Dread: Great Game or Greatest Game

I've talked about gaming in general, today I want to get specific.  Dread is an "indie" RPG.  The book is short and the gameplay is simple, but it has innovative mechanics that make it one of the best one-shot games I've ever played.

Rather than dice or other randomizers, the game uses a Jenga tower (or any stacking block game, but most people use Jenga).  The tower is stacked in the middle of the table and represents the only real game mechanics.

The game is intended for horror and survival type games.  The rules are simple.  When your character wants to do something risky or uncertain, the GM will have you pull one or more blocks.  If you pull and set the blocks back on top, you succeed.  If you refuse to pull or change your mind, you fail.  If you knock the tower over, game over for you.  Your character will be stabbed in the face as the killer jumps out of nowhere, or collapse from a fatal heart attack from the fright, or go running off screaming into the night.  The details are up to the GM to come up with, but the end result is the same.  You're out of the game.  The tower is rebuilt (with some blocks removed), and the game continues.

This is interesting mechanically because it is essentially resource management.  There are a number of blocks that can be safely pulled, and after that doing a pull becomes more and more risky.  Further, this is a shared resource.  Everyone pulls from the same tower.  Early in the game, pulls are easy so most players are willing to take risks.  As the game goes on, the pulls become more intense as everyone waits to see if someone will finally bite the dust.  Essentially you are rewarded for acting early in the game, and punished for acting later.  Our first game of Dread ended with the killer knocked down and the tower ready to fall.  They wanted to tie him up and walk back to town, and I told them I needed a pull to get close enough to do it.  One by one each player poked and prodded at the tower, deciding that they couldn't make a pull.  In game, this translated to the group of college students standing around the killer, none of them able to get up the nerve to tie him up.  Ultimately, they chose to murder him in cold blood rather than get close enough to do what they all agreed was 'the right thing.'

The tower gets all the attention, but there's a second part to the game I feel is almost as important.  The Questionnaire.  Character generation in Dread is pretty simple.  The GM will have prepared some archetypes with a list of questions.  In a game where a group of college kids is spending the weekend at a remote cabin, you might be able to choose from The Fratboy, The Computer Nerd, The Cheerleader, and so on.  Each will have 13 questions to be answered essay style.  The questions can be straightforward but the ones that work best are leading, such as "Why did you tell (other character) that you couldn't study last week, even though you had nothing going on?", "Are you going to tell (other character), your boyfriend, that you cheated on him?", or "Even though everyone heard you tell (NPC that is now dead) that you wanted to kill them, why should they believe that you're innocent?"

The Questionnaire serves a couple of purposes.  First, it allows the GM to set up a situation for story.  He can put in questions that will drive conflict between characters, or ones that will get the character invested in the scenario.  He can even mine them for ideas.  I ran a Christmas game about a dysfunctional family's Christmas dinner, and while I liked the concept I didn't have an idea for an antagonist.  So I asked everyone "Who do you think is trying to kill you?" and took the best one.

The other purpose is that it quickly get the player invested in the character.  The Questionnaire helps bring a character to life, even if its one that you're only going to be playing for a few hours.  The times I've played it certainly felt like a character I've had for a lot longer, and can often set up relationships between characters.

If you want to try Dread you can buy it here.  You might be thinking that if the rules are so simple you don't need a book.  Truthfully, its not a game you refer to the book a lot.  But I recommend it to everyone.  It has three good premade episodes in it, as well as great advice for running a horror game of any kind.

Dread is a great game in general, and for running one-shot or con games, it is the Greatest Game.

Next post, I'll be talking about what Dread has to do with 4th Edition D&D.  :)

Law & Order: RPG

 In the Roleplaying Game System, the game is played by two separate, yet equally important groups.  The GMs who set the stage, and the Players who decide the course of action.  These are their stories.

What does Law & Order have to do with gaming?  Pacing.  Pacing refers to the speed of plot, how fast actions unfold or take to resolve.  A fast paced game goes from scene to scene, while a slow paced game builds its action to an exciting climax.

The key to any good story is conflict.  One character wants something very badly, and another stands in their way.  Combat, even in the most hack and slash game, is a perfect example.  Your heroes are exploring a mysterious cave, and a band of foul orcs appears.  The orcs want the PCs to die.  The PCs want to not die.  This is a very basic conflict (and runs afoul of deciding a course of action for the PCs), but  it works.  Other conflicts are not so clear cut, but they drive story in the same way.  Maybe this is the orcs' traditional territory, and the PCs are invaders.  Maybe the orcs work for some other agent.  This opens up more possibilities, but the essence is the same.  These orcs present a problem, and one that we need to address.

And more than one conflict can go on at a time.  Maybe the Bard knows this tribe's history, and if an accord can be reached he's convinced they'll honor it.  But the Ranger's brother was killed by orcs and he's out for revenge.  Now we have a conflict between characters.  Or perhaps there's a couple of factions back at the human castle.  The Duke wants them killed off or driven out, but the Castellan says that if peace could be made his Lord would listen and they could be a powerful ally.  Maybe the orcs aren't raiding out of maliciousness, but a band of ogres has displaced them.  Maybe the PCs should go after the ogres.  But will the orcs return to their old territory?  You can get a lot of story by changing the focus from "can I kill the bad guys" to "What happens if I kill these guys" or "What if I don't kill these guys".

So what does all this have to do with Law & Order?  Good pacing allows you to focus on these conflicts.  In the TV show, they have the Doink Doink.  There's a crime scene, a prostitute was stabbed in an alley, a patrolman finding the body.  Doink Doink.  Benson and Stabler have arrived on the scene, questioning the other prostitutes.  One of them said there was a customer that was giving her a hard time last night, and they took down his license plate number.  Doink Doink.  The detectives are knocking on the guy's door, wanting to ask him some questions.

It doesn't show you Benson and Stabler getting the call, getting to their car, and driving across town.  The Doink Doink takes care of all that.  It cuts to the next interesting scene where some conflict plays out.  Too often games can get bogged down in minutia.  If what is going on doesn't introduce, explore, or resolve a conflict, you are wasting time.  Cut to the chase, get on with it.

That being said, that doesn't mean the pace should always be breakneck.  It might, if you're running a pulp adventure or action movie style game.  Other games benefit from a slower pace, but that doesn't mean the Doink Doink won't help.  In a horror game for instance, building up tension is very important.  It leads to other tools.  Investigation benefits greatly, after all the tool came from a criminal show!  Slowly give them pieces of the puzzle, and if they want to look into something else, cut right on over.

This style of game benefits greatly from running on the fly.  Like my friend muutus once said, you can have a great game even if the characters decide they aren't interested in the current goings-on and all want to go to a bar.  Fine by me.  Just introduce a conflict at the bar.  Maybe they run into one of the big bad's henchmen.  Or there's some other conflict you can play on.  If a character is shy and bumbling, having a girl hit on him can be great fun.  If a character is a tough guy, have some drunk get in his face.  See if he'll throw down in a bar, risking injury and arrest.  If they want to go to the bar, that's great - throw some conflict at them and have fun!

...And I Punch Him In The Face!

 A reader comment to yesterday's blog brought part of the problem of running a story-oriented game to light.

"I agree that the story is the thing...but it seems like no matter how I craft a story the reaction from the "story craving PCs" is invariably, "I punch this guy in the face while he's monologuing!!""

I'm sure we've all been there.  You want to tell an epic story, the kind your players will pump their fists and cheer when it's all done, but they don't seem to care.  Their eyes glaze over when the sage talks about the ancient history of his people, they can't remember the name of the guy they're supposed to get the thing from, and when the villain is giving his speech during the big climax, one of them says 'I punch him in the face while he's talking!'

What's wrong with these players?  Even in the given example, they say they want story but they aren't reacting well.  The problem is that they don't want your story, they want their story.  Your job as GM is not to tell a story, but to set up an environment where they can create a story.

So why punch him in the head?  Well, the player might be a jerk but I'll assume that you're playing with friends and your friends aren't jerks.  I would suspect the cause would be that the player feels he is going to have to fight the Big Bad Evil Guy.  Therefore, what the guy says is unimportant, and he might even take him unawares.  The guy is Evil with a capital E, so he's going to need killing one way or another.  This common setup in RPGs presumes an outcome from a scene, which is where the problem starts.

The way I run games, I don't like to have too many assumptions about what is going to happen.  I provide the PCs with a situation, and leave it to them to resolve.  There are certainly adversaries, but rarely are they Capital E Evil.  They have an agenda that conflicts with the PCs or that the PCs finds objectionable.  They might face them down in mortal combat.  They might trick or manipulate him into giving up his agenda, or promise him something in exchange.  Or do any number of things.

The trick to running a game like this is to be willing to trust yourself.  You have to let go of writing pages of notes and plans and contingency plans.  If you find yourself writing 'if the PCs do this, that, but if they do that, this other thing' stop.  You are second guessing your players.  Just set up the situation, the characters involved, and play it out by the seat of your pants.  They will likely come up with something you would never have thought of anyway, so don't worry about it.

I will note that this is easier in some systems than in others.  For this to work, you need to have a system that is easy to run on the fly.  If your system of choice doesn't have good mook rules, make some up.  You'll need them.  And if you're playing something complicated, know it well enough to fake your way through a stat block.  I did this many times in 3e D&D.  I knew the system well enough to eyeball a BAB, damage bonus, and hit points.  Anything else I'd make up on the spot.  Feats, ability scores, spells, you name it.  Your players will never notice, I promise.

There's a lot more to this, naturally.  One of the reasons I started this blog was to analyze what it is I do in gaming and try to explain it all.  Hope some of you are interested to read it.  :)

The Play's The Thing

"Alas, poor Yorick, his GM started playing WoW."

I love RPGs.  I love the clatter of dice, the great friends I've made from this hobby, and the great adventures we've shared over the years.  Back in the old days (high school in the late 80s) we would game all day every day.  Sometimes we had epic wars and world-shattering adventures that we still recount when the old group gets together.  Sometimes we just goofed around.  And while I look back and want to say it was all fun, it really wasn't.  The fun was great, but there was a lot of 'dead air', because we weren't paying any attention to the story, or understanding how to create it.

The thing about 'story' and 'roleplaying' in RPGs is that it means different things to different people.  To some, story is what happens when you aren't fighting, and is the thing that leads you to the next fight.  To others, the story is the important part, and combat is only interesting when it serves the story.  To me, story is the heart of an RPG.  It is the element that makes these games more than the sum of their parts.  Its not just who rolled what on a die, or moved a miniature where, but that all this went into a shared imaginative space, a place we all saw and remember.

Think back to your fondest gaming moments.  Do you remember it as you and your gaming buddies, sitting around the table, rolling dice and cracking jokes?  Well, I remember some of it like that, but I also remember my thief, seeing his best friend captive with a dagger at his throat, and landing an arrow straight into the assassin's head.  That has stuck in my mind more than any action blockbuster, and was met with cheers all around.  (I do remember a bit from the table as well, because I rolled a nat 20 on that sucker).

As I got older, the group moved apart and I had to find new people to game with.  It was difficult and frustrating, until I adapted my gaming style from that of a kid to that of an adult.  I'll go into more detail on later blogs, but the core idea is that things which make for a good story make for a fun game.  Not everything, there are tons of specific examples that illustrate that.  But in the general, the tools to make a good story will make for a great game.

Because the play's the thing.  When I was 15, I could game the summer away.  I really didn't have anything better to do, so it was acceptable to play for 12 hours every weekend, and 4-6 on weekdays.  It was a small town, nothing much to do besides game and tip over cows.  We could wait for the moments of awesome to come.

I can't any more.  If this game TONIGHT isn't awesome, we probably won't have another one.  And it needs to happen in 3-4 hours.  If it doesn't there probably won't be a game for very long.  Why is this?  Do the players just not care?  Aren't they devoted?  Of course not, they love this hobby as much as I do.  But Bill doesn't get off until 7, and Jane and Frank both have to work early in the morning, and Sue and Steve are popping for a babysitter to come and play in my elfgame.  We're adults with busy lives, and hobbies are costly in terms of time.  Free time, especially regularly scheduled free time, is a valuable commodity, and if they aren't getting their money's worth they'll have to shop elsewhere.

So make your game awesome.