Does anyone here have any experience playing Dread? If you don't know, it's a horror game where you use a jenga tower instead of a set of dice for solving challenges, it seems like a pretty novel concept but I'm wondering how well it works in practice. I'm also interested in other non-dice based games, if you have any you want to bring up I'd be happy to hear about them.
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Dread works two ways. If you have a group who want to be scared and a good scenario it's actually really fricking tense. Just make sure people are always drawing blocks.
If you have a group of the average shit-eaters who want to spout one liners it's a fun novelty and you need to get them sold on dying by making it an awesome moment of gore (think peak Friday 13th deaths) and have a large cast that players are happy to pick up and play as they get killed off.
There's Enter The Shadowside, that was based on cards, and had a GMless style of play, reviews were positive but it sank without a trace.
No one but me ever mentions it here, so I guess it's been memoryholed.
There's Malifaux's RPG, Through the Breach. Poker card based, with the four suits. A little finnicky, but neat.
Do you have a copy of that somewhere?
I found one on Scribd.
https://www.scribd.com/document/470368825/Enter-The-Shadowside-Core-Rules-pdf
Okay, that was a pretty cool read. The Jacob's Ladder thing is real neato and I like the premise. But I don't see card-use, it's a d20 resolution system.
Oh? Well, I'm remembering kickstarter blurb from 10 years ago and change, so I may be wrong.
It sucks when at least one player in the group is a spastic who knocks down the tower in the first four pulls.
Played Dread as a convention one-shot. Was my first and only time. According to other players it is usually a very stressful experience full of cascading failures - if the tower falls during a check, the character attempting it is out, but someone else has to try again when the tower is restocked.
During our scenario, I had to pull 3. I had also never played Jenga beforehand, but managed to keep the tower standing somehow. No one died in the end, though not everyone got away (some of the characters had their own agendas and chose not to come back).
Dreadful has two problems
1) the whole concept is extremely stupid
2) by the rules, there is actually no way to kill a player character since they can always refuse to pull from the tower in exchange for a penalty.
>2) by the rules, there is actually no way to kill a player character since they can always refuse to pull from the tower in exchange for a penalty.
Can the penalty be dying?
> the whole concept is stupid but I can’t tell you why because I’ve only decided it is
Great point. But have you considered you’re wrong?
I had fun with it, definitely better at building tension than CoC in my experience.
Me too, here in Sweden we don't have many games you can play with new Swedes due to language issues, but Dread is one of the few games that really set our house guests at ease.
I've run it for Halloween every year (and I'm putting together one right now). I enjoy it. It's barely a role playing game, it's kind of a communal campfire story where the Jenga tower decides how scared everyone should be and when somebody dies. It's a nice way to spend an hour or two every once in a while. A house rule I use is that when you die, you get to hang onto the block that killed you and donate it to somebody later to save them a pull. It takes a little bit of the sting out of dying and keeps the person engaged because they're on the lookout for when they can guarantee a success or save somebody's life or something. And it gives me an excuse to be even more merciless because oh look Dave could save you right now *if he wanted to*.
Also, at the end of each questionnaire I've started writing one unique question for each player, and it's always a drawback. One player's might ask "how did you lose your leg?" and another's might ask "why are you so afraid of the dark?" etc. I 100% frick players over with these, and the intention there is to force the group into situations they otherwise wouldn't have to deal with. This year's game is going to take place in the middle of a flood, and one of the players' questions is, "why'd you never learn to swim?"
In short: it's fun as a sometimes game. Not a huge amount of depth or anything, but it's not that kind of game. Once a year has worked out about right for me; the players always start asking questions about it around October.
Yeah, it worked really well for a party, and a grognard was pissy about it. That's about every reaction you'll get. People who no one wants to play games with get irrationally angry about it, game theory geeks think of it as an interesting gimmick but not worth treating too preciously, and casuals eat it up. Entry-level game through and through.
Ran it once, with one player that wasn't into tabletop because rules scary. It was fun, I think it can get some people into the hobby, or be a fun alternative to focus on narrative.
No but it sounds neat