The name “zombie slave” works, and it’s self explanatory. It’s not particularly offensive, and not particularly misleading. However, it feels clunky. It doesn’t describe well how really terrible it is (it’s nothing at all like slavery- the zombie is literally trying to bite you, but can’t) and it implies that it can do anything more than carry stuff. Here’s my proposal:
“mutilated pack zombie"
or
"dis-armed pack zombie”
Both of them imply that it’s a pack zombie, ala something for carrying gear. It also implies, in the name, that it was forceful, and that if it was a human, it’d be dead. No slavery shenanigans, nobody gets mad, and it very well explains that the zombie can’t hurt you, is incapacitated. The biggest problem I can see is with all the injury prefixes.
Well, renaming it now makes sense, as the zanimals have been renamed as well.
“Zlave” is just really not a fitting name. The first time a player sees this, he goes “wtf”? And once he understands what it means, he’s confused and repulsed.
Why not give it a simple name that fits the purpose and the reason why exactly you’re mutilating and crippling a walking corpse that only stays around you, because it wants to kill you: storage room.
I can’t really give it a name, though, but perhaps someone will come up with something fitting.
I do not protest about the repulsive nature or connotations, if it weren’t that I had already seen threads about this I would have put in my confusing names thread though.
I’d say that if I created one of them and was allowed to put my own name on that specific zlave, I’d rather name it Walking Hoard, because it is where I can store my hoard and it is walking, yes it conveys even less that it is a zombie but I’d probably not care because it feels unlikely from the creators standpoint that it will ever be dangerous (until that fateful meeting with something that restores it anyway). However if NPCs will be bringing those around in the future it might be a really bad name because of the higher contact with unrelated survivors which would probably give it a name different from the one the creator of it would use.
I would not change the name of the creation process. I would simply go with create zombie slave because thats basicly what id be doing . I can only guess why people are against this … this sadly also largely inables me to argue about this issue because for me its pretty much nonexistent.
So yeah my opinion would be leave it as is and direct thought process and development time to other actual issues.
Mi-Go’s; bondage suits; brutal death around every corner; mass extinction; starvation; drugs: this is not a family friendly or strictly politically correct game. The end of the world is not a pretty place. Changing what you call your Zombie Slave does not the change the fact that you have a Zombie Slave whose desire to kill you you are taking advantage of to enslave their mindless corpseness after brutally ripping out their teeth/arms.
Why pretend like this is prettier than it is?
EDIT: Just in response to the idea that people were getting mad at the word “slave” or that anybody should care.
Mi-Go's; bondage suits; brutal death around every corner; mass extinction; starvation; drugs: this is not a family friendly or strictly politically correct game. The end of the world is not a pretty place. Changing what you call your Zombie Slave does not the change the fact that you have a Zombie Slave whose desire to kill you you are taking advantage of to enslave their mindless corpseness after brutally ripping out their teeth/arms.
Yes, C:DDA is definitely no family game. Still, “creating a zombie slave” is by far the most cruel thing the player has the possibility to do. Everything else can be more or less jutified by the neccessity. Knocking out a former human being, mutilating it, not giving it a merciful death and keeping it around only for carrying your stuff is plain cruel.
C:DDA is politically correct, AFAIK; there is no racism, sexism or anything like that. What you name there are just the harsh circumstances the player has to fight, and while some of them are horrifying, that’s nothing very new, really.
The difference is, that the player himself is being so cruel, and even for a pretty minor reason. He even goes out of his way to be cruel; studies first aid, risk being attacked, for example.
Now, I don’t have a problem with the feature itself, the huge penalty to morale is probably supposed to show the cruelty of the act, but at least, we could give the act a name that indicates the reason, for why on earth you would do such a cruel thing. And that is: storage room, and not the “enslavement” of another being, just for the kick of it.
Damn i think i changed my minde about owning one .
Only problem for me is that most of the time i would probably loose my zombie slave as i am driving arround a lot. Can we not have the option to stow that z in our car?
Because some folks realize that the zed was at one point a living human.
FWIW the original “zombie” was a person kept more or less drained of willpower and forced to work for someone else. Chemical form of slavery, and theoretically it persisted after death. (In some mentions, getting folks to bury the pre-zombie alive is part of the process: the initiator drug(s) induce a coma.)
So you’d be afraid of the zombie not because it wants to eat you, but because it represents a (potentially-perpetual) mindless servitude.
On a slight sidenote, has anyone actually found them useful? They seem like a slower more annoying form of shopping cart to me.
Shopping cart is very useful; it doesn’t have (quarter)panels so opponents can get stuck in the one you’re dragging along. For those even more skillful, marry men of misfits there are (extra) extra-light frames, 1-cylinder engines and small wheels. Find a saddle and some controls and you’re a Mad Max already.
On the other hand, you can stuff your LegZ (SlaveZ) with a supply of explosives and send an apartment block to the Underground. Or use your god-beloved arms to throw some C4 sticks at one zombie swarm or another; your call.
