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Originally Posted by woodelf
That is almost always the reaction we get at conventions...
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I'll be honest - I went into Dread with that attitude. I wholeheartedly didn't expect to be blown off my feet by the tower mechanic (if you've followed some fo my old posts on RPGNet, you already know that I hate gimmicky mechanics). After a friend and I fooled around with the tower, however, we found that it did a good job of emulating common conventions of story progression in horror fiction (and film). If anybody is wondering,
this is what separates the tower mechanic from a simple marketing gimmick (i.e., "a new way of rolling dice"). While it's easy to walk away with that impression after skimming the website, nothing could be further from the truth.
A gimmick doesn't accomplish anything new - rather, it's merely a different way of doing the same old thing. In Dread, the tower mechanic specifically emulates common plot progression in horror stories by design - something I have
never seen a resolution mechanic do before. The tower mechanic isn't merely a different way of doing the same old thing, it's an entirely new way of doing something entirely different. The tower mechanic is Horror 101 wrapped up in a rule.
When the tower starts to wobble during actual play, it generates a
lot of tension. As the story progresses, that tension organically builds as more pulls are made from the tower, thus causing it to grow less stable. Eventually, a climax point is reached, the tower tumbles, and a character is removed in dramatically appropriate fashion. After this, the tension subsides and begins working its way toward another climax. This is basic, forumlaic, horror story stucture (from
Friday the 13th to
Dog Soldiers) and here, in Dread, it's actually built into the game.
Having a mechanic tied directly to story progression in this manner has a
huge impact on actual play, tapping into a player's discomfort zone and exploiting that innate fear of in-character failure that many roleplayers have. Dice can generate tension, sure, but that tension is never organically stepped up as play progresses and it certainly isn't tied directly to story structure. The Dread tower mechanic manages to facilitate both of these things. Every pull successfully made cranks up the tension a few more notches as the number of successful pulls left in the tower dwindles, and certain doom creeps closer to the PCs.
Dread creates tension so thick that you can cut it with a big, bloody, kitchen knife.
[Note: All of that said, as I mentioned in the review, if you try to approach Dread like a traditional roleplaying game with the goals of character survival and success (as many people in this thread seem to be doing), you're going to be disappointed.
Period. That's simply not what Dread is about.]