We’ve gone and done it! Just like I threatened, last weekend I had a chance to test run Dreadship at our group’s gaming weekend. The game was certainly fun; I ran Gradient Descent in one-shot mode, with the players as artifact hunters trying to get a big score and retire. As far as Dreadship is concerned, though, the playtest revealed a few things about the game’s workings. Thanks to both my own evaluation and feedback from my players, I know what I’d do differently in the future.
This is one of the first playtests that I’ve run, so I also learned a lot about the process. Most importantly, seeing the process in action is likely to make it easier for me to test new rules and games in the future. So with that all said, how did mashing up Mothership with a Jenga tower actually work?
The premise is solid
As I expected when I proposed this mashup, using the Dread model for Mothership is straight-up fun. Faced with pulls from the tower, my players approached every room with a solid combination of creativity and outright stress, which is what you want from a horror game. The spectre of pulling from the tower did have a similar effect as the spectre of an uncertain die roll in Mothership, pushing players to think about the situation and their surroundings. The genre alignment was definitely there, even in the moments where the tension let up a bit.
As we get into the rest of the discussion, I think it’s important to note: The premise working is key to understanding where the rest of the critiques come in. If using Dread to play Mothership scenarios did not end up as fun as I thought it would be, the shortcomings of the rules I drafted would be quite different.
The rules…less so
My rules ideas did have some shortcomings, the biggest one being exactly the issue I forecasted in the first article: Adding free checks makes the game much too easy. We played a full four-hour one-shot and, despite the premise and the danger of the module, there wasn’t a single tower collapse. At the same time, despite the intent of the free checks being to amp up the Stress level, no character achieved a Stress higher than 5. This was arguably a failure of intent, but it went further than I had originally anticipated. I had thought I’d need to tweak the number of free checks, but after finishing the game and playing out the game of Jenga for fun, it became clear that the right amount of free checks was probably none.
This unfortunately means that the rules construct of Dreadship likely falls apart. The Jenga tower doesn’t impose Stress on characters, so without another construct the adapted Panic Check system falls apart. Additionally, the standard deviation of both Stats and Saves in Mothership is low enough that the free check counts didn’t appreciably vary between characters, meaning the whole intent of porting Stats and Saves at all doesn’t really work.
As you begin to peel back the consequences of the rules mashups, it becomes a bit more clear that there are two paths forward which really work well: Either playing Mothership rules-as-written or using Dread rules-as-written to play a Mothership module. Combining Mothership and Dread mechanics ends up diluting the strong intent of both of them, and that’s much clearer in play than it is on paper.
Is there synergy?
As far as whether there is any synergy between these systems, I think that depends on how you look at it. Strictly as two sets of mechanics, I’d argue the answer is no. Dread and Mothership have their own specific ways of slowly ratcheting up tension, and they’re difficult to substitute or mix. In Dread, the tower itself provides the tension, but the ratcheting up comes from the slowly decreasing stability. Things are easier at the beginning and get harder, ultimately resulting in dire consequences.
In Mothership, Stress and ensuing Panic checks are what ratchet up the tension. There is no inbuilt increase in difficulty in Mothership, either in the system or written into most modules. That means that even without the stretching of the mechanic with free checks, Mothership characters will be faced with a brace of easier tasks at the beginning which they can use as mitigation. If you’re just playing Dread that’s ok because the ultimate consequence is unavoidable, but if you’re playing a hybrid where a tower collapse may not kill you (as I proposed), it simply pushes the consequences out too far. You either need a mechanic where failure is omnipresent (i.e. the Mothership rules) or one where all of your success and preparation won’t save you from the ultimate consequence (i.e. the Dread rules).
In retrospect it’s both understandable and amusing that the mechanical clash that prevented Dreadship from being as tight as either of the games it was mixing was caused by having major rules systems that aimed to do the same thing. Seeing how the tension mechanics of Dread and Mothership mixed (or failed to mix) helped me understand both games a bit better. While Dreadship didn’t quite work out as intended, the experiment made me excited to both play more Dread and play more Mothership.
For those following along at home, I want to be clear: Playing Mothership modules with Dread is awesome. The mashup totally works, but it need not involve a rules mix like Dreadship. Instead, I’d do something much simpler. Look at the questionnaire section of the Dread handbook and think about what elements of a bunch of spacers like those in Mothership are most important. If you do want to adapt Mothership character creation, ignore stats and saves and only take the classes, skills, and inventory rolls. Use those starting options the same way you’d use skills and gear in any game of Dread, as ways to mitigate extra pulls. Use the Mothership rules for saves (especially Fear and Sanity saves) as inspiration for when to call for pulls, but don’t feel the need to port rules. As they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
As for me, I’m thinking that I want to push for my group to play more Mothership. Gradient Descent felt great as a module that would fit into a longer running game, and even though the Dread mashup was definitely tuned for a one-shot I’m thinking more about how to make the Mothership rules fit in with my group’s sensibilities. Even using the Jenga tower has taught me more about how to effectively run Mothership, and I will definitely run more in the future.
Dreadship didn’t quite work as intended, but it taught me a lot about how both Dread and Mothership were designed, and what happens when you modify those designs. When considering the many possible outcomes of a playtest like this, discovering a renewed interest in both the root games isn’t a bad outcome at all, even if the mashup itself didn’t end up working. I’m going to look for more opportunities to play both Dread and Mothership; at the very least I should find more uses for the Jenga set I bought. I’m also curious to hear other people’s experiences with Dread; one potential confounding factor in this experience is that my group is really good at Jenga, as we found out playing through the tower. Regardless of how steady our hands are, this experience gave me a renewed interest in and respect for the playtesting process, and may encourage me to bring more of the pie-in-the-sky System Hacks I’ve done before down to earth. Keep testing, keep learning, and I’ll see you later for another System Hack!
Like what Cannibal Halfling Gaming is doing and want to help us bring games and gamers together? First, you can follow me @levelonewonk.bsky.social for RPG commentary, relevant retweets, and maybe some rambling. You can also find our Discord channel and drop in to chat with our authors and get every new post as it comes out. You can travel to DriveThruRPG through one of our fine and elegantly-crafted links, which generates credit that lets us get more games to work with! Finally, you can support us directly on Patreon, which lets us cover costs, pay our contributors, and save up for projects. Thanks for reading!
