Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Crichton" data-source="post: 4467257" data-attributes="member: 4779">There was talk down-thread about alternate mechanics using the Dread system.  I just ran a Dread game using a two-tower mechanic.  It went shockingly well.The players filled out the questionnaires normally and the game began as normal:  Fresh tower and 6 characters, no pre-pulls.  The scenario was set up for more player vs. player action than normal.  It was also set up purely as a one-shot.  It also featured the Ghostbusters.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I wasn't sure the second tower was even going to come into play.  I first thought of the idea as a way around an early tower knock-down; a backup plan.  Then it mutated.  What would happen if the pull frequency increased (purposely) to get the tower to fall in under two hours?  Now, this didn't HAVE to happen but it was in the back of my mind.  Turns out that the tower fell between the 90-120 minute mark.  It didn't get terribly high (or at least as high as I've seen previously) but there were a healthy amount of pulls.  So the second tower came into play!  Since the tower was not knocked down intensionally, the character became immediately possessed by forces opposing the players.  The player immediately gained the power listed under the "If you could have one supernatural ability, what would it be?" question of the questionnaire.  The player kept his entire personality but from that point forward had the singular goal of destroying the party, or at least stop them from completing their mission.  There was certainly still an element of self-preservation (the possessor ensured that) but the rest was left up to the character.The next two pulls attempted by this character were still made from the original (fresh) tower but all subsequent pulls, which included any use of the newfound supernatural ability, would be made from the second tower.  This set up a very interesting dynamic (outlined below) the minute the second tower came into play.  Had I realized it ahead of time, I would have settled on a few more solid numbers of the pre-pulls and who got to make them on each of the towers.First:  The rest of the (non-possessed) characters would keep looking over a the other tower with the "WTF Face".  Classic.  Kept the spirit of the adventure right on ticking.  Second:  The moment the possessed characters started making opposed pulls from the second tower with characters using the first tower, the action really started flying.  Could this part get a little meta-gamey?  Yes.  And it did to a degree.  Did it take away from the game?  If it did, it was negligible.Third:  When things turned bad, they turned bad REALLY quick (same as normal Dread!).  The player vs. player aspect ramped up exactly as I expected it to, but it stayed focused on the game and not for the sake of PvP.  The players did an excellent job of being true to their characters until the time it became painfully obvious that their teammates had betrayed them and direct actions had to be taken.Last rule:  If a character sacrificed himself (knocked over the tower purposely) they were not forced to be possessed.  They were given the option of sacrifice for good.  The one example of this resulted in severely hindering one of the possessed characters for a bit which meant more pulls from the second tower.  At the time, there were 2 possessed characters vs 4 non-possessed characters.You can start to see how this can skew the numbers.  If you have more people pulling from a tower, the less they can do before failure.  So you get a certain amount of attrition which means ramped up anticipation coupled with a smattering of cockiness from the "possessed" using the second tower.I'd love to tweak this idea further for future runs.  Thoughts?</blockquote>

Verification