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

[Seonaid]

Dread has become my favorite game for one-shots and my favorite game for new gamers. It is very easy to get into and not nearly as intimidating as a page of numbers and calculations.

I think that a group of gamers who have never played Dread could get into it given a session or two, so my suggestion of trying it with someone experienced is not entirely a way of eliminating people. It's just the best way to do it (IMO).

 

[zen_hydra]

Gameplay podcasts? Really? Where? I would love to listen to one since I haven't had a chance to play it yet.

Here's one.

The Gamemaster Show - Dread Character Creation / Actual Play / Game Review

Episodes 36 - 40

Their Website

Their RSS Fead

I would stress again, that you really can't fully appreciate the games mechanics without actually playing the game and feeling the tension build as people pull from the Jenga tower.

 

[Hypersmurf]

The game mechanic definitely has an eventual failure wired into it. The tower WILL collapse at some point, killing somebody (unless the game is short).

You'd think so, wouldn't you?

I watched the end of DG!'s second session at GenCon.

Her theme was 'redemption'... and yet one of the players had written a questionnaire yielding a character so amoral and evil that redemption was literally unthinkable for him. The last fifteen pulls were all player-vs-player, as the other PCs tried to either force him to beg forgiveness, or sacrifice him instead. The last five pulls were clearly defying physics... and the tower simply refused to fall.

Each pull was taking several minutes, with DG! providing a running narration and doing her best to provide extra psychological pressure on top of that created by the unstable tower. And the entire table, plus a table of strangers adjacent who were supposed to be playing a board game, were riveted to the tower. Every time there was a sway, you could hear a hiss as about fifteen people sucked in their breath. And the tower refused to fall.

In the end, Piratecat shoved it over. I think he couldn't handle the pressure any more

-Hyp.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

At the last NC Gameday, I ran a Dread game in the morning and played one in the afternoon. Neither had a fatality. Both had 40+ pulls from the tower. It was epic.

In the previous two times I had run the Morro Castle game, I had two fatalities, at nearly identical points time-wise.

 

[John Crichton]

The game mechanic definitely has an eventual failure wired into it. The tower WILL collapse at some point, killing somebody (unless the game is short). A non-fatal reset mechanic might reduce the feel of lethality (perhaps some action consisting of several pulls to reset the tower)./QUOTE]There is a reason it's called Dread.

 

[Janx]

I'm more thinking of ways to adapt the idea to other genres, besides horror. Heck, disabling a PC for the rest of the session is a non-lethal way to deal with tower collapse as well.

 

[pxacrake]

Halloween

Hello All,

I'm new to Dread (have only just recieved the book) and would like to try it out with friends over Halloween.

Can you suggest any pre-made scenario's I could look at.

Cheers, Drew

 

[Shawn_Kehoe]

There are 3 scenarios included in the book itself.

Below are links to the official Dread message boards and my session summary of the third scenario, "Beneath the Mask":

Session Summary:
http://www.tiltingatwindmills.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=2733&highlight=#2733

Post-Mortem:
http://www.tiltingatwindmills.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=2734&highlight=#2734

Since the posts contain major spoilers about a published module, I chose not to copy the contents here.

Shawn

 

[Nareau]

Start a dread counter at 1. People roll d% when they'd take a pull. They then inject themselves with an EpiPin. Whenever someone makes a roll, increment the dread counter by 1. If someone rolls equal or under the dread counter, they just toppled the tower and it resets at 1.

FIFY.

Seriously, the Jenga mechanic is necessary to induce the rush of adrenaline that makes the game great.

I've played in 4 Dread games, and run 4 Dread games. All of them were a blast.

As for players who decide to sit the game out? I've had one of them. I made a couple of efforts to bring him back into the action, but eventually gave up. Anybody is free to stop playing the game whenever they want; it's their choice to do so. It was no different than if we were playing D&D and he decided to stay at the inn and get drunk.

I played in Cassander's GenCon YMCA game, and it was awesome. The whole time I kept expecting a psycho-killer to jump out at us, or the ghosts of drowned boys to start haunting us. But there was none of that--just a lot of screwing around, player-vs-player action, and camp. And it worked beautifully. I learned a lot about running a great Dread game that night.

One of the great things about Dread is that horror stories are incredibly easy to write. Go watch any bad 80's horror flick, and you can write the basic story in 15 minutes. It doesn't have to be particularly good, either. So much of the game is written by the players that you have to do much less prep work than you would in just about any other system.

Nareau

 

[WizarDru]

So we had our Dread game this past weekend. End result: FUN.
I may decide to retool the adventure for convention use. The only flaws with the game were with my plot, NOT with the players or the game. I can't see any way that dice could replace the Tower. Just can't.

The Tower is crucial in setting up tension. Later in the game, as things went from Bad to Worse, players would pause every time they were given a choice. Is it worth a pull? If I pull now, what about later, when I might REALLY need to make a pull? Can I do this?

And at the later part of the game, EVERY PULL caused the entire table to stop and watch. No side conversations. No scanning of rulebooks. Just tension as every player turned to watch that player make his pull.

There are things I would do differently, based on experience...but overall I was left with the impression that Dread works as promised. Reading about it is one thing, playing it is quite another.