Dread

This review was originally published on Veritas Tabletop and is reprinted here.

Contributors: Impossible Dream (Epidiah Ravachol and Nathaniel Barmore)
Publication date: September 1st, 2010
Price: $12.00

Dread is an award-winning, best-selling RPG by The Impossible Dream. Unlike a lot of RPGs, this is NOT one that you can play online, so you do need an in-person group.

I sort of ran Dread once before when I tried to play it remotely using a deck of cards. It worked a little bit, in some of the ways that I'll detail below, and fell flat in a lot of others. In October, I ran my first "actual" game of Dread, as my group played through what was essentially the plot of Jaws--something that some of my players had been asking me to run in some system for several years--and so this one also had a much more predictable and unoriginal storyline, which also shaped the experience of playing it.

Mechanics Overview

If you've heard only one thing about Dread, you've heard how to play it, and so I'm not going to spend a ton of time talking about this. Dread is wonderfully light on rules; while I enjoy games with some crunch, for an atmospheric horror game like Dread (or another improv-heavy, atmospheric horror game like 10 Candles), having something very simple works well.

The basic mechanic of Dread is that, instead of dice, you are playing Jenga. For each "roll" in another system, you instead make a pull from a Jenga tower, placing the block you pulled on top... like in Jenga. If you succeed without knocking over the tower, you succeed on the roll--or at least, keep the story moving forward. If you knock over the tower, your character dies or is otherwise written out of the story.

That's it! That's the rules! It is a very simple system, and this basic mechanic has a lot of deep implications for the play experience.

Character Creation

Character creation is done through a "character questionnaire" developed by the GM. These questions range from basic establishing facts (what you do for work?) to intrusive and establishing a fact about the character on the basis of the question being asked (why do you resent your romantic partner?) to borderline-mechanical (what item do you always keep on you?). The GM has the flexibility to write questions to tailor the characters to the intended story.

I talk in much more length about why I like this system in my article here, but needless to say, I like this system. We skipped over it in the Jaws session, instead just playing versions of the three characters from the movie, and to some extent, I think the game suffered for it. Playing the movie characters meant that there was less of a connection to the characters than there would have been if we had built them out, and we relied on caricatures from the movie. But in the online version of the game that I tried, this development is what worked best; we had an interesting, nuanced set of characters that really worked for a horror game, based on the questions that were asked.

This element is also minimal on the rules or mechanical crunch, but it has a lot more narrative depth than the simplistic character creation in, say, 10 Candles. I think it works well for the type of game that Dread is.

Tension

Horror relies on tension and the cycle of building tension and releasing it. That is the point of the Jenga tower. All the players can watch the tension rise, as their pulls from the tower become increasingly unstable. A character death when the tower falls acts as a very visceral release of that tension as you watch the tower topple.

Once again, the system is simple, but it just works.

That said, it does require a GM that is very attentive to pacing and tension. If your players aren't great at Jenga, the tower might tip over at a low-tension moment, in which case, you need to adjust for that. If your players are good at Jenga, the tense periods of the narrative might happen when the tower pulls are still feeling easy.

Part of the key here, for any GMs who intend to run the game, is to allow for long stretches of action to go on with multiple pulls. If two characters are fighting each other– or are battling with a monster or enemy– let every attack be a pull. Every attempt is a pull. The player character attacks? Pull. Monster turn, and the player character needs to try and dodge? Dodging is also a pull. Be liberal with making your players pull, and let there be stretches where you just keep pulling – "pull to not die" is a completely valid thing to ask your players to pull for, even over and over again in a sort of combat scenario.

You cannot die without knocking over the tower. This means in those narrative beats of high tension, you need to make sure that they're doing a lot of pulls to really feel that tension.

This is not really a problem with the system, but it does require an attentive GM to manage. It requires a willingness for improvisation, as you will definitely need to adjust the length of scenes to ensure that high-tension scenes peak with the tower's most wobbly moments.

The Dead Character Problem

The one problem that I think Dread has is: "what happens when you die?" Horror games built around lethality have all sorts of answers to this question. Cast Away deals with it by allowing dead characters to still influence events a limited number of times. 10 Candles addresses it by making sure that everyone's death happens in a relatively condensed amount of time.

Dread doesn't really have an answer that keeps players engaged once they've died. Sure, you pull additional blocks at the start of the game to make each subsequent death take less time, but it is unlikely that the characters will die in particularly quick succession (unless your players are really bad at Jenga). The result is that the first player out will be just sitting around for a while.

The rulebook does suggest that you can allow your dead to take on the role of a bad guy, essentially acting as co-GMs. I can see this working (though I haven't tried it) in a game about ghosts, werewolves, or really any plural threat. But in a story about a singular threat--like Jaws, for example--if the GM is going to keep controlling the shark for the sake of continuity and having the central bad guy, then the dead have really nothing to do. A second shark would just feel... cheap.

But again, that's my main strike against the system, and it is not a huge one.

GMs: be aware of this, though. Maybe, if you're building your own story concept, be thinking about "what will the dead players do?" And maybe consider prioritizing multi-enemy stories over single enemies.

Conclusion

There's a reason Dread is a best-seller and has won multiple design awards. It stands the test of time, maintaining its popularity year after year. It is a simple system that works powerfully well for horror storytelling, particularly at the hands of an attentive GM who is paying high levels of attention to the pacing of the game.

If the system is so simple, is it worth it to buy the book? I still say yes. The book's "rules" section is fairly short, due to the simplicity, but the advice sections of the book offer long sections on how to run the game for different horror subgenres. How do you elevate gore in a game that relies on imagination? How do you make it more of a mystery? What about a game about insanity?

And perhaps the most important – how do you structure the Questionnaire?

Just for those sections, I think any aspiring horror GM needs to check out the rulebook for Dread. Aspiring horror GMs should run Dread because it will teach you a lot about running horror--about pacing and tension--as you strip out all the rules of a more mechanically complex game. And buy Dread's rulebook for all of its great advice on the genre, which is applicable to all sorts of different horror systems.