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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cassander" data-source="post: 4453746" data-attributes="member: 8838">On Labor Day, I ran a Dread game for two other people and decided to try out an alternative resolution mechanic, specifically an idea similar to the stones from a bag idea that was thought up by Cerebral Paladin earlier on this thread.One of my players who had played Dread once before but died early due to some unfortunate pulls was a bit nervous about the tower and asked about alternate mechanics. So I decided to try out the stone method where instead of pulling a block from a tower, you instead pull a stone out of an opaque bag. If it's a good stone (in this case, blue), then your character succeeds. If it's a bad stone (green), your character must leave the game. Everything else is just like normal for Dread.I decided I wanted two bad stones so that the bag wouldn't have to be restocked when a player pulled a bad stone. The symbolism of a death stone for each character also seemed to fit. So decide on the number of good stones, I built a spread sheet to calculate the cumulative odds of one or both players dying at each number of pulls. I decided on 65 after looking at the numbers, but didn't tell my players what the cumulative odds were to preserve a sense of mystery.Alas, the stones didn't really work. The failures (the one that happened and the lack of the second) were spaced about as intended and predicted by the the spreadsheet though the players did get a little lucky. But there was no drama surrounding the pulls. My players, even and especially the one a bit uncomfortable with the Jenga tower, told me that they felt like they had no control over their fate and felt detached from the game due to the lack of the tower looming visually. Because of the small and uncontrolled chance of failure, they felt no reason not to pull. Indeed, one often kept going for a pull even before finishing describing his action and I had to caution him to slow down so I could say whether and how many pulls would be appropriate. And when the bad stone was finally pulled, it had little impact, quite a contrast to the tower collapses I've seen in other Dread games. Both players said that a tower would have worked better and wanted to use it for any future games.I still have my spreadsheet and can upload it if anyone is interested. It's possible the stones might work for other groups and scenarios. I have seen two-player work just fine, though that scenario (fleeing from a dangerous cult, run by Fraisala) seemed better suited for it than the one I used (defending a keep against impossible odds). And I still have some ideas for alternate mechanics, but I think they must be really special and should somehow visually enforce the doom the game brings. Pulling should be a big deal.</blockquote>

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