Revisiting Dread, Jenga version

[Frank T]

Hey Ron and everybody else, look who's back. Yeah I know, Germans are totally 2006 and even Italians are getting old these days, but I thought I'd drop by to say hello. Nice to see you're still out here doing your thing. I enjoyed reading through the religious analogy threads, even though to my taste, there wasn't nearly enough well deserved teasing of the saaandbox! But I hope that will be remedied with the article-in-the-making.

In case you've grown tired by now of talking about dungeons and (yawn) sandboxes, I've brought you another stale topic which is... wait for it... Story Before! Yeah right, I'm still beating that horse, and it's very much alive, too. This is going to be a bit longer.

When last I tried the game called Dread, Jenga version, despite an overall positive experience owed mainly to the GM's and other players' performance, I was kind of disappointed by the lack of player agency (at the time, player agency seemed like the holy grail and everything else just evil GM fiat, not to be tolerated). And when I read the book later I raged at the blatant Illusionism proposed by the authors (or so I perceived). But I've come a long way since then, or maybe I should say I've come back around. And so, when some time ago I contemplated running a game of Mindfuck-Horror-In-Space in a Story Before fashion, and flipped through a number of possible systems I might use, I felt an itch to give Dread another try.

I announced the game months prior to actually running it, having only a vague idea of "Alien-esque space travel, prison colony on Ganymede, characters find themselves imprisoned and do not know why, horror and mindfuck ensues". Coincidentally, around the time, for the first time in my life as I have to shamefully admit, I started reading some Philip K. Dick. Now first of all, Ron, this reminded me of you because of the way PKD's fiction is bleeding the Cold War. And secondly, of course, it gave me some great inspiration for the game and a good idea of the tone I was going to aim at.

You know, some ten years ago, I've had a few really great role-playing sessions with the kind of dead-serious supernatural-angst-mystery "fuck, how can this BE" stuff that some GM's used to run with KULT, Unknown Armies et al, but I've kind of outgrown that. I can't really push myself any more to be creeped out by "you pull the plug but the monitor IS STILL ON". Neither am I particularly into Splatter. The dark, ironic humor and outright paranoia of PKD, on the other hand, suited me just perfectly. I was going to spice it up with some shock effects on account of being a "horror" game, but as it turned out when I finally ran the game last Friday, it was actually more of a thriller than an actual horror story.

I came up with a fairly simple but layered backstory: The characters are imprisoned on Ganymede because they are thought to be "sleepers" programmed by some hostile Alien species about whom very little is known yet. Or aren't there really any Aliens, were the characters part of a global rebellion against The System (tm) back on Earth, like some prisoners on the station claim, and their minds have been manipulated? Or is it all bullshit, is there no Alien species and no rebellion and not even a System and the whole thing is just madness, a consequence of big data and quantum computers and human incompetence? Or is that exactly what the Aliens want you to believe? As it turned out, the players didn't really agonize all that much over these questions during the game, but the multiple layers provided for a very nice and fitting twist in the final scene.

But back to preparation phase: How to introduce the players into the story? For this, Dread has a really great technique, one of the best examples of Participationist game design I have seen to date. It is called the questionnaire. I as GM get to ask leading questions of the players about their characters and they get to answer them. It's a perfect illustration of Ron's tandem analogy. In this case, I set up 3 questionnaires with 10 questions each. Some example questions from one of them:

• What region [on Earth] devastated by civil war and pollution are you from?
  
• When you were 10 years old, you first killed a man. Why?
  
• Why is it that you are scared senseless by doctors and surgical instruments?
  
• Who do you pray to, and what for?
  
• Why do you need to return to Earth at any cost?
  

So this allows me to take a strong lead and to establish both my (huge) amount of content authority and the direction I'm going to take the game, at the same time giving the player an opportunity to fill in the details, to add some color and context, some flesh to the bones I have provided. Already we are collaborating, with no false pretense about it and no hard feelings about the inequality of authority. This is playing the game exactly as written. In the previous game I linked to above, the GM had not asked leading questions, instead he had asked just two open questions and the same questions of every player. Today I think he wasted a powerful tool. But we are all wiser today.

Now for the Jenga tower. As most of you are probably aware, Dread uses a game of Jenga for resolution. The idea is you have to draw from the tower in order to succeed at anything dangerous or difficult. You can abort the pull if you think the tower will fall, but if you do, it means you fail. If you topple the tower, your character dies or is otherwise written out of the story in a genre-appropriate way. So far, so genius.

When I first read the rules, however, I was outraged at how little respect the authors seemed to have for their own genius idea, using it merely as a gimmick of the Illusionist to replace meaningless dice rolling with something more suspenseful but just as meaningless. It seemed to me that the rules were pretending to be conflict resolution, which after re-reading the rules I have to admit was biased perception on my part. The rules are very clearly task resolution, to the point of stating that the only thing the players have control over are their characters' intentions.

Reading the rules for a second time I was still somewhat frustrated by the sheer amount of deliberate vagueness and GM fiat. "Coax the players into pulling blocks, call for one pull or multiple pulls, tell them or don't tell them what they are pulling for, players can make elective pulls but they don't know whether it will do them any good, and all consequences of everything are up to the GM anyway." This is not how I normally run role-playing games these days. But you have to understand that the lack of transparency is part of what makes it fun, makes it suspenseful, it is part of the dialogue between GM and players in which both parties are required to contribute with good intentions.

My previous misunderstanding was that this would make pulling a block meaningless. In a way, the opposite is true: When you risk losing your character although you know that ultimately you will not change how things are going to turn out, but you still do it, isn't that all the more meaningful? It makes a point of illustrating what your character is all about, and that's for you, the player, to decide. Or, of course, you are just forced to pull the block in order to move the Story along, which is legit, too: Be a good participating player and please don't let your character die, can you do that? Are your hands shaking? And last not least, there is one very hard consequence the tower resolves without compromise, which is player character death. Who dies, at what time, and what was her final act? That is not a small thing at all.

So yeah, I guess I've done the authors injustice. I still groaned at some of the passages about keeping everything oh so very secret, but there were also some pieces of advice that I found really helpful in preparing my scenario. For example, I had two scenes involving surgery and I used advice from the book on running a "gory game" to make them more unsettling. One of these scenes was later commented on by the players as being particularly intense.

As the text keeps repeating over and over, every "host" (as Dread calls the GM) must find their own unique style and I guess that statement, clichéd as it may be, ain't so stupid after all. Most people who will be running a Dread game will be hardened GM veterans like yours truly and Dread is really, in many ways, a very normal role-playing game, so everybody can bring their tried and true style of running normal role-playing games to the table and it should work out fine. I like to be very transparent about what I am doing and where I'm going, as GM, but I get that a certain amount of "mystery" contributes to the suspense of a Dread game. So, in running Dread, I had a mind to be a little more "dun-dun-dun-duuuuun" than I usually am, but in the end I didn't do much of a show and the Jenga tower did all the work on the suspense front by itself. It was really a very exciting game even though, for (almost) every pull made, I laid out the consequences of success or refusing to pull very clearly before the pull was made.

Before we started to role-play, we played two ordinary games of Jenga in order to get a feel for it and I found that very useful. The players also strategized a bit and discussed where to pull in order to make the tower last longer. I had house ruled that the "sacrifice option" where a player can topple the tower intentionally to sacrifice her character but succeed at her action was not available, because in my previous experience this option would invariably be taken long before the tower was really close to collapsing. Incidentally there was another Dread game in the same convention where the GM did not allow any strategy discussions or practice game in advance, and did more "dun-dun-dun-duuuun" instead. In his game, 23 blocks were pulled before one player chose the sacrifice option (and to be fair, reportedly everybody loved it). In my game, 30 blocks were pulled and on the 31st the tower collapsed, which was also the last action of the game. And yes, I carefully steered the game into that very direction (as the players well realized).

Brief plot summary: Characters arrive at station and learn that they are supposed to be sleepers. They are shown to the prison colony, learn that they have a chip implanted in their neck that can cause them pain or demobilize them or maybe even worse, and they are forced to submit to medical examinations. Then they establish contact with rebels and the rebels help them get rid of the chips, hide them, make plans to get off the station and get back at The System with the help of The Resistance. They are attacked by killer-spider-cyborgs, supposedly sent by The System but it's an unknown technology. Their plan is set into motion and they manage to overpower the guards. I let them get by with relatively few pulls from the tower here because the tower is already quite shaky and I don't want them to go into the final scene with a fresh new tower, which would take all the suspense out of it. In the final scene, they manage to fool the crew of the supply ship, fly up there and take over the ship.

By that time all the important pulls have been made successfully but the hacker character wants to look into the station's network to see what she can find about the spider-cyborgs, her player stating that it would be all right and actually quite fitting to topple the tower at this point (this also being a prime example of functional Participationist play). But she makes the pull successfully and so I say she finds an encrypted file and needs another pull to decrypt it (that was the one pull where I was being vague about the consequences). She pulls once more and yay, this time the tower falls! So I describe how she opens the files and finds research information about the spiders, outlining their alien origin, and safety procedures for the guards and crew to protect themselves from the spiders. Then, zoom into her nervous system where suddenly things change. Zoom back out, her face going blank for a moment, then back to normal. She deleting the file, putting away the tablet computer and leaning back. The transit ship starting for Earth and then an alien ship coming into view in front of the orange orb of Jupiter, slowly picking up speed to escort them back. Great ending and very genre-appropriate. Spontaneous applause from the players.

It has been a long time since I ran a game in which I as GM played such a dominant role, and yes it is quite taxing but also rewarding, just like the cliché goes. I was a bit concerned at one point that the GM plot was strangling the players but they assured me it was fine. There was some space for interaction and a bit of player activity in the prison colony and I tried to incorporate what the characters did there into my pre-planned plot. For example, I gave them some rumors of the rebels and one player started to look for the rebels actively, so instead of the rebels approaching the PCs as I had planned it, I made her find the rebels, and made the rebels totally surprised and grateful at finding a pilot and a hacker and a killer, exactly the skills they needed to escape the station. So yes, the plot went exactly as planned but the characters' roles changed, they were suddenly on eye level with the rebel leader, instead of just pawns in her game. When the guards were overpowered, I gave the player of the "afraid of surgery" character a personal moment with the doc who had performed the examinations on her, and she shot him in the balls and left him bleeding on the floor. But most of the time, I was driving hard and they were just acting out their characters' reactions. (Cue question from random con-goer: "What else would they be doing?")

I actually had to force myself to run the players on such a short leash, after all these years of untraining it. It's probably still true that this kind of GM'ing will burn you out much faster than your average bass-playing. But it's a highly functional mode of play when executed well. And Dread is a brilliant piece of rules and advice to support exactly this mode of play. The game was five hours of pure intensity and I woke up this morning still thinking about it. And as a bonus, since my 19 pages of prepped material aren't specifically tailored to player-authored material, it means I can easily run the scenario again for different players, and I certainly will.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Frank!!

Yeah I know, Germans are totally 2006 and even Italians are getting old these days,

That's hilarious.

I also found the rulebook hard to take. I've certainly become more appreciative of Participationist play, but since I don't enjoy it much, being good at it in design terms isn't something I've been seeking out. Also, on an unrelated note, I thought Rafael Chandler's Dread (renamed Pandemonium) unjustly received short shrift as the "non-Jenga one." That's no criticism of this Dread specifically, but it definitely biased me against investigating it through play.

It's great that you're reading Philip K. Dick. I find fandom about his work absolutely intolerable, but for me, it deeply influences so much of what I create that I almost find it impossible to acknowledge specific bits. You've seen The Stress of Her Regard, right?

That's a great actual-play report and relevant analysis. Perhaps we'll see more applications of how a single compelling mechanical principle can replace all those damned "skill rolls" for Participationist play.

Best, Ron.

P.S. You are going to love both the D&D-religion and sandbox essays.

[Frank T]

Thanks Ron. I hadn't seen The Stress of Her Regard, I'll be sure to check it out. Haven't read VALIS yet, still busy with Dick's older work. He has been quite productive...

I'm mulling over what difference it might have made that all three players in the game were female. Except for bragging rights (I've been boasting about my "three angels" all weekend) I haven't made much of it yet. There was this one moment where I, playing the "speaker" of the prisoners who collaborated with the guards and thereby gained some privileges, mentioned to the characters that he was "just a man and sometimes lonely", an information which "some women find useful". Of course, this mainly seized on the characters being female. Same goes for the docs in protective suits asking the patient to undress. I'm a bit hesitant to draw any conclusions on the impact the players' gender had on this.

The relationship between the player characters was supportive and compassionate throughout. There were no tensions or conflicts of any sort, but the scenario wasn't built to trigger any conflicts between the characters. Neither were there any romantic interludes, not between the PCs and not with NPCs. I had included one male NPC who might have been suitable, but he got killed by the spider cyborgs because no player could be bothered to pull a block to save him.

I guess it would be quite interesting to play the scenario again with an all-male group and a mixed group, and compare the results.

- Frank

[Ron Edwards]

Hi,

I'm a bit hesitant to draw any conclusions on the impact the players' gender had on this.

I'm not. I wrote a whole book about this sort of thing.

Have you seen Ocean? It seems relevant to your play-experience. See also my analysis of the game here.

[Frank T]

I know you did! I'm not reluctant because I'm not sure there weren't any, but because I find it hard to express what they were. Anyway, it'll be fun to see how such a tight-knit scenario works out with different groups.

You fooled me with that last PDF for a moment because it doesn't say "by Ron" anywhere... sounds like it's riffing off of the same genre expectations as my scenario, except for the Anime stuff, which is not really on any of my Geek Buttons. Yet.

- Frank