A couple days ago I finished the draft of The Wonder Vault Heist, my upcoming Cypher System adventure. I'm pretty proud of it, and am very excited to playtest it. In the meantime, I'm working on formatting it and working out the kinks (as well as finishing editing on the first episode of Heroism and Other Lies, getting cover work done, and planning for my next novel).
In planning a Heist adventure, I was thinking of some of the great fiction I've encountered before that either includes or focuses on heists: Leverage, Alias, Burn Notice the Ocean's movies...
In addition to this, I recently had a conversation with a friend who was trying to plan a Burn Notice one shot for Hero System, and we talked about some of the challenges associated with running that sort of adventure.
The biggest challenges all have to do with planning.
In heist movies, there are usually cool scenes where the characters discuss the information they've gathered and use it to make a plan for how the heist will go about. In order to hold audience attention, these scenes may be interspersed with the heist itself so that the events are seen and experienced by the audience as they are discussed. Oftentimes, the thing that makes heist fiction so appealing is the cleverness of the main characters and their plans. For translation to RPGs, there are several hurdles to this.
1. Gathering Intel
A lot of times, heist fiction doesn't really get into how the characters find out about their potential target. There's a research phase before the planning phase that often happens off screen, or is handwaved with hacker-magic. This generates information about people who connect to the target as well as about the target's security systems and the like.
When I ran the Firefly RPG, I had put a lot of thought into how players might look for information and so I created people and places where the PCs could go to try to get information. The PCs didn't really seek these contacts out on their own unless I made the path very obvious, in which case they didn't feel particularly rewarded for finding the information. More likely, they tried to rush in and take things blind, which was sometimes frustrating for everyone.
2. Character Knowledge
In a lot of heist fiction, different characters are experts in different things. In Leverage there are the clearly defined roles of Hacker, Hitter, Grifter, Thief, and Mastermind. Each of the characters has extra knowledge about things based on their specialties (and their backstories). For example, if they are dealing with mercenaries or military units, the hitter usually has some extra knowledge about how those types of people operate and what their procedures are.
Unless a character has a really long and detailed backstory and/or the adventure is designed around this, the player likely doesn't have the specific character knowledge. To a degree, this is what Knowledge skills are for, but in some cases characters may not think to make these rolls.
3. Planning the Plan
Characters in works of fiction have the best Hollywood minds writing for them, and doing so without the same time restraints the characters have. A portion of the plan that a character might think of in a second may have taken the writer hours, days, or even weeks to think of.
In real life, planning is difficult. Ideas and dialogue don't flow freely, and people don't all contribute in a sensible fashion. Many players tend to get frustrated in long planning discussions, debating between hypotheticals. Oftentimes, these plans will fail to address certain elements of a heist, and/or focus on entirely the wrong details.
Most likely, your characters are not criminal masterminds. This will make it hard for them to think in the way that criminal masterminds think.
4. Boredom
In addition to the frustration of debating hypotheticals, many players like getting right into the action of things. They see forming or debating plans as separate from the "fun" part of actually pulling off the heist. I've had numerous times where a player, getting bored of the discussion, just says "Okay, my character goes and does X" even though X is impulsive, impractical, and often directly opposed to the interests of the character. The player just wants the story to move forward, and doesn't see a planning discussion as doing that.
5. Bad Ideas
As I said already, it is unlikely that your players are criminal masterminds. You may think that the path to success is obvious, but players are unpredictable things. Inevitably, they will come up with plans that are far more complex or convoluted than necessary. They will come up with ideas that are unreasonable and illogical. They will fail to account for particular security measures or obstacles, even if you tell them about the obstacles, give them a note with them written in all caps, and circle them in bright red.
This can make things go wrong, and not just in the "oh, the plan went sideways, what will we do now?" interesting drama wrong. It can make things go "oh, there is no sensible way the PCs get out of this without being dead or captured" wrong.
So, what do we do?
Don't fear! I have several suggestions for how to overcome these challenges and more, and I'll post about these in my next blog post.
See the post here: http://goalworlds.blogspot.com/2016/10/heist-adventures-2-tips-and-advice.html
For information on running a campaign centered on heists, see this post: 3 Heist Campaigns
In the meantime, what other obstacles do you think there are to planning a heist mission? Do you have any thoughts on how these can be overcome?
Although it was hard to continue reading about my mind wandered imagining the Burn Notice RPG, I was interested considering this! Haha. I never really considered all the extra work and complications that a GM would have to anticipate planning something like a heist. Hmm... I'll have to keep thinking about how these issues could potentially be overcome. My first thought would be that players are given some starting ideas from the GM based on what their character might know? For instance, if they are the hacker, perhaps the GM could have the player roll and then potentially tell them, "Your character might know that she needs a blank in order to blank..." or something. However, that runs into complications with stepping on players' creative problem solving choices. But if there was a way to strike a balance between giving players a little more knowledge that their character would have and allowing them to ultimately make creative decisions on their own, that seems ideal. I'll keep thinking!
ReplyDeleteI think that you're right; I think there is a balance between GM providing of information/plans and of players coming up with them. In general, it will depend on the group of players and the complexity of the heist as to how much guidance the PCs will need.
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