How do I run a game of Dread over the Internet?

Question

The challenge is finding a suitable substitute for The Tower. For those that don't know: Dread is a horror game that uses a Jenga tower instead of dice. The tower is shared among the players. Successful pull is success. Toppling the tower is (usually) death of the character.

I'm looking for a Jenga-like game and some mechanism for the players to take turns and for everyone to see the game's progress in real time. The game should be an open ended one of dexterity (with keyboard or mouse) that becomes progressively harder over about 20 to 40 short levels till failure is almost certain but not guaranteed.

Answer 1

If you and your players all happen to have Android phones you could try using the Multiplayer Online Jenga App for Android.

There is an iPhone version for those with iPhones. (I don't know whether the two version play well together if you have a mix of phones in your group.)

So, only suitable if you have the hardware handy, but possibly an option.

Answer 2

The option we opted for was to have every player buy or borrow their own Jenga tower. So every character has their own individual tower. This meant more pulls but also parallel pulls, which sped up the game a bit (i.e. if each character has to make a pull, they can do it at the same time).

Every tower started with 9 blocks left over by the side. This reduced the total number of possible pulls. Also for heroic sacrifices (and only for heroic sacrifices, not if the tower was knocked over accidentally) the players got to place 3 of the left over blocks into their towers to increase stability.

It made for a longer game but it worked quite well.

Answer 3

One idea: Reverse Hangman. The players have to give a letter, and this adds to a word in front of them. When the word/phrase is completed? You're dead!

Oh, they'll try to cheat it. They'll guess their "q"s and "z"s early on. But then they run out of the rare letters, and things get interesting. They start to work out what the phrase is gonna be, and they keep trying to dodge around it, but eventually they have no choice. This does risk losing some of the suspense, though—by the time they reach the last letter, they'll know they're about to die before even guessing. You can mitigate this by not showing them where the letters are—"Yes, there is an x," you say, making a note on the hidden spaces. "Only two spaces left!"

Maximizers: If you can't think of quite enough many-lettered words, a few ways to extend it:

Each guess = one space filled. So, if you guess "a" for the phrase, "Apples Are Awesome", you would only fill in one of those three "a" spaces. The host has to let you know when you've gotten all the "a"s, of course.

Fractured Phrases: You actually go through a whole sentence, but you split up the rounds (so you can't guess for the end of the sentence until you've reached that point). Once you've guessed the first section, you move on to the next. For instance, you might guess for the phrase, "Dead men tell | no tales."

Answer 4

Another option is Tabletop Simulator, which is a piece of software that allow you to play many board games online. The majority of the contents are user made and shared trough Steam Workshop (like FlickIt, a Jenga clone) or some other site (e.g., NexusMods).

If you are planning on doing a single adventure the $20 per-player price tag may be too high. But if you want to have a long lasting campaign, Tabletop Simulator is gonna pay for itself very quickly.

With it, and a bit of preparation, you can have — shared to any other player — anything you would have on a real table: character sheets, maps, miniatures, pictures, entire PDFs, a handy tablet for quick internet research and many other things.* Everything can be stored as-is for the next session.

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* Note that I'm not familiar with Dread — those are examples of things which may come handy in many other RPGs, but may still relevant with Dread.

Answer 5

Use a d20 (or a d30). Record the result of every roll. Each time a player would pull a piece from the Jenga tower, instead, they must roll the die. An action succeeds if the player rolls a number which has not already been rolled.

• If the player decides not to roll, the action fails.
• If the player rolls a number which has not already been rolled, the action succeeds. Record the result. The next action will be just a little harder.
• If the player rolls a number which has previously been rolled, the tower collapses. Reset the list of results for a new "tower."

This really doesn't give the same feel, but it provides reasonable compromise in an online environment where not all players can use the Jenga app.

Answer 6

I'm going to experiment with 2 decks of cards. There is 1 fail card in each deck. (I printed some simple custom cards. But you could just use a regular deck and say Ace=Fail or something like that.) I have 9 success cards and 1 fail card in each deck. I hold up two cards and let them pick one. If it's "Success" they are successful. If it's "Fail" I hold up two more cards. A second fail means then the task fails.

So the odds of getting two fails at the beginning are pretty slim. But you could pull a success card out of the deck each time they are successful, so the odds of failure go up as the game goes on. (Just like a Jenga tower.)

Letting them pick which card to choose gives them some agency in the decision. So if they fail, it's because they picked 2 bad cards. Not because of something you did.

You could also customize decks. So if each player had a deck, players that take more chances, or are more reckless, have more a chance of failing later. You could have an injury or death card, in addition to fail, and add them to the deck when things get more risky down the line, but keep them out at the beginning, so there aren't any premature deaths, etc.

Obviously this still lacks the manual dexterity part, but it still gives them some choice and creates tension.

Answer 7

Use pulls from a Tarot Deck. Obviously the Death Card is the one that will kill someone. You can also impose if things pass or fail based on if they are drawn face up or face down just like Tarot Card readings. You can even get creative and give bonuses or penalties based on cards.

Example: The Sun Card could be kept and turned in by a player to automatically pass without drawing a new Card.

You could use a regular deck of cards as well, but Tarot seems more Horror appropriate. I once had a group have to pull cards to determine how many blocks they had to pull from the Tower. It worked well.

Answer 8

I think you would need to fundamentally alter the base mechanic of the game. That's actually not a huge deal but I would let the players know you're doing it.

The first solution that comes to mind is pretty simple, roll a die and after that number of turns count that as if the tower fell. I would use a d20 for this, but I can see it working with a d10 or a d%.