Has Anyone Ever Played Dread?

To be fair it doesn't have to be character death, it's just removal from the game. The book even recommends other shit

Examples:
>They die
>They go insane
>They lose consciousness/become critically ill
>They get a phone call that a family member is in critical condition
>They go to have a piss and something kidnaps them or they get lost
>A relic or artifact they touch transports them to another dimension

The other user mentioned that you have some alternatives to literal death, but you're right that it does make for some silliness. The reason for that, though, is to maintain the dread ("dread"! Get it?) of the Tower falling. In a game where you're rolling dice and those dice can mean good or bad things, the physicality of rolling the dice is less important. The act of rolling a die doesn't mean anything, the comparison between result and target number (or whatever other mechanic you choose) is what matters.

The Tower doesn't work like that. If you want players to be afraid of it, then it falling has to be all-caps BAD, every time, immediately. You want to gut-punch them every time the Tower falls, and if you don't, it stops being scary. I'm sure you could easily run Dread while soft-house-ruling the Tower falling into being some kind of setback instead of death, but the pure visceral response to "Tower Falls = You Fucking Lose", and the fact that every player understands that from the start, and continues to understand that every time a pull is made, is something I think is very important to the game.

Then again, Dread runs a very specific "feel" of game, so the system might not be the best fit for the kind of thing you'd use Call of Cthulhu or Unknown Armies or any other horror system for.

The biggest thing is keeping your players hooked and in character. Make them actually want to survive the story for their characters sake. This will do everything the user here talks about, while making the heroic sacrifice option mean something.

Nothing ruins the game more than getting to the last bit of a game of Dread for a player to invoke a heroic sacrifice for no reason other than "fuck it"

Tbh the only time Dread really works is when you can have something absolutely awful happen to the PCs if they fail

kill yourself shill rat

>Shilling something that is entirely available online for free
???

wakkata

This is why I never really run RPG's. None of my friends can play a narrative. They just try to game whatever system we're playing.

I didn't care for it. I found myself calling for pulls far far more often than I would ever call for rolls in a normal game, just to actually make use of that mechanical tension. It came off as forced as it was.

Then the second tower ended up significantly less stable than the first, and next thing you know the game ended immediately on the next pull, and half an hour of tower building.

I don't know why you're doing it either. End your own life.

>STOP TALKING ABOUT SOMETHING THAT ISN'T D&D OR WARHAMMER REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Fuck off

>literally autistic screeching
Push all the blocks over and kill your character irl

>Then the second tower ended up significantly less stable than the first, and next thing you know the game ended immediately on the next pull, and half an hour of tower building.
do you know how to play Jenga?

The gm doesn't pull blocks.

what does that have to to do with anything? How did the second built tower end up less stable than the first one? How did it take half a fucking hour to set up?

>my normie friends
This is without fail the best way to spot a normalfag

its my go to system for horror one-offs and sometimes even introducing normies to TTRPGs

Tried it once, hated it.

GUMSHOE or Fear Itself would be better. Even Dungeon World is better.

tbqh anyone who only plays 5e is a normalfag/cancer anyway

> one person completely took over the game by getting too drunk and screeching at everyone.
That could happen at any kind of social gathering.

I suppose it's analogous to the Jenga Tower itself. It lives and dies by the touchiness of the thing.

It does a great job of introducing the fear of it collapsing, but it also means an unexpected collapse creates tonal mismatches. For gamier players it means a lot of choice paralysis for fear of weakening the tower

It's good fun if you've got a dm who can actually tell a story, the tower really adds to the tension of decision making.

Looks fun for one-shots, but is there any purpose to building your character if all checks come down to whether the player is good at balance and finesse? You won't, say, get a bonus to fixing an engine from being a mechanic. Your character is just a name and a personality, nothing mechanical.

tl;dr: It's just a mixture of a kids' game and freeform roleplay. Might be fun to try like one time though.

When someone dies you have to remove more blocks from the tower when you reset it. It took half an hour because 3 people died during the process of putting it back together.
Because each time we reset it more blocks needed removed to compensate.

>Looks fun for one-shots, but is there any purpose to building your character if all checks come down to whether the player is good at balance and finesse? You won't, say, get a bonus to fixing an engine from being a mechanic. Your character is just a name and a personality, nothing mechanical.

A mechanic wouldn't have to make a pull, or would have to pull less than a regular character (as more complex tasks can result in multiple pulls), likewise a mechanic could be made aware of secret complications that a gm should and would have not told a non-mechanic before the first pull (and knowing that you have to pull thrice to succeed a task is much more helpful before the pull than after a brick is already removed, and hey look at that guess you have to pull a second with no knowledge of if it will stop there of keep going).

You know there are stories where the main characters die during the story. Its a short horror game. Survival is not the point.

Did you mean to reply to someone else? I said nothing about survival.

Yeah I have a friend who either powergames, or, in a system where he can't do it as much, he'll just do as much wacky and stupid shit as possible and I indulge it to a point because he gets retardedly high rolls and/or I don't want him to die doing something absolutely ass-tarded because I actually am trying to have a good story, and it's dumb if he dies because he decided to pick a fight with a whole bunch of unofficial city guards at once and get shot 10 times and die. I want to run Apocalypse World for him but it's hard as fuck to die in that, too.

Its literally the TTRPG equivalent to the Choose Your Own Adventure Goosebump books in a good way

It's good for what it is - which is to say, a narrative RPG with very simple gameplay. More than anything, I applaud it for finding a way to combine real, physical tension with the developing story.

Funny you mention that, because my group's go-to horror module these days is a fusion of Dread and Cthulhu Dark. We just replaced the Insanity mechanic with the Jenga tower, so players can roll an extra die on tests by way of risking their precarious grip on reality. This addressed my biggest problem with Dread, which was how to pace the frequency of players pulling blocks. Too often and you get a player elimination 20 minutes into the session, too rarely and the players end up running unopposed on like 90% of the things they attempt.

I have a session next week where half my players can't make it, so I was planning on running a one-shot Call of Cthulhu game (The Derelict specifically). However no one has played CoC and I don't want to have to spend a lot of time explaining the rules, which eats up a lot of time for a 2.5 hour one-shot. So I was thinking about just using Dread.

I saw a couple of anons mention that they use Dread for CoC. How do you handle things like a spot check using Dread? Where a character has to interact with the environment, but isn't necessarily doing an action that puts them in danger. Basically I'm concerned that my players will go "Hey, lets see what's in the locked drawer" and I have to come up with some reason why they killed themselves.

The essential rules for Call of Cthulhu are a paragraph long: Any time you want to do something, roll a percentage die. If it's below the rating for the relevant skill or ability, you succeed.

>How do you handle things like a spot check using Dread?
Broadly speaking, you don't. The nature of Dread's rules demands that you roleplay the minutiae and save the actual game mechanics (the jenga tower) for delicate or dire situations where catastrophic failure is possible. If a player elects to do something like search the contents of a trashcan, the keeper won't require a tower pull to avoid tetanus; he'll simply tell the player what their character finds therein.

It's better this way, per how the game works. If you're asking the players to pull more than once every several minutes, you'll run into player elimination very rapidly.

>save the actual game mechanics (the jenga tower) for delicate or dire situations where catastrophic failure is possible
Literally (((current year))) technology

dunno if my experience gm'ing dread lines up with this

it's more like the game has a built in narrative arc relative to the number of challenges the players have been faced with

that is to say, you can plan to present the players with up to 20 or so challenges where they pull a tile before the threat of death/disability becomes at all realistic, but you should not plan for more than 30 or so of these challenges before someone meets their end

like I said, this pace is built into the game. especially clumsy or lucky players can occasionally provide for outliers and the gm can cheat the system a little bit by rebuilding towers at less than 100%, but it will largely repeat the trajectory mentioned above until the game ends