Cooperation between the players’ characters in Dread usually takes the form of the players divvying up the pulls, sharing the responsibility and the risk. And this works largely because it lets each individual player experience a little ease in their burden without tampering with the pacing of the game.

But recently, in Piratecat’s ever-growing ENworld thread on Dread, there was a request for a mechanic that helped to focus the game on trust between the characters, and this inspired the following optional rules.

Trust

When hosting a game that focuses on trust, you will want to create situations in which the players’ characters need to rely on each other. A situation where at least two pulls will be needed to complete the task at hand safely, and at least one of the pulls can be shared with another player’s character. A situation that would require trust for the two characters to work together. Perhaps one character is keeping watch while another breaks into a building (one pull for breaking in and one pull for doing without being seen). Or one character is applying pressure a bleeding leg wound of a victim of a car accident while the other tries to treat the slightly more pressing sucking chest wound (one pull for each wound).

The players can then decide that they trust each other. If this happens, then one of the pulls does not have to occur. This is the bonus you get for trusting each other. The host should decide which one of the players will have to make the remaining pulls (or the host may be a little mischievous and leave it up to the players to decide). In many cases this will be obvious. When in doubt you can just go with the player whose character’s actions provoked the need for pulling in the first place.

However, if the tower should fall while the remaining pulls are being made, both the characters share the gruesome fate. This is the price for trusting each other. By putting your trust in someone or allowing someone to trust you, you agree to share this risk.

Betrayal

The Betrayal system is a twist in the Trust system described above, giving one of the players has the option to betray the other for a little bonus down the road. Once the players have established their characters’ trust in one another and the remaining pulls have started, the player not pulling may declare after a pull is made but before the block is placed on top of the tower that they are breaking the bonds of trust.

In the fiction of the game this does not have to be something big. Simply an indication that they aren’t doing what they were trusted to do to the best of their abilities. A teenager trusted to keep watch might spend his whole time on his cellphone chatting up his girlfriend, or someone trusted to keep pressure on a wound while the medic administers to more pressing injuries might become momentarily overwhelmed by the gore and freeze up. That sort of thing.

If a player decides to break this bond of trust, then the block that was going to go on top of the tower is handed to that player. It may be used later on as a free pull–simply place it on top of the tower instead of pulling another block. That’s the reward for being a jackass.

And the player who was betrayed must now also make the pull that their trust had originally eliminated. Whatever the betrayer was trusted to do has now failed–just as it would have failed if the player simply elected not to pull. That’s the penalty for trusting a jackass. (Thanks to Asmor over at ENworld for making this suggestion.)

If the tower falls after this point, the characters no longer share a fate.

When to Use Them

If your game doesn’t focus on issues of trust or betrayal, you probably shouldn’t use these systems. They are specifically designed to change the feel of the game and focus more closely on how the characters interact with one another. They can lead to a lot of conflict between the players’ characters, which can be fun for some types of stories (especially things like survival horror), but disruptive for other sorts of stories.

Not all games that use the Trust rules need to use the Betrayal rules either. Trust by itself lends more hope to the game, and can be used on its own in games where the players’ characters need to work together to overcome incredible odds. The Betrayal rules definitely put a darker, more self-serving twist on things.

Miscellaneous Thoughts

When someone deliberately knocks the tower over while someone else is trusting them, be sure to honor the greater sacrifice with greater results.

While it seems possible to create more than one bond of trust for any given situation, simulating a well coordinated team working towards a common goal, I’d highly recommend against it. One slip-up could end the scenario entirely by wiping out everyone involved in the web of trust.

If using the Trust mechanic without the Betrayal, you could add even more hope to the game by allowing one character to trust another without lending anything more than an encouraging word or a reassuring peck on the cheek. “I’m so confident you can land this plane, even with a burnt-out engine, that I’m not even going to bother to bail out like all the others.”

At the moment, the Betrayal mechanic can be gamed in a serious way. Players who have assessed the situation and decided that they’re not going to make all of their pulls, can call for another player to trust and then betray them. The end result in the fiction is very similar to pulling for some things and electing not to pull for others. But mechanically, a player has earned a free pull for later. The only thing that might prevent this from happening all the time is that in the fiction the character getting the free pull ends up looking a bit like a jackass. There might be a need for a stronger mechanic deterrent to such tactics.

Be sure to let your players know upfront if you’re going to be using either one of these sets of rules.

Horror doesn’t always have to be in grayscale. If you’ve never seen Suspiria, then you owe yourself a rental, or a NetFlix, or what have you. The sharp, otherworldly aspect of the brilliant colors used throughout that film are just as unsettling as the murky shadows we typically attribute to the genre. Suspiria is what I thought of when I played Villa Paletti for the first time. Since today seems to be my day for Dread experimentation, I’ll daydream a bit about what grotesque fairy tale I could host with this Jenga substitute.

This message brought you by the venerable Isa Chandra Moskowitz who was kind enough to recommend Suspiria to me, and the ineffable Emukt, who introduced me to Villa Paletti.

“What stops me from just refusing to pull?”

It’s a question I often get when introducing someone to the rules of Dread. And it is a legitimate one. Usually, I’m moments away from hosting a game for them, so I can answer with an enigmatic, “You won’t.”

But recent discussions on the Dread message board and through e-mail have me reconsidering this terse answer.

In the book I set the tower up as a physical representation of one particular point of tension: the promise of success versus the threat of elimination. As presented, the sole reason for pulling from the tower is to have a competent character. Not pulling from the tower of course means failure.

However, failure is most likely preferable to elimination. And given this choice alone, there are players who would be tempted just ride the game out without once touching the tower. Fortunately there are other tensions hidden within the tower.

Hand in hand with the question of success is the tension between affecting the story and being removed from it permanently. Pulling from the tower allows characters to have an impact on what is going on. Most folks aren’t in the game to be passive observers tossed around like a rag doll from one horror to another. So players will naturally want to step up to the tower from time to time.

Along the same lines, anyone who is pulling automatically takes center stage. During the breathless moments that the block is being slid from the tower, everyone at the table is concentrating entirely on character whose life is at stake. This time in the limelight will also draw players to the tower when it might otherwise be too risky for their characters.

Given all this, there may still be a point in the story when most, or even all, of your players will be reluctant to pull. Congratulations, they’re scared. This is a wonderful time to be a host, because it means you can do all manner of vile things.

Here’s the key: if the players aren’t moving the story along, then the host should. Failure shouldn’t just mean the opposite of success in Dread. It should cause the characters to move within the plot. Force a retreat. Slay a loved one. Capture a player’s character! Do whatever it takes to crank the story up. If the players are giving you free reign, revel in it.

Take a moment and think about whatever evil the players’ characters are up against and just what could happen at this moment that would best exemplify this evil and keep story moving. The serial killer drags a character off to his lair. The alien horde forces the characters out of the safety of their own dropship. The symptoms of the disease appear on a character inside the quarantined area. The devil offers a deal so tempting, the players’ will have to pull to refuse.

If you can, make it personal and make it change as much as possible. But don’t eliminate all hope. You are not trying to force the players to pull, just move the story along until they gather the courage to pull again.

Let’s take a moment and examine Jenga.

The Tower serves two major purposes in the game that are only tangentially related to determining who succeeds, who fails, and who is removed from the game.

The first is as a physical representation of the tension and pacing in the game. The Tower sits in the middle of table (or to a reachable side) and looms over the players. It is an ever-present reminder of the impending doom. Both it’s height and instability are clearly visible at all times. And this is even more evident through the sense of touch. The tactile nature of the tower engages the player on a more visceral level.

The second is to use this physical embodiment of tension and work with the player’s fear. For this to happen, the player needs to be invested in their character (something the questionnaire should help in). But if they are invested, each time they reach for that Tower and it twists or shakes, they will feel it like a shock.

Occasionally I’ll be asked about the manual dexterity involved in the game. Do I ever get someone so good at Jenga, it wasn’t fun? Or do people complain because they haven’t the coordination to keep up?

It has been my experience that Dread and skill in Jenga have very little to do with each other. The aforementioned qualities of the tower overwhelm most confidence people have in their skills. It effectively levels the playing field.

Now, of course, this isn’t universally true. Several people have conditions that may make playing Jenga difficult. When this occurred during the games we hosted at conventions, we would offered to let one of the other players act as a surrogate block puller. The tension was still there, just without the tactile icing on the cake. But if it was at all possible for them to pull for themselves, we encouraged them to do so, and no one complained.
When a player isn’t invested in their character, when they are playing Dread just to show off their Jenga skills, that’s when there is a problem. How you approach this is going to be different for everyone. For some, they just need to reminded that they aren’t playing Jenga, and their character’s inflated bravado is breaking the mood. For others, this might only make matters worse.

Fortunately, in all the games I’ve hosted, I’ve only encountered this in one player. It was a convention game, so I did not get a chance to correct the problem. I suspect it is something of a rarity, and in the end, enough bravado will get you a fallen tower.