[Dread] Jenga beat up my dice! My results from the indie horror RPG.

While the Jenga mechanic really is innovative (and was blown away by the point about how it shows results over time), for my money the less innovative, but far more useful mechanic, is the character questionnaire. As a player it's an incredibly useful tool for brainstorming ideas about your character, and it's amazingly fun when a throwaway bit on your sheet turns out to be a huge part of the game. As a GM it's an absolutely unprecedented way to set the tone of the game and to steer your players. Of course, players often go in much different directions than you expect when you steer them! But still.

(warning: blather ahead)

I ran Dread last time we played, and I didn't find the questions hard exactly, but I spent a lot of time crafting them so I'd have a good mix of questions. I find a good way to think about them beyond a distribution of who/what/where/when/why/how is whether they're open ended vs. leading and neutral vs. intrusive, because they accomplish different things:

Open-ended/neutral: "Where'd you get those shoes?" A good way to get players to think about their character and give you a glimpse of their personality that might not have much to do with the game per se. These are fun to repeat across character sheets to see what different answers you get. They don't elicit game-specific information and aren't terribly useful to shape the character, for the most part. I try to avoid slipping into yes/no questions, which even with good players seem to prompt a limited response; "Do you wear underpants?" is not going to get as good an answer as "Boxers or briefs?" (to which you know That Player is going to answer "Boyshorts").

Open-ended/intrusive: "What would you die of embarrassment to have anyone know?" Better at shaping the character, especially if your intrusive question goes to the theme of the game (e.g., the players are trapped in a modern version of No Exit).

Leading/neutral: "Why have you stayed at your job as long as you have?" Not intrusive or offensive, probably, but you're now dictating facts to the player; she's got a job, she's been there for an unusually long period of time for that job, and there's a reason for it.

Leading/intrusive: "Who else knows what you really did to your father?" Dictating facts to the player again, and in a way that leans heavily on them to either embrace something unpleasant or deny it. It's easy to overdo these questions because they fit so well with the horror theme.

I found it worked best (both as a player and GM) to have a light touch with leading things, and tone can make a huge difference in how you shape the character. Say I want to imply that a character is a collector. "Good grief, how many of those things do you even have?" is very different than "What object do you collect as a hobby?"; "What's your worst habit?" is much lighter than "You know that's going to kill you someday, so why can't you stop?"

You effectively have only 12 questions per character since one of them will almost certainly be "What's your name?" and others will have to establish facts relevant to the game setting. It's surprising, after slaving over a whole passel of questions, how quickly they go when you start to divvy them up.

Here's a few questions I threw at my group of 'tormented artists':

• Why do you take such pains to conceal how much money you really have?
• She didn’t make it big, but you did. How do you feel about that?
• Isn’t there anyone you can talk to about your fears? Anyone at all?
• What milestone or accomplishment did you complete many years after most people do?
• What one question are you always asked in interviews but always refuse to answer?
• You wish you could go back and apologize for what you did; why can’t you?
• Don’t you think you should stop doing that to yourself?
• Where were you, exactly, when you received that phone call?
• How do you react when someone tells you they’re a fan of your work?
• Who gave you that scar?
• Everybody says it wasn’t your fault. Are they right?
• Don’t you miss him, even a little bit?
• Why do you lie about your ethnic background?
• What’s in the shoebox?

mythago said:

...it's amazingly fun when a throwaway bit on your sheet turns out to be a huge part of the game.

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I really enjoyed that as well. As the GM I found it fun to pore over the questionaires and create a scene from those throwaway bits that would elicit a pull or two from the tower. When I ran the sci-fi scenario in the book one of the players mentioned a space-dwelling animal into a questionaire response and I had fun finding a place for it in the scenario.

malcolypse said:

Oooh, SCP is perfect Dread fuel. I like it. Thankx Janx.

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The first thing I thought of was Dread when I saw what SCP was. I heard about it on the XenoMiner forums, an Xbox Indie game, and somebody started a talking about SCP and apparently there's an indie PC game for that.

It was all very cryptic to figure out the topic, and when I had, it looked like a natural fit. Scary objects. Secret organization. Secure. Contain. Protect.

I got the Dread rule book last summer when I was at The Source. I was thinking of a zombie survival game, but SCP looks like another good setting with plenty of source material.

[MENTION=3019]mythago[/MENTION], I'm not a Dread player or GM but your post on character-building questionnaires was great!

pemerton said:

[MENTION=3019]mythago[/MENTION], I'm not a Dread player or GM but your post on character-building questionnaires was great!

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That was a great breakdown on the kinds of questions to ask. Understanding those can lead to asking better questions, or more varied questions.

I'm more fond of leading questions that allow for open-ended answers.

So I would probably never use "where did you get those shoes" as it mostly opens to door for a silly answer or a non-significant one. Other folks may get plenty of mileage out of it, but I'd rather burn a question on something else.

I like this type of question: "Everybody says it wasn’t your fault. Are they right?"
As a GM, I'm establishing a fact, something "bad" happened. The player has an opportunity to make something tragic, dramatic, or secretive that should shape how the character is played.

And the beauty of it is, it can be reworded for variations of meaning for different PCs:
"Everybody says it was your fault. Why did you take the blame?"
"Everybody says it was your fault. What really happened?"

I always try for one question like that, sometimes fully open ended, other times tying in family or work into it:
"Why are people whispering about you and what really happened on LV-241?"
"Why is it important that you serve on THIS ship, instead of the better offer you had?"

So I'm preparing to run another Dread game this weekend. Last time I simply gave the players a general overview of the game setting and handed them some character sheets, without much specific direction other than telling them they were all artist. I think it made the game a little too directionless. This time, I prepared a list of different character 'roles' specific to the setting (America, 1971, vaguely government/political themed, everybody has worked for the same slightly mysterious Mr. Johnson figure). They were instructed to pick their first and second choices - interestingly, nobody overlapped.

The questionnaires each have at least one question linking them to another character; these are all one-way because I didn't see any feasible way to keep the stories from being entirely divergent. There is at least one question probing into their ties to Mr. Johnson. Everybody also got the questions "What did you want to be when you grow up?" and "What is your name?" The rest of the questions are random, though a lot of them are tied to the setting, such as "Is your 4-F status legitimate?"

So having run a couple of Dread games with radically different themes -

"The Solar Lodge", where the players were tormented artists going to a famous retreat-in-the-woods to get away from it all and work on their art in peace. Of course it turned out not to be quite the peaceful idyll that they were expecting. With this game, I simply told the players they were artists of some sort and were otherwise free to pick what they liked about their characters.

"Gold is the Metal", set in 1971, where a group of political radicals, Vietnam veterans and politicos were sent to a remote location in the Solomon Islands to track down rumors of the Philosopher's Stone, with the prize being the ability to save the gold standard and thus rescue the US economy. For this game I gave them less choice: I presented them with a list of 1970s archetype characters, ranging from "Former combat medic" to "Prominent Neo-Satanist" and told them to pick their first and second choices. I also gave each person at least one question that tied them to another character. This is tricky because you can't be sure that the person on the other end of the question is going to have the first clue about whatever they come up with - so the questions were all 'one way' and didn't require the other player to know of it at all, e.g. "You met the helicopter pilot once when you were younger; why do you doubt he remembers you?"

It was interesting to see what the players found important and what they didn't, and how they pushed back on the game's plot . In "The Solar Lodge", I had asked one of the players "Where is your little sister buried?" and he replied that she was buried right on the grounds of the aforementioned resort, where he visited her grave every year. O-kay, I had not planned on anyone on this group having been there before, but it didn't seem right to veto this. So the players show up, and the first thing he wants to do is visit his sister's grave. Which isn't there; instead, he finds a stand of maple trees that are clearly a few decades old on that spot. None of the caretakers (who are, by complete coincidence, new from last season) has any knowledge of a grave ever having been there, and there's nothing on the maps....

I had intended this to be a throwaway creepy moment, but the obsession about finding what happened to his sister's grave turned into a major plot point for the game, and eventually a huge reason for this character's descent into madness and death.

Conversely, I learned that you can have real problems with a player who doesn't pay attention to their character sheet or who needs to "up their metagame," as one friend of mine puts it. One player, who is normally a very creative and involved RPer, has a tendency to procrastinate and waited until after being reminded a couple of times to turn in their character sheet. This player also doesn't seem to get that the questions are a hint to what might be important in the game. So, for example, in response to "Why are you more dangerous than you look?" the player wrote "I'm not dangerous! But I can take care of myself", and when asked "Does anyone else know about your work for the FBI?" gave an extremely vague answer about having been on a watch list. The end result of this is that the player ended up sitting on the sidelines a lot instead of getting involved in the main plot, combat, etc. and I had to stretch a little to find ways that she could take center stage at all.

Looking forward to running it again!

Sounds like a cool setup [MENTION=3019]mythago[/MENTION].

I like how you accepted the player's surprise decision to put the grave on the island.

I think that ought to be standard. Once the GM writes a loaded question to guide the PC's creation a certain way, the GM needs to accept almost anything the player writes down.

This forces the GM to adapt to the organic situation in the same way the players have to, thus ensuring each run of the game is different and surprising for the GM as well.

There's naturally going to be exceptions, but they should be over game balance or group disruption issues.

Necro-Dread!

I'm almost finished prepping my first-ever Dread game, and I can't friggin' wait.


In completely, utterly unrelated news... Did you know that the island of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic is considered the single most remote isle on the planet?? It's a 5-6 day boat ride from Capetown, South Africa just to get there.

This should be the ultimate tropical paradise getaway... but then why are people screaming??

UselessTriviaMan said:

I'm almost finished prepping my first-ever Dread game, and I can't friggin' wait.


In completely, utterly unrelated news... Did you know that the island of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic is considered the single most remote isle on the planet?? It's a 5-6 day boat ride from Capetown, South Africa just to get there.

This should be the ultimate tropical paradise getaway... but then why are people screaming??

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How'd it go?