Welcome back to the weekly Tabletop Games thread! This thread is where we can talk about all kinds of RPGs, card games, board games, etc. Whether you gather around a physical table in the real world, or use a virtual space to play with friends who may live far away from you, this is where you can discuss your favorites, ask for and/or receive recommendations, recap your recent adventures, or even find some people to play games with!
Discussion Prompt: To round out Spooky Month, I want to talk about the award-winning horror TTRPG Dread. First published in 2005, Dread is designed to simulate classic horror stories, with consistently rising tension and no expectation of survival for all of the player characters. It accomplishes this by using a unique system for action resolution. Rather than dice or playing cards, Dread uses a Jenga tower. Whenever someone in the game attempts something difficult, the player has to pull a block from the tower and place it on top, following the standard Jenga rules. Successfully doing so means your character succeeded at whatever it is they were doing. But if you fail, and the tower falls, it probably means your character is dead. Due to the nature of the Jenga tower, of course, this means that the game only gets more and more difficult and the suspense rises, until it finally breaks with a character death.
The official rulebook comes with a few sample adventures, but I would imagine this is a game that benefits greatly from a GM (or Host) who is very familiar with horror tropes. It seems to me that resetting the Jenga tower each time one of the characters fails might deflate the tension a little too much. Using the Jenga tower also precludes the use of a VTT for Dread (unless someone’s programmed a virtual version of Jenga that I don’t know about).
If you’ve played Dread, let us know what it was like!
If you would like to suggest a prompt or contribute a write-up or discussion topic of your own, let me know in the comments!