When a game has a lot of rules, very detailed character creation, and a generous helping of math, it is usually referred to as being “crunchy”. If that is true, then the horror RPG Dread is an adventure trope quicksand pit disguised as a bowl of pudding. When I arrived at RPG-A-THON on Saturday afternoon, I stopped at the Extra Life table. I had just missed their morning block of play-anything drop-in sessions, but I was intrigued by what they were setting up. The table had “character sheets” that had a single word written on them (Doctor, Guard, Chemist, Geologist, etc), pencils and note paper, and a Jenga tower. I instantly knew that I needed to try this.
When you first start out with an RPG, there are usually lots of decisions to make. You have to choose your stats, choose your skills, decide which stats need to be higher or lower to optimize your skills and learn the game mechanics for skill checks and combat rolls. If you are lucky, you might be given a pre-made character, where most of those choices have already been made, but you will still need to understand the character’s skills, abilities, and bonuses. Dread has none of those. It doesn’t even have DICE. Dread is pure storytelling, with a twist.
After choosing my character, The Geologist, I turned over the page, finding a short biography and a list of 12 open-ended questions. The biography explained my basic role in the group, a few personality traits, and a couple of plot hooks. The questions were there to help me decide exactly who my character would be. Instead of choosing my stats and picking from a list of skills, whatever I wrote down was who I was. Some of the questions on my list included “What was your first childhood experience with the Supernatural?”, “Why don’t you trust the Guard?”, “Why are you claustrophobic?” and “What paranormal ability do you have, and what is the negative consequence of using it?” I spun a tale of a woman disguised as a man who, as a child, had had a cryptid encounter that everyone assumed was an Imaginary Friend. She later was ridiculed for researching whether animals can be ghosts, and she has the natural ability to Speak with Animals. Oh, and she is desperately trying to hide the fact that she knows nothing about Geology.
“What paranormal ability do you have, and what is the negative consequence of using it?”
Our story was an Antarctic rescue mission to find a missing research team. We had food, equipment, cold weather gear, two planes to get us to the base camp, and nothing else. Everything that would happen would be determined by how well we described our actions and how good our dexterity was. Not the characters’ dexterity. Ours. Instead of having Skill Check Rolls, we had Skill Pulls. If someone wanted to succeed at a particularly difficult action, the Game Master (called the Host) would ask them to “do a Pull”. This meant pulling one tile out of the tower and putting it on top. If you succeed, then the action succeeds. If you choose not to pull, then you fail. If you do pull a tile and the tower falls, then not only do you fail, but Something Terrible happens. This being a horror game, Something Terrible usually means your character ends up dead, insane, catatonic, or something worse. If an action is very important, or very unlikely, then the Host may require more than one Pull, or add a time limit. “You have one minute to move two tiles”. Each time the tower falls, it gets rebuilt, but with some of the tiles already removed. That means the further you get in the story, the fewer characters you have, and the harder it is to succeed. The game continues until the story reaches its conclusion, or everyone dies (or is otherwise removed from the game).
I really enjoyed the “skill not chance” game mechanic, especially the fact that it is such a physical skill. It’s not a matter of being lucky enough to get a good die roll. It isn’t even a case of being clever enough to justify to the Host why your character should succeed. No, you literally put your fate into your own hands. In my very first Pull, my tile did not want to move, and I ended up twisting the entire tower like a corkscrew. I succeeded, but after that, every other player had to deal with the mess that I had made. I also loved how open-ended the storytelling could be, being completely unchained from skill checks and attribute checks. This means that, when the group was being attacked by monstrous wolves where no wolf has any reason to be, I could say “my character tries to talk to it!”. This also means that, when another player wrote in his biography “The Guard never misses with a gun”, the Host decided “okay, you don’t need to Pull to decide if you shoot the monster. But I do need a Pull to decide if you shoot it before it lands on top of you and rips you to pieces”. Finally, I’m curious as to how much character creation changes what the GM originally planned. Would the rescue team have been facing Antarctic werewolves if I hadn’t been there?
