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Originally Posted by smascrns
I'm less than convinced by the Jenga thing. It just seems to be another gymnic or, to use the reviewer's own words, "a new way to roll dice" with not much in terms of increased roleplaying experience. It seems, I said, because I didn't try it so I may be wrong.
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That is almost always the reaction we get at conventions...until the person actually plays. We've had more than a few highly-skeptical players who afterwards said they'd been wrong, and it worked perfectly, and was completely different from dice. The thing to keep in mind is that the difficulty of a task is dependent very strongly on where in the story you are, whereas in most RPG mechanics, difficulty is dependent primarily or solely on the nature of the task being attempted. With the Jenga, there is a constantly-rising tension to a climax: each task is more risky than the last, regardless of what the tasks are.
And, yes, we've had a very few players who, even after sticking around for an entire game, still didn't care for it. It's not going to be for everyone. But it does work, and it does behave differently than most RPG mechanics--even if not in a way that would be fundamentally impossible to do with dice.
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Originally Posted by smascrns
Yet I have a more fundamental question and here it comes:
Character creation ...
"Characters in Dread are not described using numbers. Unlike in the vast majority of roleplaying games, characters in Dread are described using only words, much as an author describes a character in written fiction or a film buff describes a character from his favorite movie to a friend"
Sheers to that. I worked on similar lines with my GlovE project here at RPGnet some years ago.
... and action resolution ...
"Whenever a character wants to do something that isn’t clearly impossible or easily accomplished, the host (or GM, if you will) will likely require a pull. A ‘pull’ is the act of, well... pulling a block from the tower and then placing it on the tower’s uppermost level. If a pull succeeds (i.e., the player whose character is taking action manages to remove a block without toppling the tower), then the action being attempted succeeds. Conversely, if a pull fails (i.e., the player whose character is taking action topples the tower), so does the action being attempted."
Now the question: What is the relationship between the two things? How does the character's description (created in purely qualitative terms) work into the action resolution mechanics? The review provides no clues on how this happens if it happens at all.
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Well, the free "quickstart" on our website might answer the question. But let me try and explain. Whenever the character wants to attempt something, the first thing to determine is whether or not it is within the character's capabilities. Only if it exceeds her capabilities, or is performed under extenuating circumstances, is a pull required. So, a trophy-winning trap shooter doesn't need to pull to hit a stationary or even moving target, provided it's not too far away, too small, or too fast, and the character is aware of it. But if that same trap shooter needs to hold her ground and get a steady shot at the rhino that's charging her, it might require a pull (i say 'might' because other aspects of the character would likely come into play). And if i needed to shoot something small and/or moving, it would require a pull (because it's been two decades since i've so much as held a gun, i've only ever shot at bullseye targets on a range, and i was never particularly good). An average person would be unable to pick a quality deadbolt lock with a hairpin. A character with a history of picking locks might be able to with a pull. A professional catburglar wouldn't even require a pull, but could automatically succeed. But even the catburglar would need to make a pull, if she needed to get the lock picked in 5 seconds before a guard arrived. And the mediocre lockpick would need two pulls in that circumstance: one to do it at all, and a second one to do it quickly enough.
Does that answer the question?
I'll also get an excerpt of the book online later today. The entireties of chapter 2 (the rules, essentially) and chapter 7 (one of the sub-genre chapters), so you can get a better idea of the writing style, the rules themselves, and the layout.