Old School D&D using Dread...

[Pbartender]

Give me your opinions...

I picked up Dread last summer, and have been experimenting with it a little over the past few months. I just got an idea into my head...

Way back in the day, when I was playing 1st ed. AD&D in junior high school, we played a very particular style suited to that particular edition of the game and players of that particular age. It consisted mainly of rather dangerous dungeon crawls, and always felt a lot like Indiana Jones gone medieval fantasy. In particular...

1. There was a significant chance of dying at any time, and character creation was resonably quick. Therefore, character death was not a heartbreaking experience for the players, and character background/history was limited in favor for in-the-game development.

2. The dungeons were dangerous, and there were no skills that allowed you to roll for success. Therefore, players had to think through puzzles and traps on thier own, without the assistance of dice.

3. We were young, and hadn't yet seen it all. Therefore, there was still tension, suspense and excitement, when we ran across something we hadn't seen before.

I was thinking, considering these points, using the rules for Dread to play through Old School style D&D adventures might work well... What do you guys think?

 

[Crothian]

Dread can be used but it won't feel the same. One Dread pull is usually a bit more then a single hit or something like that. Casting spells as pulls and having enemies miss saves with pulls or something like that might be too many pulls.

 

[Wystan]

Have multiple towers, One Melee Tower, One Spell Tower and one Critical Moment Tower...

Pull from the First when you want it to count as a melee swing, same with the second for spells. Start the Third tower down 2 pulls per player (or 3) and use it for puzzles and the like and even the BBEG fights?

 

[Pbartender]

Dread can be used but it won't feel the same. One Dread pull is usually a bit more then a single hit or something like that. Casting spells as pulls and having enemies miss saves with pulls or something like that might be too many pulls.

Oh, good heavens... You guys are making this more complicated than it needs to be.

A pull doesn't necessarily need to equate to a single hit... Only how difficult it is to defeat a particular opponent. All the rest in the description of the action.

For example, a lone fighter wants to kill an orc warrior. He makes one pull. Success = dead orc. Fallen tower = dead fighter. Refusal to pull = wounded fighter and live orc.

If he wants to fight a group of kobolds, one pull might suffice for to defeat several of them at once. If he wants to fight a dragon, he'd have to successfully pull multiple times, before he kills the dragon.

A wizard would simply work the same way, except that a wizard's weapon is his magic, is all.


I'm not really trying to convert D&D to Dread... Think of more like using old-style D&D adventures as the basis for Dread scenarios.

 

[Epidiah Ravachol]

You are definitely on the right track. One of our old Dread demos was a dungeon crawl done up in horrific fashion. Somewhere around here I think I still have the old questionnaires. I'll see if I can dig them up for you.

I ran it straight Dread with the following considerations:

• Fighter-types got a leg up in the fighting department. This occasionally meant free-pulls, but usually it meant more could be accomplished with a single pull. I would use it as an opportunity to tempt them. Fighting should be more about gaining a tactical advantage (so they can run if they have to) than wearing the critter down. "I try to hit the carrion crawler" becomes "as the crawler reaches for our wizard, I want to slam into it with my shield, shoving it across the room."
• Rogue-types were give the opportunity to slay outright if they had the element of surprise. Or, for the scarier monsters, at least hinder them in some way. I had a lot of fun with the sneaky part of the rogue, because I love occasionally leaving the other players temporarily in the dark about what their fellow player is pulling for.
• I gave the spell-casters a chance to write their own magic system with some guidelines. This was done through the questionnaire. Basically, I let them come up with a price they have to pay in order to wield their magic and then I balanced this price against pulls to avoid it. And always, I'd tempt them with extra pulls for extra effectiveness.

In one of the games I had a player who wanted his cleric to pray to his god for a boon, and asked if he could take a block off the top of the tower and re-insert it into the bottom of the tower. I figured what the hell, it seemed like a cool idea. That's when we learned Jenga is far more difficult to play in reverse.

 

[Pbartender]

You are definitely on the right track. One of our old Dread demos was a dungeon crawl done up in horrific fashion. Somewhere around here I think I still have the old questionnaires. I'll see if I can dig them up for you.

Very cool. I'd love to see the questionnaires.

I was actually trying to figure out if I could come up with a single generic questionnaire for all characters... Or maybe a handful of generic questionnaires: one for each "class" archetype.

The idea being that, if a player's character dies, a new character can be quickly created and inserted into the game at the next sensible point with relative ease.

And I like some of your suggestions... I'll have to keep them in mind.