[smascrns]

Originally Posted by woodelf

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.

The posts to the thread explain how the Jenga tower works in Dread and it seem to really be a great idea, maybe the most innovative I read in a lot of time. It seems to work very well both from a genre emulating POV (be it for horror or for action genres) and from a gaming POV. Yes, it's a gymnic but for once it's a gymnic that brings something more to the set of gymnics we have around.

And it opens lots of possibilities. For instance, we can have mechanics that take advantage of the different colours of Jenga tiles and how these are arranged in the tower. (For instance, items in a character description may be marked in colour and when the character "activates" one of those items the player has to pick a Jenga tile of the same colour.)

Well, the free "quickstart" on our website might answer the question.

I'll check it.

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. (etc.)

So far so good. What you say is that there are three possibilities: Automatic success; automatic failure; possible success. This is a staple of most rpgs.
Probability of success is mapped into the number of Jenga tiles the player has to pick from the tower.
On the other hand, having a system where the mapping of probabilities from the character description is done in a case-by-case basis and not pre-defined is something I only found in Dred... and my own GlovE system. Needless to say, I like this a lot. (By the way, where Dred maps probabilities into Jenga tiles GlovE maps it into dice to be included in the dice-pool.)
Of course, GlovE is work in progress and I never turned it into a finished game while Dred is there.

I have another question, though: Does the GM pick tiles from the Jenga tower for his NPCs or only the players do this for their PCs?