Saturday evening, I ran a Dread game at Endgame in Oakland. For those of you who listen to the podcast, you may have listened to the original recording of the playtest of the scenario.

All in all, I feel pretty good about how it went. Only one characte died, which is a little disappointing. Not because I particularly like killing characters in RPGs, but Dread is a little special. Dying can be pretty awesome in this game. In any case, things went well. My players gave some really good feedback, and managed to stay in the game pretty much the whole time. I’m going to go back and edit the scenario again, keeping their feedback in mind. I don’t usually run the same game multiple times, but I think that the Ghost Hunters scenario works well enough as a con game.

There were a couple of things that I changed for con play. First, I dumped one of the ghosts. I felt that, in the original draft, there was too much going on, and it distracted from the story. Also, there was a rape in the original scenario. While I haven’t removed it from the scenario entirely, I decided to omit it for the con. If I ran this at KublaCon, I would probably leave it in, since each game has its own private room. At Endgame, there were a great deal of people around (hell, a game of 3:16 was going on immediately behind me), so I figured that a murder/rape, even when described through the filter of a FLIR camera, might not be appropriate for all audiences. It didn’t take much away from the game, anyway.

I’m very strongly considering running this scenario, with some more edits, at KublaCon next year. I don’t think that Dread gets enough love, and it’s such a fun game. That being said, I’d like to thank The Game Master Show for introducing it to me.

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