Dread: Worst Mechanic Ever?
This one needs a little background. A little over a week ago, while reading d20 Blonde, I came across mention of a horror role-playing game called Dread, which featured a unique mechanic: task resolution by playing Jenga. (Not to be confused with the other horror role-playing game Dread, which uses 2d12, and which was published several years prior to this Dread.) (Edit: Some further digging reveals that, while the other Dread was published first, this Dread seems to have been created and used for convention play first. Not that this matters much, really — just for the sake of accuracy.)
My immediate reaction was not favorable:
A Jenga tower? Really? That’s got to be the worst mechanic I’ve ever heard of. Nothing like killing a character because the player is physically clumsy… or has a nerve-related ailment.
This was, however, apparently a unique reaction. One of the responses put it this way:
The threat of the tower falling (even if you’ve got shaky hands!) is part of what builds the tension in the game… In fact, as the tower grows and become more precarious, you’ll see the players physically scoot back from the table because, even if you accidentally knock the tower reaching for a drink, you’re [sic.] PC bites it.
As the story progresses, the danger of dying increases with each pull… and the atmosphere grows more and more intense. It’s a beautiful thing.
Additionally, I received several admonishments not to judge the game without playing it. Well, fair enough. I decided to see whether my group would be interested in trying a game, using the quickstart rules available on the website. They were.
I’ve changed my mind: Dread’s mechanic is not the worst I’ve seen. If I exclude cases where the entire game is just awful, though (like FATAL), it’s still in the top three. There are a couple of reasons why. But first things first.
Our GM for the session — Dread works best with one-shots, apparently, although I’m told the rulebook contains suggestions for running continuing campaigns as well — was a horror fan, and also the one who GMs our Call of Cthulhu games when we play that system. He, like all of us, was new to Dread, but he’s quite experienced with gamemastering in the genre.
Our first hurdle, actually, was coming up with a set of Jenga blocks. None of us had one. They’re less ubiquitous than dice or cards. It wouldn’t be accurate to call this a weakness of the system, but it is a conscious design element, and it does make the game less accessible… at least for us. We managed to borrow a set from a friendly neighbor, though, luckily.
Next came character creation. In Dread, this is done by completing a leading questionnaire. The GM (which Dread calls the host) provides a set of leading questions; the players answer them. Questions such as “Why did your wife leave you?” or “What makes you lie awake at night?” — or even less innocuous-seeming ones, such as “What was your favorite subject in college, and why didn’t you get your degree in it?” That last one is out of the rulebook, which, in a nice touch, has a string of questions along the bottom of each page (or at least each one that’s included in the preview).
This could be done at a session, I suppose, but it seemed better to complete them in advance, so we did. The GM had them before the game begun, and he used much of the information we revealed about our characters during the game.
And that’s all there was to it. Dread is a statless, diceless game. Our character sheets were a few scribbled details about the characters we were playing, and maybe a list of a couple of skills in general terms. More on that a little later.
This method of character generation met with overwhelming success among my group. Not a single person had anything bad to say about it, unless you count “Can we ask each other questions, too?” (Strictly by the book, I don’t think so, but we allowed a couple of questions at the start of the session, for further character development. I can’t see that it hurt anything, and it helped us relate to each other.)
The game system is very light, and can be summed up this way: When you try to do something, and it’s not clear whether you should succeed — it’s neither trivial nor impossible, in other words — you “pull” by taking a block out of the Jenga tower (anywhere below the top level), and placing it back on the top level. You can also voluntarily pull, in order to do a better job, take extra caution, or ask the GM for a clue.
If the tower stays standing after you pull, you succeed. If it falls, you fail, and your character is removed from play. This might be a death, but not necessarily — he could also be driven insane, called in to work suddenly, called away because of an emergency, fall into a coma, flee in wild terror, or become completely blissed-out and unresponsive to the world at large. The effect’s the same, though: it’s game over for you.
There’s one small exception: if you intentionally knock the tower over, it’s called a “sacrifice.” Your character is still removed from play, but he succeeds at the task in some dramatically-appropriate way.
This is, clearly, a very deadly game. That’s well in keeping with the genre, though.
In most cases, the character can refuse to pull. He fails at the task and suffers some negative consequence, but the end result is something less severe than a removal from play.
One of the problems is that the pull is used for any questionable task resolution. One of the examples from the rulebook is that of a scholar attempting to translate a Latin text. The scholar might know Latin — it’s not unreasonable for his background. On the other hand, not all scholars do, so he might not. The GM calls for a pull, and there are four possibilities:
- Success. The character knows Latin (and the player writes that on his character sheet — if it comes up again, there’s no need to pull again, because it’s established that the character knows it).
- Failure. The character does not know Latin, and something comes up to remove him from play. Perhaps the book was evil and drove him insane. Perhaps the book was innocuous, but he suddenly received word that his daughter was in an accident, and is now hospitalized in a distant location, and he has to get there ASAP.
- Refusal to pull. The character does not know Latin. He’ll have to get the information some other way. Some negative event might occur — maybe he gets a headache from staring at the indecipherable text too long. Though in this case, the failure alone is likely to be enough.
- Sacrifice. The character translates the Latin and manages to convey its information to the other PCs. However, some event removes that character from play once he’s finished.
The block-pulling is unquestionably an innovative mechanic. After playing the game, though, I still feel it’s a poor one. Here’s why:
It’s fundamentally unfair. It ties the character’s success — and indeed the character’s life — to the player’s physical capacity. The player’s physical ability determines the character’s ability to succeed and the player’s ability to remain in the game. Roleplaying is normally a mental and social game — but in Dread, those traits are irrelevant. Even the best actors and the cleverest gamers will be swiftly eliminated if they happen to be clumsy. Or, worse, if they happen to be physically injured or disabled in any of numerous ways.
The latter probably doesn’t come up in many groups. One of my players broke his dominant arm a while ago, though, and it’s in a cast; for this game, he was forced to pull using his weaker hand, and managed a whole one success before knocking the tower over. I’ve had two other players in my group over the years with physical disabilities that would prevent them from effectively playing Dread, too. The bottom line is, the game mechanic is hostile to these players, and that’s by design. Punishing poor roleplaying or foolishness is one thing; punishing physical inability, in a type of game that is not in the least physical, is quite another.
We toyed with the idea of allowing a more physically capable player to pull in his stead, but rejected it. As he said, “That would put my character’s life in someone else’s hands. Literally.” Can’t blame someone for wanting control over his own character.
(We made sure he knew the mechanic before committing to the game, incidentally. He chose not to sit it out. We managed to involve him through our standard “absent character technique” of allowing him to play some of the NPCs, so the session wouldn’t be an almost-total loss for him.)
This was the real dealbreaker for me, and I don’t really see a good way of addressing it. Aside from letting someone else pull, the main option would seem to be not requiring as many pulls of that player — but that then gives that character an advantage over the other characters, for no logical (in-game) reason.
It discourages proactivity. Pulls are required for reacting to dangerous situations. However, pulls are also required for activity such as investigation. In order to maximize your character’s chances of staying alive, therefore, you’d need to minimize the amount of activity you undertake, and try to keep things as simple as possible so that you can skate by with automatic successes. This system actively discourages risk. That means it’s easy to get bogged down into spinning-wheels mode, where the plot is going nowhere.
My group, luckily, is a pretty story-oriented bunch, so we didn’t stall for long. But every time we made a move, we were aware that it was a bad choice according to the game system. It did increase the tension, but only artificially — the question of whether a character can translate a Latin text or not is not ordinarily an immediately deadly one, even in a horror game.
To be fair, one could say that this reflects a common trope of certain genre films — the ones who “go exploring” or “stop and investigate” are the ones the psycho slasher kills. But it’s my firm opinion that a game should encourage active participation in the plot, and this mechanic discourages it.
It breaks the atmosphere. My group generally agreed that the tower increased the level of tension, as was evidently the intent. However, we also generally agreed that it took us out of the game when it came up. When we needed to pull, we were thinking not about the character’s success or failure, but about our own. One player wondered whether we would have felt the same tension by playing Jenga while telling ghost stories.
That’s not quite what we were doing with Dread — it was interactive, if nothing else — but I can’t say it’s far from the truth, either.
Perhaps this is something that would go away as we played more. I wouldn’t doubt that the “newness” of the mechanic drew extra attention to it. Nevertheless, it felt gimmicky to us. Even ignoring the points above, I’m not sure a Jenga tower adds more than it detracts.
It can lead to confusion. Any time the tower falls, aside from during its initial construction at the start of the session, a PC is eliminated. Once, our tower fell… for no apparent reason, when nobody had touched it, or even gone near the table it was set up on, for at least ten minutes. Who gets eliminated, then?
We eventually handwaved that one and rebuilt the tower without eliminating anyone. By the book, though, someone would have had to go. And I’m still not sure what caused the blocks to fall.
Now, this was a freak occurrence. It probably happens one time in a million. But it still interrupted our session and led to a couple of minutes of puzzled out-of-character discussion, so it gets a mention.
That sounds pretty bleak, but it’s not all bad. As I mentioned earlier, Dread’s character generation is incredibly fun, quick, and roleplaying-oriented. I’ll be importing some ideas from it into my next campaign. Dread’s system is light, easy to explain, and mostly succeeds in its goal of creating tension among the players. It’s the most unique mechanic I’ve seen in recent memory. And it’s possible to run an entertaining session using Dread. This is not a Synnibarr. It is an inventive, rules-light, roleplay-heavy RPG. We had a mostly-enjoyable session, which two of the characters even managed to survive.
Unfortunately, Dread’s mechanic is downright inimical to certain players, through no fault of their own; even if that were not a concern, I felt it was gimmicky and distracting. In light of this, I have difficulty recommending it. I’m afraid I also have difficulty suggesting improvements, short of a revision of the system. We’re planning to think it over and see what we can come up with. But as it stands, Dread is not a game my group can play.
(Possible caveat: The group was using only those preview rules available online. The physical rulebook might address some of these issues. We gave it an honest shot with what we had available, though.)
No related posts.
Tags: dread, game design, reviewCategories: Reviews | Comments (21)
2 Trackbacks/Pingbacks
- Pingback: Cuz This Is Thriller, Thriller Night (Dread Review) « Turbulent Thoughts on Sunday, October 12, 2008
- Pingback: Review: Imperium Chronicles | A Butterfly Dreaming on Saturday, April 25, 2009
I think I agree, even if I haven’t ever played it and am not likely to. Now, tkae a modern game and the characters need an NPCs help and he’s a Jenga master and they’re challenged to a game – he’ll help if the challenger wins…. that sounds much more fun!
Mixed feelings.
Dread doesn’t appeal to me, but the Jenga-thing is only a small part of it. I don’t like games with high PC mortality, and I certainly don’t like games where one of the players can get essentially kicked out early on.
As far as the mechanic goes, it isn’t for every group. If your group has people with motor-control issues, it certainly isn’t for you. Yes, it favors people with steady hands, but most rpgs favor people with – say – good problem solving skills (or dice that roll well). Is one more valid than another?
While this seems like a problematic mechanic, there’s one important aspect to keep in mind: this kind of game would probably be very effective to introduce new players to RPG, especially older ones, since it combines a more traditional game with storytelling on a genre that doesn’t seem as “childish” to certain people as fantasy or scifi might. Sounds like the perfect game to get your girlfriend hooked in RPG.
Just my two cents.
I’ll tell you one game Dread works perfectly for: Paranoia. All the PCs have clones, and death is supposed to happen all the time. It’s quite hilarious.
Dread is not a game for those who can’t or don’t want to play jenga, obviously, much like rules-heavy games are not to everyone’s taste. You are taking a new game (Dread) and judging it with standards of other games (Roleplaying is a mental activity. Dread is less so. Hence, Dread is a bad game.), as opposed to judging it as itself.
Your other commentary is very relevant and even-handed, though.
Also: Clever players will still have an edge; it is a matter of knowing what you can get away with without using the rules, much like Amber and old school D&D.
@Viriatha: I’d still suggest giving it a try if you have the chance… you never know. If nothing else, going through character creation with Dread was a terrific and inspiring experience.
@Stuart: Yes, I’d say so. I alluded to this in the post, but RPGs are a mental and social genre, so I consider it reasonably fair to involve players’ mental and social skills. (How much they should do so is a separate matter — the longstanding “Detective skill for the mystery/Int roll to solve the riddle” question. But clearly they’re going to to some extent; it’s impossible to play a true tabletop RPG non-socially.)
@amz: It might… but I’m not so sure. I’d have visions of the inductee messing up his/her first pull and dying ten minutes into the game. That would be a less than ideal introduction.
@Patriarch917: Ha! Yes, it just might, at that. A horror-themed Paranoia session would be interesting, too. Maybe The Computer really is your friend… your ONLY friend…
@Tommi: I don’t think Dread is a bad game. It was reasonably entertaining for the most part, which is about all I could ask of it. I just find its mechanic distasteful (and the part where it discourages investigation ill-considered). If we hadn’t had an injured player among us, I’d probably find it less so. Although I’d still lean toward Call of Cthulhu or a more streamlined version of same, because of the other factors I mentioned.
And clever players will always have an edge. I notice they tend to make up for it by getting themselves in over their heads more often than the others, though. Always a good time.
Also, small edit regarding the dates of the two Dread games: this one was evidently created first and used for convention games, while the other one was created second but published first. Just one of those odd things, I guess.
Had an interesting thought while reading your article here. What if you used the standard dice mechanic for conflict resolution, but used the jenga as a sort of sanity meter? The idea of giving sanity a physical measure appeals to me, particularly an unstable tower. Basically, when something mentally upsetting happens, you have the player pull a block. If something really bad happens, you might have them pull two or even three blocks. The only problem here is that every one would have to have their own jenga tower. So you’d basically put them aside but in plain view, so the players can always look at it nervously before making a decision. That way, they are able to be proactive, but the tension building that makes this fun is still there. Also, the poetic significance of a toppling tower representing the descent into madness…appeals to me.
I have to agree. I have not once been tempted to play Dread for these exact reasons. The problem is the relevance of the mechanic to the game and the character’s abilities (none). You may as well kill whoever farts first.
I have played Dread a few times, and it’s never failed to deliver a great horror game experience. One of the players in our last session of it was still recovering from a mild stroke he had last year, and he said that liked how the tower created more of a challenge for him. And, his character was the only survivor at the end.
If wooden blocks just don’t work for you, then use a deck of cards. Shuffle it and place it face-down in the middle of the table. When players attempt an uncertain action, they draw the top card and place it off to the side. If they draw a joker, they die or disappear from the story. Reshuffle the deck afterwards.
@Tzuriel: That’s an intriguing thought. One of the problems I had with the mechanic is that death doesn’t necessarily come at an appropriate time. You can have a couple of successful pulls representing the players’ escape from the axe murderer, and it works wonderfully… and then in the next scene, someone needs to persuade an NPC or perform some research, and they get eliminated. Some mechanic to address the non-trivial but non-fatal would go a long way.
As far as the falling tower, I think that’s the sort of symbolism that’s intended.
@Tim: That sounds like a terrific suggestion. I might need to play with the “deadly” values (2 in 54 is a pretty low chance of elimination), but it addresses the physical capability issue while still being simple.
This sounds so idiotic. I must play it and review it.
Dread is one of the most fun games I’ve played in a long time. I do recognize that there’s a certain brand of gamer who will hate every second of it. There’s not really any rules to play with, no modifiers to tweak, so if that’s part of your fun it will be absent here.
There is reward for clever players. The OP might not have had this using quick-start, but the PC making a pull can change the circumstances surrounding the action to prevent having to pull. For instance, if the PC has to explore a dark basement filled with sharp metal rusty things, they might avoid a pull if they think to go up to the kitchen and grab a flashlight.
There’s also a provision for someone knocking the tower over five minutes into the game. They can be ‘ghosted’, where they are a dead man walking. Any action that attempts a pull fails, but they can still play. When you reach an appropriate time, take them out.
As a GM, I really enjoy the challenges that Dread provides. By being so rules light, its very easy to come up with things on the fly, to work things from the questionnaires into the game, and so on. I like having to think on my feet and figure out why someone should be removed from the game for failing to talk to a cop or something.
And I’ve never seen a game have that effect on players before. You can get them creeped out, you can get them paranoid, you can even get a cheap scare or two. But I’ve never seen players [i]afraid[/i] in an RPG before. In the first game I ran, no one had died all game, so the tower was very unstable. The killer was unconscious on the ground, and they wanted to search him for weapons before tying him up. One by one, the players nudged and prodded the tower, looking for a loose piece but finding none. Finally they decided to shoot him in cold blood, because none of them could work up the nerve to get close to him. Loved it
It is a good game for ‘non-gamey’ people. My roommate is anti-gaming, having no interest in D&D, Buffy, CoC, or anything involving rules and dice. But she had a blast with Dread.
Hi there,
So, I know this is resurrecting an old thread, but I’ve only recently discovered “Dread” and have been googling any conversations about it I can find, in preparation for running my first session of it in a couple weeks. I just wanted to comment quickly on one of the reviewer’s points about why he thought the mechanic was bad…
“It discourages proactivity. Pulls are required for reacting to dangerous situations. However, pulls are also required for activity such as investigation. In order to maximize your character’s chances of staying alive, therefore, you’d need to minimize the amount of activity you undertake…”
I think this gets to a fundamental issue, which is that the point of Dread is *not* “to maximize your character’s chances of staying alive.” The point of Dread is to enjoy roleplaying a good, immersive horror story where you know you could die at any time. If the idea of being killed off before the end of the session really puts you off, you probably shouldn’t be playing Dread in the first place.
To be clear, I’m not just giving a dismissive “if you don’t like it, don’t play the game.” That’s not what I am trying to say at all. I am saying, be sure you understand what kind of experience a game is designed to provide, and then see if you are playing it that way–or even want to have that kind of experience in the first place. Yes, the Dread Jenga mechanic is a poor mechanic that discourages proactivity, *if* you go into the game with the primary player goal of keeping your character alive to the end. But if you go in with the mindset that the game was designed to serve–that of “I could die at any time, heck I probably will before this is over, so let’s see how fun and exciting things can be until I do,”–then the Jenga mechanic does not discourage proactivity at all. After all, wouldn’t you rather die to a tower collapse because you were trying everything you could, rather than scrupulously avoiding pulls, and then, say, accidentally bumping the tower down? Especially since the “Dead Man Walking” rule exists, to ease excessively early or dramatically inappropriate tower collapses. If doom is imminent and almost certain, then leap into the teeth of it and enjoy the ride. That seems to be what Dread is all about. And if you play it that way, the Jenga mechanic is just right.
Thanks for listening.
Best,
~~~~Random
@Random: The problem with this is, once you’re “dead,” you’re out of the game. If you take on the sorts of early investigation that are required to move the plot along, there’s a good chance (especially if you’re clumsy) that you miss the exciting latter part of the game.
Dying in a horror game because you failed to outrun the serial killer or the monster ambushed you is one thing. You should, indeed, expect such things to happen if you’re playing a horror game. “Dying” because you failed to translate a mysterious book or bluff a security guard to gain access to a building is another story.
@Scott: Yes, once you’re dead you are out of the game. That’s a design element of the game. If being “killed” out of the game before it is over is a problem for a player, then Dread may not be the game they want to be playing. Now, I can certainly understand why it *would* be a problem for a player. There are certainly plenty of people who would not enjoy that, and so they probably wouldn’t enjoy Dread. That doesn’t make the mechanic that causes that in Dread a bad mechanic. The mechanic serves what the game is trying to do. There are simply people who are not going to enjoy what the game is trying to do, and people who are.
Also, with regards to your comment that “If you take on the sorts of early investigation that are required to move the plot along, there’s a good chance (especially if you’re clumsy) that you miss the exciting latter part of the game,” (emphasis mine) based on all reports I have heard and read, there is not actually a “good chance” at all. It seems that the average number of tower collapses in a 4-hour 5-7 player game is 0-2. It would appear that it generally takes an awful lot of pulls, or an extreme case of clumsiness (or cockiness) to get the tower to fall–with the occasional surprise exception. But the possibility of that surprise exception is part of the atmosphere of tension and uncertainty the game is trying to create. The idea is that there is a *possibility* that your character will die (or otherwise be taken out of the game) with every pull, but a very high likelihood that he/she won’t be, unless the game has been going on for a long time, and the tower is very rickety. That’s why it’s a game of “horror and hope.”
Now yes, you raise a good point that if one is exceptionally clumsy, or has some sort of physical impairment–temporary or permanent–that makes pulling from the tower difficult or impossible, and one also does not feel comfortable letting someone else pull for them (a not unreasonable feeling) then yes, the chances of you dying are much higher, and the game is probably not going to be fun for you. But does that make the mechanic inherently poor, just because it eliminates some people from using it? Sure, it would be great if a game was accessible to everyone, but it doesn’t have to be, to be a good game. There are plenty of people with physical restrictions–again, temporary or permanent–who can’t particularly play baseball very well, or at all, for example. Does that make baseball an inherently bad game, because some people are not physically able to play it? Is the game “Concentration” inherently a bad game, just because people with very poor memories can’t play it well? It would be great if every game in the world was accessible to everyone who wanted to play it, but the reality is that is not the case, and that doesn’t make the game inherently poor.
Again, I feel you raise a number of very valid points about how the game does and does not work. But I think it’s unfair to say that those points are indications that is a poorly designed or poorly thought-out system. I think rather, the points you bring up are good analyses of what the game does well (what it was designed to do) and what things the game does poorly (that it was not designed to do.) The points you identify, I think, are helpful in letting someone take a look at the game and see if the kind of experience it was designed to give is the kind of experience they want to have. Judging from reports, there are a lot of people who do. There are also certainly a lot of people who don’t. That just means that it’s a matter of taste, what one enjoys, and not an indication that the mechanic works poorly. It obviously works extremely well to accomplish what it was designed to accomplish, and a lot of people enjoy what it was designed to do.
Again, I really think you have identified a lot of salient points in your review. I think your analysis of how the game works is accurate in a lot of ways. I just think that your conclusion that it is a weakness, when in fact it is doing exactly what it was designed to do–something that a lot of people seem to enjoy–is somewhat off base.
Thanks for listening.
Best,
~~~~Random
@Random: I’m curious where you’re getting your numbers from. 0-2 collapses is an extremely low estimate, based on my experience.
The mechanic is not a bad mechanic because it eliminates characters who are in dangerous situations. The mechanic is a bad mechanic because it eliminates characters who are not in dangerous situations — ejecting the player from the game for some trumped-up reason — and because it ties a character’s performance — that is, the performance of every character a player could ever play, regardless of that character’s supposed mental or physical capabilities — to the player’s own manual dexterity, and because the tension it produces is not generated by the story but separate from it and, at least in my group’s experience, distracting from it.
The third might be a matter of taste, but the first two are by design. That people enjoy the game doesn’t make it good design — it just means they can deal with the bad design. Similarly, many people enjoy Axis and Allies, even though by default it is imbalanced (the Axis side has a disadvantage against the Allied side), but this does not mean that a consistent statistical imbalance is good design in a war game.
I’m glad that you enjoy it, but I stand by the conclusion: a mechanic that ties a character’s success or game-over to a player’s physical performance is poor design for a roleplaying game, particularly when the mechanic is so unforgiving.
What if you start with half a Jenga “tower Built”
give out the rest of the blocks to the players.. (or some number of blocks)
on thier turns
They could spend them to gain sucess .. spend extra to get more sucess, or give them to other players who may need help (While properly roleplaying how they are helping each other).
When you spend a block you add it to the tower..
Only when you run out of blocks do you have to pull..Or in moments of greater tension (determined by the host.)
When you pull that block into your hand for use.
I know In effect rebuild the game….
but at least a less skilled Jenga-ite could be effective in game, by smart resource management, and roleplaying ways other “team” memebers can help them (give them blocks) if they run out.
No one wants to be”the charater that needs help all the time” But those charaters exsist in Horror flims.
And it beats the heck out of having your charater knocked out of the game simply bacause you have a broken wrist.
Random is right. And you don’t have to die (leave play) from not being able to translate a latin book. Nor do you HAVE to pull for that.