Celebrim
Legend
Ever since Dread came out I was excited by it and excited by the reports I was hearing about it. I even bought the rules shortly after the game came out and did my best to run a game of it that didn't really go over well.
So I have long wanted to be a player in a Dread game with an experienced GM that knew the game well in order to get the real experience so I could then run Dread and transmit that experience to others.
And after seemingly a decade of trying I finally succeeded in that.
And it was pretty much nothing what I expected. It was a lot of fun, don't get me wrong, but ultimately it turns out the experience of Dread is so basic and fundamental that it is too obvious for anyone to state. And that experience can be summed up in a single line:
Playing Jenga is fun.
And that's pretty much all there is to the game. The claims of immersive experience didn't stand up. The claims that it encouraged role-playing didn't really stand up. The claims of deep emotional connection didn't stand up except for the reasons that playing Jenga is in and of itself an emotional experience. What it turns out that Dread really is at heart is a vehicle for getting people to play Jenga in a manner that neatly mixes the competitive versus cooperative aspects of Jenga playing that are what makes Jenga fun. It's the Peanut Butter and Chocolate of RPG systems - two great tasting games that go well together. You match a rules light RPG that relies heavily on GM skill with Jenga, and tada.
It's not even that the Jenga dictates the pacing of the RPG, it's also that the RPG dictates the pacing of Jenga. If you are just playing Jenga there is a tendency to view any individual game of Jenga as not having any particular meaning. You often see prolonged sessions of Jenga with players getting careless especially in the early turns when things don't seem to matter. The RPG slows the pace down and forces each game of Jenga, and each pull to be meaningful.
So it's a lot of fun but not the revolutionary experience I had hoped for and it still does not solve the fundamental problem I have with horror RPGs - they almost never actually involve any fear or horror. Disgust, sure. Anxiety, maybe. But not fear or horror. You have a really hard time getting the jump scares of a good horror movie or the lingering horror of a good disturbing short fiction, and certainly not the existential horror that HPL was channeling when he wrote his famous short stories or the disturbing motifs of the best episodes of the Twilight Zone or the Outer Limits or their descendants.
So I have long wanted to be a player in a Dread game with an experienced GM that knew the game well in order to get the real experience so I could then run Dread and transmit that experience to others.
And after seemingly a decade of trying I finally succeeded in that.
And it was pretty much nothing what I expected. It was a lot of fun, don't get me wrong, but ultimately it turns out the experience of Dread is so basic and fundamental that it is too obvious for anyone to state. And that experience can be summed up in a single line:
Playing Jenga is fun.
And that's pretty much all there is to the game. The claims of immersive experience didn't stand up. The claims that it encouraged role-playing didn't really stand up. The claims of deep emotional connection didn't stand up except for the reasons that playing Jenga is in and of itself an emotional experience. What it turns out that Dread really is at heart is a vehicle for getting people to play Jenga in a manner that neatly mixes the competitive versus cooperative aspects of Jenga playing that are what makes Jenga fun. It's the Peanut Butter and Chocolate of RPG systems - two great tasting games that go well together. You match a rules light RPG that relies heavily on GM skill with Jenga, and tada.
It's not even that the Jenga dictates the pacing of the RPG, it's also that the RPG dictates the pacing of Jenga. If you are just playing Jenga there is a tendency to view any individual game of Jenga as not having any particular meaning. You often see prolonged sessions of Jenga with players getting careless especially in the early turns when things don't seem to matter. The RPG slows the pace down and forces each game of Jenga, and each pull to be meaningful.
So it's a lot of fun but not the revolutionary experience I had hoped for and it still does not solve the fundamental problem I have with horror RPGs - they almost never actually involve any fear or horror. Disgust, sure. Anxiety, maybe. But not fear or horror. You have a really hard time getting the jump scares of a good horror movie or the lingering horror of a good disturbing short fiction, and certainly not the existential horror that HPL was channeling when he wrote his famous short stories or the disturbing motifs of the best episodes of the Twilight Zone or the Outer Limits or their descendants.
