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Rpgs are generally fantasies of competence. Not necessarily personal competence, but the competence to do something that you can't actually do in real life. Sometimes that is because you are the best at what you do, and sometimes it is because you have 6 disposable clones so you can fight the man/.friend computer and keep coming back until it works.
Heist games are one of a subgenre of rpgs where the story structure is "find a goal, gather information about that goal, plan how you are going to approach the goal, and finally execute."
If you play a standard F20 rpg, you often go from "discover a goal, execute you lack of plan for attaining that goal. Heal up and do it again."
The problem comes up because the gm often has no idea how to manage the gather information and make plans sections so those take a lot of zero progress time, and then the execution stage falls apart the first time the plan doesn't match the gm's scenario. So we end up with a bunch of people who claim that in RPGs, planning is bad.
The Leverage RPG lets you gather the information and make the plans, and then gives you a mechanic to overcome those surprises without them ruining the rest of the plan. A generation later, you get games like Blades in the Dark where you are advised to compress the planning into "pick a goal, state an approach, roll some dice to determine the first dice roll you have to make, then execute without any actual planning or information gathering. Trigger your vices to heal up afterward." Notice we could have done this with fewer steps in the standard D&D model. And we would have hit every point of the competence fantasy that the f20 game did.
That is great, but there are several other competence fantasies that this approach elides. It turns out in real life, it is fairly difficult to gather the sort of information you need to, for example, rob a vault. And the above model says "handwave, now you rob the vault." If your competence fantasy is the execution alone, that is great.
For a lot of people that is not the whole of the fantasy. Lets look at one of the great heist shows and what it can teach us. Specifically, look at the Leverage episode, The Gold Job. Go watch it. I'll wait.
...
...
...
Welcome back.
In the Gold Job, Hardison is acting as the Mastermind, and he has created an intricate plan that is trying to use a bunch of psychological tools from game design to make the marks do what he wants. It mostly fell apart. This is what happens with a lot of people's heist games. The gm comes up with a complicated but brittle plan, the PCs get to try to figure out the edges of that plan, make their own plan, and then execute it. They often super focus in on a few pieces of minutia, and then when they execute, they have no idea what to do when the rails come off.
In the end of the Leverage episode, Nate manages to finish the heist even though Hardison's plan was too fragile, and at the end, he tells Hardison how he did it. He gives Hardison a list of things that he needed to have in place for his quick and dirty heist, and he says that you make the beautiful plan, but you also make a plan D that is the quick and dirty version of the plan that will work even when all of the subtle parts fail.
Now I want to talk about a different game that is not focused on planning and heists. There is a game system with about a dozen different versions called Gumshoe. Gumshoe is an investigation game that has a really cool piece of game tech: your characters are competent investigators so if the player has a relevant skill in a scene, they just get the clue. The investigation is deciding what to do with those clues. There is a second piece of Gumshoe that does not get discussed quite as much: the structure of a Gumshoe adventure works with something the designer calls the “spine” This is composed of the scenes in the adventure and the basic plot line. In the published adventure, each scene tells you what the goal of the scene is, what information it is supposed to provide the party, and what other scenes each scene can lead to.
If we take this idea and rub it on Nate's list, we have the first half of the setup of a heist game. Here is how we use this:
first the GM takes the goal of the scenario. They come up with a couple of likely approaches and a way to let the players find enough information to suggest an approach. Be ready to improvise if they have something you never thought of. One of the key points of this method of running a heist game is 'Listen to what the players are planning for and don't be too stuck on your initial plan. If they become very interested in the specifics of the cleaning service for a facility? It is time to make the cleaning service important. Come up with a couple of likely NPCs that they might interact with and who might be their opposition.
Let's look at part of a worked example, say “steal a valuable artifact possessed by a government before they relocate it to their secure vault.
Identify the likely end scenes:
1 Use a party in the museum the artifact is resting in as cover to sneak in and steal the artifact.
2. Sneak into the same place when there is no party to distract the guards but there are fewer people to complicate things either.
3. Steal the artifact from an armored carriage as it is being transferred.
4. Whatever other thing the party comes up with after you give them that information.
I tend to run fairly short sessions frequently. Which means that this is about as far as I need to go fir a session worth of game.
My scenes in the first session are:
1 Sneak into town
2. establish a safe house for planning purposes
3. Let the players use their character specialties to find enough information to decide that these are the potions (in this case they found out that the item was in a museum, the museum was having a party in three days, and on the fourth day the item was going to be moved under guard to a more secure location. I was ready to give them some sub scenes based on what they decided to do with that information that would encourage whatever they were already leaning toward. By the end of the night, they had made some contacts in town, and had decided on “Steal the artifact during the party” which set a timeline for their activities and told me what things to focus in on.
They had asked about the guard rotation, the possibility of visiting the museum before the party, gained the trust of a local thief organization, asked about the nobleman in charge of the party and the transfer, and where the extra staff for the even would come from.
That gave me a whole set of things to focus on for the next session and a place to work on for my preparation for the next session. I mapped out the site, gave the rough outline of about a dozen npcs including the noble, several members of the guard who could be subverted by bribes or playing on their personal addictions and weaknesses or more direct means. I came up with a temp service they could infiltrate, a couple of nobles they could get to know to find more gossip about the target, a connection who might know about the security systems and a second person who would know specifically where the item was being held and a couple of different scenes to build toward. I dropped the raid the museum in the night vs the guards plot and the armored vehicle heist at that point. And it was pretty clear they wouldn't do all of these things. They had limited time, but I gave them a couple of different routes in if they did any sub set of the things I had prepared. In the end, their focus was on infiltrating the party and knowing about how to turn off the security system. They didn't try to work the nobles approach and talked about using the purloined letter method but that did not survive the instincts of the players at the end.
This gave me several sessions of active planning where each step of the planning was role playing and where each player's specialties could come into play. We never sat there with maps and a list of equipment, and when they had 7/10ths of what I had seen as the plan to hit the scenes I felt we needed? I was able to gently direct them toward the others. I kept notes on what things they seemed interested in and made sure to incorporate as much of that as I could into the next session's activities. (Seriously, planning sessions tell you what the party expects to see. Let them see those things with a small set of variation. Listen to their preparations and make sure each preparation they make can solve a problem that you present to them in a actual execution. If we had been playing for more than two hours at a time, I would have called for a snack and restroom break at the mid point to do that incorporation, but as it went I was able to do this on the fly.
(At the end, they got the item and a few other things, they got away clean but had to use one of their alternate escape plans. Some things went wrong but they added complexity instead of killing the party.)
Come up with an event, the potential scenes to play out, and some interesting choices that all lead to the final scene, but that the party can't do all of. Your big difficulties are based on which things the pcs decide to focus on. Since the party hadn't talked to the nobles, they knew about the alarms but had to do more exploration during the heist to find their target. Since they didn't interact with the person in charge, he didn't know any of their faces afterward, but they also had to find a different solution to a locked door he had the key for.
They planned a heist. They executed it and had some difficulties, but pulled it off with their skills and cooperation and repurposing some of their planning. There were humorous points where they failed that both increased and released some of the tension.
The take home; use a flexible spine, reward your players' focus and make sure planning happens in actual in game events instead of just sitting there for hours theory crafting.
Heist games are one of a subgenre of rpgs where the story structure is "find a goal, gather information about that goal, plan how you are going to approach the goal, and finally execute."
If you play a standard F20 rpg, you often go from "discover a goal, execute you lack of plan for attaining that goal. Heal up and do it again."
The problem comes up because the gm often has no idea how to manage the gather information and make plans sections so those take a lot of zero progress time, and then the execution stage falls apart the first time the plan doesn't match the gm's scenario. So we end up with a bunch of people who claim that in RPGs, planning is bad.
The Leverage RPG lets you gather the information and make the plans, and then gives you a mechanic to overcome those surprises without them ruining the rest of the plan. A generation later, you get games like Blades in the Dark where you are advised to compress the planning into "pick a goal, state an approach, roll some dice to determine the first dice roll you have to make, then execute without any actual planning or information gathering. Trigger your vices to heal up afterward." Notice we could have done this with fewer steps in the standard D&D model. And we would have hit every point of the competence fantasy that the f20 game did.
That is great, but there are several other competence fantasies that this approach elides. It turns out in real life, it is fairly difficult to gather the sort of information you need to, for example, rob a vault. And the above model says "handwave, now you rob the vault." If your competence fantasy is the execution alone, that is great.
For a lot of people that is not the whole of the fantasy. Lets look at one of the great heist shows and what it can teach us. Specifically, look at the Leverage episode, The Gold Job. Go watch it. I'll wait.
...
...
...
Welcome back.
In the Gold Job, Hardison is acting as the Mastermind, and he has created an intricate plan that is trying to use a bunch of psychological tools from game design to make the marks do what he wants. It mostly fell apart. This is what happens with a lot of people's heist games. The gm comes up with a complicated but brittle plan, the PCs get to try to figure out the edges of that plan, make their own plan, and then execute it. They often super focus in on a few pieces of minutia, and then when they execute, they have no idea what to do when the rails come off.
In the end of the Leverage episode, Nate manages to finish the heist even though Hardison's plan was too fragile, and at the end, he tells Hardison how he did it. He gives Hardison a list of things that he needed to have in place for his quick and dirty heist, and he says that you make the beautiful plan, but you also make a plan D that is the quick and dirty version of the plan that will work even when all of the subtle parts fail.
Now I want to talk about a different game that is not focused on planning and heists. There is a game system with about a dozen different versions called Gumshoe. Gumshoe is an investigation game that has a really cool piece of game tech: your characters are competent investigators so if the player has a relevant skill in a scene, they just get the clue. The investigation is deciding what to do with those clues. There is a second piece of Gumshoe that does not get discussed quite as much: the structure of a Gumshoe adventure works with something the designer calls the “spine” This is composed of the scenes in the adventure and the basic plot line. In the published adventure, each scene tells you what the goal of the scene is, what information it is supposed to provide the party, and what other scenes each scene can lead to.
If we take this idea and rub it on Nate's list, we have the first half of the setup of a heist game. Here is how we use this:
first the GM takes the goal of the scenario. They come up with a couple of likely approaches and a way to let the players find enough information to suggest an approach. Be ready to improvise if they have something you never thought of. One of the key points of this method of running a heist game is 'Listen to what the players are planning for and don't be too stuck on your initial plan. If they become very interested in the specifics of the cleaning service for a facility? It is time to make the cleaning service important. Come up with a couple of likely NPCs that they might interact with and who might be their opposition.
Let's look at part of a worked example, say “steal a valuable artifact possessed by a government before they relocate it to their secure vault.
Identify the likely end scenes:
1 Use a party in the museum the artifact is resting in as cover to sneak in and steal the artifact.
2. Sneak into the same place when there is no party to distract the guards but there are fewer people to complicate things either.
3. Steal the artifact from an armored carriage as it is being transferred.
4. Whatever other thing the party comes up with after you give them that information.
I tend to run fairly short sessions frequently. Which means that this is about as far as I need to go fir a session worth of game.
My scenes in the first session are:
1 Sneak into town
2. establish a safe house for planning purposes
3. Let the players use their character specialties to find enough information to decide that these are the potions (in this case they found out that the item was in a museum, the museum was having a party in three days, and on the fourth day the item was going to be moved under guard to a more secure location. I was ready to give them some sub scenes based on what they decided to do with that information that would encourage whatever they were already leaning toward. By the end of the night, they had made some contacts in town, and had decided on “Steal the artifact during the party” which set a timeline for their activities and told me what things to focus in on.
They had asked about the guard rotation, the possibility of visiting the museum before the party, gained the trust of a local thief organization, asked about the nobleman in charge of the party and the transfer, and where the extra staff for the even would come from.
That gave me a whole set of things to focus on for the next session and a place to work on for my preparation for the next session. I mapped out the site, gave the rough outline of about a dozen npcs including the noble, several members of the guard who could be subverted by bribes or playing on their personal addictions and weaknesses or more direct means. I came up with a temp service they could infiltrate, a couple of nobles they could get to know to find more gossip about the target, a connection who might know about the security systems and a second person who would know specifically where the item was being held and a couple of different scenes to build toward. I dropped the raid the museum in the night vs the guards plot and the armored vehicle heist at that point. And it was pretty clear they wouldn't do all of these things. They had limited time, but I gave them a couple of different routes in if they did any sub set of the things I had prepared. In the end, their focus was on infiltrating the party and knowing about how to turn off the security system. They didn't try to work the nobles approach and talked about using the purloined letter method but that did not survive the instincts of the players at the end.
This gave me several sessions of active planning where each step of the planning was role playing and where each player's specialties could come into play. We never sat there with maps and a list of equipment, and when they had 7/10ths of what I had seen as the plan to hit the scenes I felt we needed? I was able to gently direct them toward the others. I kept notes on what things they seemed interested in and made sure to incorporate as much of that as I could into the next session's activities. (Seriously, planning sessions tell you what the party expects to see. Let them see those things with a small set of variation. Listen to their preparations and make sure each preparation they make can solve a problem that you present to them in a actual execution. If we had been playing for more than two hours at a time, I would have called for a snack and restroom break at the mid point to do that incorporation, but as it went I was able to do this on the fly.
(At the end, they got the item and a few other things, they got away clean but had to use one of their alternate escape plans. Some things went wrong but they added complexity instead of killing the party.)
Come up with an event, the potential scenes to play out, and some interesting choices that all lead to the final scene, but that the party can't do all of. Your big difficulties are based on which things the pcs decide to focus on. Since the party hadn't talked to the nobles, they knew about the alarms but had to do more exploration during the heist to find their target. Since they didn't interact with the person in charge, he didn't know any of their faces afterward, but they also had to find a different solution to a locked door he had the key for.
They planned a heist. They executed it and had some difficulties, but pulled it off with their skills and cooperation and repurposing some of their planning. There were humorous points where they failed that both increased and released some of the tension.
The take home; use a flexible spine, reward your players' focus and make sure planning happens in actual in game events instead of just sitting there for hours theory crafting.
