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[Dread] Jenga beat up my dice! My results from the indie horror RPG.
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<blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 3495131" data-attributes="member: 3448"><p>It's been a long time since I've played Jenga, and I've never played Dread. But I don't recall ever facing a choice of how difficult a pull to take in a Jenga game. Sure, there are easier and harder pulls, but usually you identify what you think is the easiest pull and then take it, right? There's skill involved in figuring out which pull will be easiest, but that just gets back to "Jenga introduces player skill (unrelated to character choices) into the resolution mechanic."</p><p></p><p>One of the interesting things about either mechanic is that most of the time you won't get to the point where the odds are heavily stacked against you. Once the tower (or bag) gets to a point where the odds of death are, say, 1 in 4, a relatively small number of pulls makes a death very likely. At 1 in 4, the cumulative risks of death are 1/4, 7/16, 37/64, 175/256, 784/1024, if I've done the math right. So 5 pulls at 1 in 4 odds of death kills somebody better than 3/4ths of the time. (Obviously, by the time you get up to a 50/50 chance of death, the cumulative odds of death become very steep (1/2, 3/4, 7/8, 15/16, etc.).) So what that means is that most deaths are going to happen not when they are almost inevitable, but when there is a substantial but much less than half chance on each pull. That means that, either way, you spend most of the game at the sweet spot where pulling is significantly risky, but you'll probably live.</p><p></p><p>Perhaps 50 marbles isn't the right number; after all, I pulled that out of the air. But my guess is that with a little judicious twiddling you could get an effect that is fairly similar to the Dread mechanic but is independent of skill at Jenga. Personally, I'm all for trying Dread using the Jenga mechanic, but I'm not convinced that the basic insight of the mechanic can't be retained while addressing the concerns of people like Jim Hague, WayneLigon, and Kafkonia.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Cerebral Paladin, post: 3495131, member: 3448"] It's been a long time since I've played Jenga, and I've never played Dread. But I don't recall ever facing a choice of how difficult a pull to take in a Jenga game. Sure, there are easier and harder pulls, but usually you identify what you think is the easiest pull and then take it, right? There's skill involved in figuring out which pull will be easiest, but that just gets back to "Jenga introduces player skill (unrelated to character choices) into the resolution mechanic." One of the interesting things about either mechanic is that most of the time you won't get to the point where the odds are heavily stacked against you. Once the tower (or bag) gets to a point where the odds of death are, say, 1 in 4, a relatively small number of pulls makes a death very likely. At 1 in 4, the cumulative risks of death are 1/4, 7/16, 37/64, 175/256, 784/1024, if I've done the math right. So 5 pulls at 1 in 4 odds of death kills somebody better than 3/4ths of the time. (Obviously, by the time you get up to a 50/50 chance of death, the cumulative odds of death become very steep (1/2, 3/4, 7/8, 15/16, etc.).) So what that means is that most deaths are going to happen not when they are almost inevitable, but when there is a substantial but much less than half chance on each pull. That means that, either way, you spend most of the game at the sweet spot where pulling is significantly risky, but you'll probably live. Perhaps 50 marbles isn't the right number; after all, I pulled that out of the air. But my guess is that with a little judicious twiddling you could get an effect that is fairly similar to the Dread mechanic but is independent of skill at Jenga. Personally, I'm all for trying Dread using the Jenga mechanic, but I'm not convinced that the basic insight of the mechanic can't be retained while addressing the concerns of people like Jim Hague, WayneLigon, and Kafkonia. [/QUOTE]
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[Dread] Jenga beat up my dice! My results from the indie horror RPG.
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