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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.