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

[Piratecat]

I also picture the "prototype" character in my head, then pick questions from the Giant List of Questions to help suggest it. One of the reasons I love Dread is the variation, though. Run the same game five times and you'll get five very different sets of PCs.

 

[woodelf]

Does the PDF exist yet? (If so there'll be another sale. Or anyone shipping from the UK?)

Edit to explain: The rulebook costs $24. Shipping costs $29.20. There are limits to the amount I'll pay for shipping...

1: For anybody who missed it, yes, the PDF exists. Head over to RPGNow (or DriveThruRPG) to get your copy. Or, for a limited time, get it bundled with any of several other horror games, and save some money.

2: Leisure Games in the UK just bought another pile of Dread. I believe they more-or-less keep it in stock, so you might try them.

 

[Piratecat]

For the record: in Separation Anxiety (which turned out to be one of the top 5 Dread games I've run), Epidiah accidentally knocked over the tower 1 1/2 hours into the game. Booyah!

The game was a success, with the group accidentally destroying half of humanity after a very unexpected TPK. I used a "confessional", as in a reality show, where once per scene a player could confess secrets to the "audience" in exchange for avoiding a future pull.

Eppy, I'm curious about how the mechanics of how I ran the game (how often people pulled, why they pulled) compared to your own style. Any thoughts?

 

[John Crichton]

The game was a success, with the group accidentally destroying half of humanity after a very unexpected TPK.

Oops.

 

[xipetotec]

Played it for the first time two weeks ago ( ran 'Under a Fiull Moon' ) with my kids ( 12, 15, 17 ) and my daughters bf ( 15 ). It went pretty well. I love how the tower creates tension.

When all was said and done though, I think they prefer Call of Cthulhu with the BRP system. But they did acknowledge that this is a GREAT game to be able to just start up fast with whomever happens to be on-hand. We will be playing it again.

 

[Epidiah Ravachol]

For the record: in Separation Anxiety (which turned out to be one of the top 5 Dread games I've run), Epidiah accidentally knocked over the tower 1 1/2 hours into the game. Booyah!

The game was a success, with the group accidentally destroying half of humanity after a very unexpected TPK. I used a "confessional", as in a reality show, where once per scene a player could confess secrets to the "audience" in exchange for avoiding a future pull.

Eppy, I'm curious about how the mechanics of how I ran the game (how often people pulled, why they pulled) compared to your own style. Any thoughts?

First off, I loved the confessional mechanic, and I regret I didn't use it approximately 1 1/2 hours into the game.

I think your pacing was dead on. There's something in particular that happened with that game which I've seen in a few other games that I've been thinking about, and it seems to be a great way to set up a Dread scenario. I don't want to hit any spoilers, so I'll talk about it in abstract. It's the game within the game.

When the tower is young and fresh at the beginning of a game, you want the players to pull with abandon. But just throwing things at them can get tedious. What you want to do is to tempt them into making the pulls. Put little, irresistible bits of story goodness in front of them. What better way to do this than to start your game off with a game.

There was this Pendragon mod for Dread on the Internet that has since seemed to have disappeared. Which is a great sorrow, because it sounded amazing. The part of it I want to highlight is how it began: with a jousting tournament in which all the knights could earn glory and respect by pulling blocks.

So the players, reveling in the stable tower, pull with relish, out doing each other and competing for . . . well for whatever, really. And then when that tower gets just tight enough (or when some shaky-handed game designer knocks it down) the story takes a turn for the dark.

It's not only a lovely way to unsettle a tower, but the palpable change in tone in both the mechanics and the story is so delectable.

I felt your scenario and the way you ran it hit that nail directly on the head.

(And by-the-by, anyone who hasn't played in a Dread game hosted by Piratecat hasn't played Dread.)

 

[Janx]

That's a good gameplay mechanic EC. probably a fitting concept for any game (and stereotypical setup for many action movies).

I ran one game as a test for 2 players from the quickplay rules off the site. it was an ad-libbed x-files/alien infection game.


Pre-planning a bunch of things to draw for early on, either as the "bait-n-switch" challenge, or as general investigation towards the main goal (if its known to the players) makes sense.

So, starting the game with Opening Situation with opportunities to draw and win and get bonusues would be easy for the players to take the bait, plus it would allow you to give a basic primer (flush with easy success) on the gist of the game mechanics.

The joust for instance. The players will want to win. They think they can easily pull it off, and they will. So they win the jousting championship. Just in time for the real problem to reveal itself.

You could make it a "take 1 to 3 pulls to choose your level of success", or some such.

Or break each big task they want to do into 3 pulls.

The point is, as a GM, you pretty much know they will succeed.

if someone does knock it down, use that as the trigger for revealing the big problem (the dragon attacks).

On the rebuild, you can make it seem overwhelming, so they'll do 3-5 pulls to retreat (thus putting some scary back into the rebuilt tower).

For the investigation introduction, you can offer them 1 to 3 pulls to investigate a place or subject. The more they pull, the juicier and better the result you give them.

I've got to go get the PDF. I like the core concept of the game, and have been itching to try it more fully.

 

[Rel]

I've been fortunate enough to play in some of Piratecat's Dread games and one thing I've seen him do early in the game is call for pulls, "If you want to notice something..."

I think it is particularly effective if you say, "Make a pull to notice something that nobody else does," and then whichever players make the pull you can take them aside. I mean who can resist bait like that when the tower is so fresh?! Likely nobody which means everybody will make the pull and you can reveal the information to the entire group at the table and your tower just got that much more shaky.

 

[Piratecat]

I have two general rules for Dread game design: build in competition or dislike between some of the characters (as well as steady or shifting alliances), and build your plot in three acts.

The character conflict is because players are far, far more likely to keep making pulls when they're competing between each other than when they're just going up against the GM. I remember one early game where Xath must have made 5 or 6 pulls to wrest a gun from a different PC, and the other player was making just as many! This game of "chicken" is a wonderful thing. If you can encourage this in your questionaire and scenario design, definitely do it.

I build my plot in arcs for pacing reasons. Act One introduces the scenario and raises the stakes, and ends when something genuinely spooky first happens. Act Two is where tension mounts and things get worse; players investigate. Act Three is when they decide to take decisive action that triggers the plot's climax, and things get really scary. Having this structure in the back of my head helps me tremendously when it comes to pacing the four hour game. I can roughly scale the number of pulls accordingly, with things getting worse/out of control at just the right time.

If people are curious, and if I haven't already done so earlier in this long thread (!), I'm happy to share an example.

 

[Rel]

The character conflict is because players are far, far more likely to keep making pulls when they're competing between each other than when they're just going up against the GM. I remember one early game where Xath must have made 5 or 6 pulls to wrest a gun from a different PC, and the other player was making just as many! This game of "chicken" is a wonderful thing. If you can encourage this in your questionaire and scenario design, definitely do it.

One of my most memorable moments from a Dread game was the first time I played it with you at GenCon. xrpsuzi and Crothian got into a "pull off" about whether Crothian's character noticed that some of the rest of us were planning to leave the island without them. It was something like 6 pulls each for them over what was essentially a "spot roll". I just sat there thinking, "This game is AWESOME!"