The Professor looks around at the abandoned generators. "I don't suppose any of these would have any usable gasoline still in them, would they?"
"Well, that remains to be seen." I nod encouragingly to the center of the table, where the increasingly lopsided tower looms. "Are you willing to be thorough in your hasty search?" The Professor's player looks at me warily, then carefully makes the pull. The Professor searches frantically in and among the rusting generators. He smells the faintest whiff of gas, and carefully cracks the tank of the southernmost unit...we all watch the pull. The tower wobbles, shifts...and holds. "I've got something!" the Professor exclaims. "It's not much, but it should be enough for that old jeep for a few more hours!" If you've never had the opportunity to play the Jenga-block-resolution-system Dread, then I'd really recommend it. It bills itself as a horror system, designed for one-shots where some (all?) the player characters really ought to die before the end. Action resolution is simple and ingenious...anytime the outcome of an action is in doubt, when in most systems a die would be rolled, in Dread a block is pulled from a Jenga tower set up in the middle of the table. If the tower falls, not only does the action fail, the character also dies. It's an effective way to build tension during a session, as the danger ratchets up considerably each time something risky is done. It also makes session easy to time, with the host's supply of bourbon the controlling variable beyond player skill. Not a lot of depth to the system beyond that, but it's a fun diversion and it makes me think about the oft-neglected tactile dimensions of TTRPGs. As I've drifted closer to OSR styles of running games the maps and miniatures of Pathfinder's hour-long battles no longer have to be fussed with. Theater of the mind, with just a world map and perhaps a player acting as the mapper in a dungeon, makes for games where enormously more can get done in a single session than the bloated (but very fun) set-piece battles of D&D 3 and its follow-ons. I found the trade-off in terms of crunch and tactics to actually be very mild, with vivid descriptions usually allowing players to set up clever maneuvers without having to fiddle with counting tiles or flanking angles. That said, I think there is something that's lost in the older mode, and that something is the tactile effect of moving minis into danger, the squeak of markers on the battlemat, and the heft and weight of a large "boss" mini hitting the table. More than anything in a strictly game-mechanical sense, what theater of the mind loses is the solid wooden feel of the actual theater, and I think that's a pity. There are a lot of very solid mechanics arguments to be made for TTRPGs eschewing miniatures, but I note that Gary Gygax's group used little soldier guys, and the most classic creative monsters in the original monster manuals came from half-melted cheap plastic toys being used as foes. I think that's something that should be preserved, at least as best it can be. They don't have to be put out on a battlemat, but maybe we should encourage players to have a miniature for their character(s), and certain enemies and friends met should probably have representative pieces too. Give them something solid to handle, and then when the character dies be sure to reach out and knock over the little guy too. The thump and clatter effects of Dread's tower can be brought to D&D games too. I use something similar to the Angry GM's tension pool when I'm building up for random encounters, but I think the single most important part of the mechanic is to use a very clattery ceramic bowl. Hurling a die into a bowl with a loud clang when the players do something reckless wakes up the entire table like nothing else I've ever seen. Fling handouts at them. The old school mechanic of the mapper is great, but I try to go further and let everyone doodle on the map, filling in details, scratching out labels. As best you can, try to make playing D&D something that engages the hands too. Just try not to think about how that makes the sessions more like a LARP...
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AuthorWeblog of Ben Gibson, the main writer and publisher of Coldlight Press. Archives
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