I don’t really think it’s so much a push as straight up collision. When you consider a zed isn’t going to act like a person and stand toe to toe while they try to make a snack of you they’ll walk through any blow that doesn’t send them reeling.
Maybe you could give each flavor of Zed a strength to their over-run? I.E. they move forward when a melee strike fails to do X damage. This way a baseball bat or sledgehammer might keep the vanilla zombies in line but nothing short of a mack-truck is stopping that hulk in its tracks.
Is that even possible? Would it be easier to just make the weaker zombies less likely to back you up? Should this be a strength check? Either way moving on…
Slippery When Wet! : Not sure if this is doable. Basically have boomers, blobs, spitters and any other “wet” creatures cause you to skid when run over with a vehicle.
Roadblock : Again, not sure how robust this system is but would it be possible for Hulks to bring vehicles of a certain size to a halt when struck? How about just sending them out of control from the impact?
Tricky - Alright! So we’ve already got a “hard to shoot” tag a la skeletons, part and parcel of this suggestion is adding a “hard to strike” tag as well. ((I don’t imagine wasps just lazily hover weapon level when not stinging you after all.) Tricky would basically be a triggered on hit that makes them hard to “X”, where X is whatever you just attacked them with.
**EDIT
Including a thought that just hit me after I posted.
What if there were certain on hit effects directly tied to a creatures anatomy and the type of damage they receive.
I’ll elaborate. The sum total of a zombie would be 2 legs + 2 arms + torso + head. On a hit, based on several factors such as the damage type of the weapon you could get messages like:
“You hamstring the zombie”
“You cleave the zombie’s head in two!”
“You dislocate the zombie’s kneecap with a sickening pop!”
“etc”
Again, these would need to apply to -any- creature or NPC with the appropriate anatomy–of which the player would not be exempt. For the most part these would be perma-debuffs that only disappear when properly treated and could lead to some challenging and memorable encounters.
Thoughts?
