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Running a survival game for civilian class players.

Has anyone tried this and what kind of results did you get when you did?

Sounds like an interesting game. I haven't tried it, but it sounds like a cool idea. Where are you getting the civilian OCC? Robotech Macross has one, so does Beyond the Supernatural. Also System Failure has some useful OCCs too. No civilians, but lots of survivor types. Plus it has a lot of SDC weapons, armor, and equipment.

Your PCs would be fine against other humans, but they'll be hurting against MDC critters unless they are very clever, lucky, or have access to MD gear.

My campaign has NEMA soldiers/peacekeepers who've been using, mainly, SDC weapons. After all, in the days right after the cataclysm everyone is JUST dealing with the end of the world, not WWIII. So the boys had to be rather clever when they had to take down a demon with SDC weapons, .50 HMGs (mounted on their MX-366s and their Glitter Boy), and a couple of PLP-20s. Fortunately HQ did let them go into the field wearing their body armor!

Next time HQ might let them take MDC rounds for their 5.56 ARs...

We are using the civilian occ from deadreign

We tried it with the civilian occs from dead reign. After we added appropriated equipment and cybernetics for the default tech level. It was brutal, it requires a different mind set. The PCs cycled through several characters before they got it. Now it is going well as our background campaign we come back to after breaks.

We are heavily relying on house rules that eliminate mdc, sdc an using hp only with damage reduction rules to adjust for the differences in armor and damage scales to balance survival ability

i like this concept a lot.
I love hard survival games.

Game update : one of the players is out for 6 mo so he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. Missing his chance to do so he went crazy. I mean just snapped ( in character of corse) and the group had to put him down.

Really added to the feel and caused a bunch of laughs.

I'm looking to start off a Chaos Earth game in a more survival mode and have it shift to a more standard style game after I feel the mood is established. The problem I'm having Is that I still want some fights in the earlier part of the game (the apocalypse, naturally) and since the pcs will begin unarmed and unarmored, I need some sdc opponents. Humans work for a few encounters, but this soon after the big event, I want to mostly focus on the plight rather than the dark side of human nature. I've got a decent idea for a few orc encounters and animated dead. Any suggestions?

My CE games are all survival games, even with the NEMA classes. However, if I did want to do a civilian game, I'd definitely use the OCCs from Systems Failure. Those are really well done and fun to play.

As for MDC vs. SDC, I would probably use 50% or more SDC creatures instead of my 100% MDC Rifts games. I would assume that all the SDC creatures got eaten up by the time Rifts happens.