I just ordered a copy of Dread

[jdrakeh]

Well, reading lots of Stephen King can certainly help, it just depends how analytical you're gonna be about it. I've learned a lot about horror by thinking about why 'Salem's Lot and Pet Sematary scared me the way they did.

Plus he wrote Danse Macabre, which is required non-fiction reading for any horror enthusiast.

True enough. The big stumbling block that I've seen in action (and read about on numerous message boards) where Dread is concerned, is that people who try to run a Dread scenario as they would an archetypical D&D adventure (i.e., a largely pre-plotted story arc) find that it falls flat. And it absolutely will. Every time.

Specifically, there are a lot of complaints about how the Jenga tower 'messes up the pacing' of somebody's pre-constructed plot. The key is not to try and force the tower to conform to a pre-existing plot, but to use the tower to create a plot during actual play. There is a huge difference between the two approaches to gaming.

The Jenga tower is not a resolution mechanic, it is a plot creation device.

People who attept to use the Jenga tower as one would dice (or any other simple randomizer) aren't going to get much but frustration out of Dread. This, of course, isn't a fault of the game, so much as it is the fault of the consumer for trying to use it in a manner that it wasn't intended to be used.

If one looks at the sample scenarios for Dread, they stand out as being little more than a premise and an environment -- there aren't pre-scripted (i.e., keyed) encounters or a running plot in any of them. This is the kind of thing that Dread was built for. Complaining that Dread is 'broken' because it can't easily be used to resolve pre-scripted plots is a bit like complaining that a hammer is broken because it won't turn a screw.

 

[Shawn_Kehoe]

True enough. The big stumbling block that I've seen in action (and read about on numerous message boards) where Dread is concerned, is that people who try to run a Dread scenario as they would an archetypical D&D adventure (i.e., a largely pre-plotted story arc) find that it falls flat. And it absolutely will. Every time.

Specifically, there are a lot of complaints about how the Jenga tower 'messes up the pacing' of somebody's pre-constructed plot. The key is not to try and force the tower to conform to a pre-existing plot, but to use the tower to create a plot during actual play. There is a huge difference between the two approaches to gaming.

The Jenga tower is not a resolution mechanic, it is a plot creation device.

People who attept to use the Jenga tower as one would dice (or any other simple randomizer) aren't going to get much but frustration out of Dread. This, of course, isn't a fault of the game, so much as it is the fault of the consumer for trying to use it in a manner that it wasn't intended to be used.

If one looks at the sample scenarios for Dread, they stand out as being little more than a premise and an environment -- there aren't pre-scripted (i.e., keyed) encounters or a running plot in any of them. This is the kind of thing that Dread was built for. Complaining that Dread is 'broken' because it can't easily be used to resolve pre-scripted plots is a bit like complaining that a hammer is broken because it won't turn a screw.

Yeah, this is especially apparent in Beneath the Mask, which was a very tricky read to follow because several key details left out ... presumably, the host fills them in based upon character questionnaires. I won't say more to avoid spoilers, but its definitely the first one I'm gonna run. Trial by Fire!