![]() ![]() As a judge and scenario-writer, I find giving up this level on control to the player absolutely terrifying, but it’s also sort of freeing – and I can’t argue with the results.įor example, my game was set in the 1920’s. Each player makes the PC uniquely theirs by answering the (occasionally loaded) questions. There are absolutely no numbers on the character sheet, because the sheet is a thirteen question questionnaire that’s effectively one big Rorschach inkblot. The first is make the player buy into their character. I think Dread relies on two basic premises. If I’m trying to scare folks or immerse them in the game, I don’t want dice rolls and combat statistics being a distraction. Part of the fun of D&D and action-adventure is making lots of combat rolls. I love gamey systems and game mechanics and rolling dice – I love D&D, right? – but only to the extent that they enhance a game’s mood instead of derailing it. For me, Dread’s big mechanical advantage over CoC is that there’s no numbers or dice to futz with. I mentioned it a few posts down (and if you want to pick the game up, you can do so from here). Notably, one player inadvertently screamed at a particularly scary moment.Īnd yet, this last weekend, I got almost as good an effect playing Dread in the middle of a loud, sunny, crowded room at the NC Game Day. It was tailor-made for inducing nervousness. The players sat in low leather couches in the exact middle of a huge darkened library, dead animals looked down on us from the walls as we played, and I could easily walk around behind the players as I ran the game. We ran the game in the school’s literary society. The PCs were Russian soldiers at the Battle of Stalingrad who were being stalked through the city’s sewers by something horrible. The previous winner was a session of Call of Cthulhu I ran at Anonycon five years ago, back when it was held at Yale. I just ran my favorite horror game in years. If you want to pick the game up, you can do so from here. I'd be curious to hear other folks' thoughts. This thing won an ENnie last year, and I can see why it's my new favorite horror game, trumping even CoC in terms of how much I liked the rules. I ran a Dread game at the EN World game day down in North Carolina. I wrote this up earlier for personal reasons, and figured that cross-posting it might make some sense. ![]()
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