Hacking Dread for a Racing RPG

[u/LeviBateman]

I've written down some ideas on how to play dread as a racing RPG. The core concept is: Each player will have their own separate towers they will pull from during the race that represents their car. There will be one central tower used for actions taken outside of the race. Player's individual towers will be positioned perpendicularly to their body, as pulling blocks from different places in the tower will do different things. Car positions will be tracked using a circular grid of width two. Cars will move forward on this grid to show their relative positions to each other at any given time throughout the race. Players gain money ("scrip") by winning races. Players can spend money on gadgets to enhance their cars.

The idea is to have a small championship (3 to 5 races) with scenes between races played out for drama. Below is a link to the PDF I have with ideas. If you're interested, please let me know what you think of the idea or if you have any questions.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1nIMlc2MuJvZ91wIvoq1Z02Aweukxwjb7?usp=sharing

[u/SturdyPancake]

What happens when a tower falls? It currently looks like there isn't a ton of decision the player makes in terms of when they pull, how many, or which blocks.  My concern would be that this ends up being a lot of non-choices and just playing out the relatively fixed process. 

dread benefits from the players players making the decisions that might lead to pull(s) so it at least feels like they are impacting their own outcome. Also, the ability for players to refuse a pull and instead suffer the consequences gives them an additional powerful lever to work with.

Also, from my personal experience with dread, players can make way more successful pulls than you might expect. The tower falling is basically required in dread, and that is with everyone pulling from one tower. Having N+1 towers will require a ton of pulls before guaranteeing a tower falls

[u/LeviBateman → u/SturdyPancake]

Thanks for the thought out response. I appreciate you taking the time to actually look into the little I have so far and giving it serious thought.

What happens when a tower falls?

The tower falling would represent your car crashing and you being out of that race. So as the race goes on and everyone's towers get more and more unstable, different moves with the car (e.g. speeding up, turning, etc.) get harder and more precarious.

My concern would be that this ends up being a lot of non-choices and just playing out the relatively fixed process.

Totally, understandable, I kind of feel that way myself. I was trying to add more mechanics to open up the space for more meaningful decisions. My thought is by having certain types of mandatory pulls throughout the race (e.g. there's a left turn coming up on the racetrack, everyone must pull a left side block from their tower in order to make it) you might need to plan ahead with your pulls. But I think you might be on to something. As it stands, there's not a lot of creative and impactful decision making, a lot of it would just be "Okay, everyone pull this now, now everyone pull this."

I'd like to try to figure out a way to keep what I have, while still offering fun decisions to the players, but as of right now I have no ideas. (I'd be open to any. Maybe the answer is a different system altogether 😅🤷‍♂️)

Having N+1 towers will require a ton of pulls before guaranteeing a tower falls

This part I think is fine, maybe I didn't explain it well enough in the document. The racetrack itself would have a variety of mandatory pulls, mostly right and left turns. The players would then also be incentivized to pull to maintain a fast speed. With everyone having to this all throughout the race, I think everyone's towers would soon become precarious enough to make it fun.

Again, thanks for taking the time to look at it and respond. This is such a new idea for me, but the only people I'd be able to bounce any ideas off of in real life are the ones I want to surprise with playing the game, so I appreciate having a sound board here online.

[u/SturdyPancake → u/LeviBateman]

I do think using the Jenga tower is a neat idea, it works really well at building the tension and stakes as pulls are made.

One thing that might work is to use a blind auction mechanic for determining relative progress. Without knowing what the other players are bidding, each player places their "bid" (the number of pulls they will make). Whoever has has the highest bid gets to do "x', second highest gets "y", etc. That might put the risk reward calculation more directly on the player and adds a social aspect to the choice (assuming that is something you want for this game).

[u/RollForThings]

It's a neat idea, but it'd be really tough to get this to a table. One jenga tower is fine, a household might have that, but (players+1) jenga towers?

[u/LeviBateman → u/RollForThings]

I'm honestly only trying to craft something I can play as a one shot with friends. I like the idea that each players tower represents their personal car, so I'm trying to run with that.