Unmasked, Part 2/4
Looks like Thief’s thieving has landed her in the slammer. Good thing our sticky-fingered tiefling has friends on the outside willing to come up with a brilliant escape plan. If it were me though, she might not be so lucky.
This might not be a popular opinion, but I don’t care for in-depth heist-style Oceans Eleven planning. Not on the tabletop anyway. Murphy’s Law is in effect every time your party puts a complex scheme into motion, meaning you’re going to wind up improvising around unforeseen obstacles anyway. To my way of thinking, that makes anything more than a broad-strokes “here’s their security system, here’s how we’re going to work around it” overkill. It’s a GM’s job to put complications in your way after all. That’s why I appreciate the flashback mechanics in Blades in the Dark, Honey Heist, or (to a lesser extent) the brilliant planner feat. These mechanics simulate uncanny criminal foresight without demanding that players actually go full-on Xanatos Gambit.
A lot of my thinking on the subject came from my group’s first Shadowrun campaign. We’d come over from our various dungeon-crawl games, and were ready for a change in setting. We got excited. We made deckers and riggers and adepts. I was a “cajun combat troll,” and my accent was full-on ridiculous. (Beauregard Saucier Dupré remains my all-time favorite PC). In short, the mix of archetypes and personalities was amazing, our GM was enthusiastic, and everyone was on board for some Leverage–style shenanigans. Unfortunately however, there were nine PCs.
“What’s your plan?” said our GM. “How will you intercept the van en route to its destination?”
“Drones! We’ll laser-cut through the roof! We go through the sewers! We hack the local traffic grid! Come up from a manhole cover! Fake a heart attack in the crosswalk! Come out guns blazing! Ride up alongside on mopeds Mad Max style! Attack the van while it’s still at its base!”
“Ok… Those are all ideas that could work. Which ones would you like to do?”
I shit you not, it was two full four-hour sessions of arguing. Every time we settled on a plan, someone would come up with another contingency that had to be addressed. The municipal traffic system might be too powerful to hack. The drones would be spotted. Attacking the base would draw too much heat from the gang of genetically engineered drug runners we were trying to rob. My troll would not fit on a moped.
Eventually we settled on the traffic / manhole cover plan. I believe we had to call a vote to make that happen. We wound up sticking the van at a never-ending red light, cut a hole through its undercarriage, and got the goods without triggering any alarms. Unfortunately, by that time everyone was thoroughly sick of heists. Our gang of shadowrunners were successful, but it wound up feeling like an anticlimax after all the bickering.
Now obviously there were too many cooks in that cyberpunk kitchen, so let’s not waste time agreeing that 9 PCs is too many. Instead, I’d like to focus our collective attention on the notion that overthinking really and truly is the trap (NSFW). Executing a clever plan is a lot of fun, but not 10 IRL hours later and at the expense of your sanity. So for today’s discussion question, let’s figure out how to find a better balance. How much planning is too much? Tell us all about a time when you executed a complex heist-style plan. How did you cover all the contingencies without driving yourself nuts? Sound off in the comments with all your best machinations and schemes.
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We haven’t done any heists in my group, but there was one time that our GM put in a lot of planning for a haunted house encounter that didn’t quite pan out the way he thought it would. He forgot about our tank – Grimnar the dwarf. He walked right into the house, ignored everything by succeeding at every will save, grabbed the macguffin, and walked right back out. We had been told not to leave the path and run if we heard rattling chains. Grimnar basically said “F it, I’m taking a shortcut,” and left the path. We followed because we didn’t want him to be left alone. Then we heard chains and started running. Guess who didn’t run? Guess who got attacked by a ghoul? By the time we realized in-character he had been left behind and to get back to him, it had been about 7 rounds of Grimnar and the ghoul. I actually felt sorry for the ghoul because it kept trying to wrap Grimnar in its chains but failed every time. And was getting whacked in the head by Grimnar’s big old axe every round as well.
The GM didn’t do a haunted style storyline the rest of the campaign. He only did one in the next campaign when we were all at low levels with bad saves.
Was Grimnar a cleric? Because that was our plan last time a haunted house came up: make the guy with the good saves walk in front.
No, he was pure Fighter. His Will save was 22. He just had super high AC and a Fort save of 31.
That is a seriously respectable saving throw for a Fighter!
+5 cloak… +6 Wisdom headband… Iron Will for +2… Assuming high level for a +6 base save… +2 from dwarf (assuming the haunting was spell-like)…
Did the dude have an unmodified Wisdom of 18!?
14, actually. Since the campaign is over, I can look at his character sheet in Roll20. I have no idea how he got his Will that high. It says 10 in Resist, but I don’t see any feats, class features, or items to boost it.
I hope I have not awakened suspicion and distrust. :/
It’s all good. It was just so funny watching it all go down. I don’t think he actually had to roll that many Will saves, so he probably just rolled well. And I’m pretty sure the chains were going against his AC which had a LOT of feats and features going to it.
I have a major tendency to overthink and hesitate, even in trivial fights. I know the art of just picking something cool and/or generically helpful to do when I can’t decide, but that doesn’t mean it won’t take me a long time to decide I won’t be able to decide, sucking all of the potential spice out of my turn. Deciding ahead of time, and putting more energy into narrating what my character does than picking the absolute best course of action, is still something I’m working on.
This applied especially hard in the Pathfinder 1E game I’m in, since we’re a small party (3) of people I’m very fond of that are all way better at going with the flow. Pathfinder being as mathy and easy to mess up as it is, and our party being as weird as we are (two delayed arcane Charisma casters and a Brawler!), I obsess a little in both character creation and play, fretting over every outcome and trying to keep us all safe. Our GM’s generally handled this by giving info or advice on the bits of the system we forget or don’t understand well, as well as having generally reasonable and informed people in the world, but one tactic he likes was instrumental to that time we needed to steal a hurricane-worthy ship: just kinda moving on with what we bring up after a certain point, without letting us (me) deliberate for too long. The ship-stealing hijinks were helped by him giving us one “I planned for this” each, but it definitely wouldn’t have been as varied or as satisfying a heist as it was if we’d been allowed to spend another hour flipflopping from/fine-tuning the basic idea of “’accidentally’ start a fire to get everyone to evacuate another ship, then steal the navy’s when they come to reclaim it”.
Is there an ideal amount of planning time in your group? When does it go from ‘fine-tuning’ to ‘overthinking?’
A healthy number of minutes, from what I can tell, or until it’s a back-and-forth that’s not really going anywhere. That doesn’t happen often, though, my friends being good at going with the flow means that solid RP or courses of action aren’t too hard to come by for them. ~w~
And as a follow up: On those rare occasions when it does drag on, what is that breaks the stalemate? Does the GM intervene? Does a player decide to yield in the name of harmony?
On an unrelated note, cute that Wizard is putting every inch of that 8 STR to work breaking out Thief c:
It is this that gives me hope for their relationship. Even if they’re not doing great in the other comic right now, I think they’ve got something special. <3
There was a complex heist plan once in a game I was running. It stalled out for two hours as the PCs’ plan of turning invisible and riding giant eagles over the fortress they were trying to break into (flying so high up that the giant eagles wouldn’t look giant to those on the ground), dropping into the fortress courtyard, and using feather fall to land safely, kept hitting the roadblock of “How do we cast feather fall on the way down without the guards in the courtyard noticing the spell’s components?”
Potions of feather fall were discussed. Complex timing involving casting right when a church bell rang were laid out. Plans to buy fireworks were well underway, and decoys were being prepared to draw the attention of the guards to elsewhere, but they were hitting more and more snafus with each solution they came up with.
After two hours of this going nowhere, I broke my GM silence and reminded them that they could just use invisibility and fly to get into the courtyard. No feather fall timing necessary.
Truly, they were a group that knew how to overcomplicate things.
I know that GMs don’t like dropping the curtain, but good on ya for getting involved. At some point, the game has to go on.
Fundamentally I think this is a “perfect pasta sauce” situation. It all boils down to how fun your group finds the process of planning to be in itself.
With the right group it can be loads of fun.
It does help if you (as a group) doesn’t consider it the GM’s job to screw your plan up, such as say by inventing and presenting complications just for the sake of complications. If the planning is just a nod to in-universe realism of your characters desires but the fun bit if flying by the seats of your pants of course the whole thing is going to feel boring. It makes the effort into work, instead of play.
If on the other hand a plan that goes off without a hitch is a perfectly valid result, the play and counter-play involved in figuring out which defenses the target is likely to have and ways to counter them can be quite entertaining in itself.
That said, it’s easy for people to get stuck in a rut of analysis paralysis and fear of ever more unlikely “what if” scenarios. I find that it helps to focus on legwork, but that only goes so far, at some point you have to make a decision. Having an IC leader of the group helps, or a tradition of voting or something. Just have some way of reaching a decision which doesn’t depend on a perfect consensus and which the group considers valid rather than a failure state to invoke.
Well that was more than I cared to know about pasta sauce marketing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aGNqw0mDm8
I like the idea of “the plan goes off without a hitch” being possible, but I think it’s weirdly unlikely. If the run involves dice rolls rather than a GM who concludes, “Te plan is clever enough to just work,” you’re probably going to fail at least one of those rolls. That means you’ll have to adapt. And that means planning too many moves ahead is becomes more trouble than it’s worth.
I’m talking generalities here, so help me out with the specifics. Do you have a step-by-step plan that worked well? What did it look like? How did you deal with failed checks?
Sadly it has been a few years since I was in a heist focused game and the more recent games have leaned more towards the “plannings for show and character moments” end of the spectrum, so specifics can be though, but my players
The problem of “roll until you fail-guarantees failure” is indeed a real one through, and since it’s often applied to stealth and deception, it more often causes trouble for heists than for other adventure activities.
The solutions (for the games where it’s a problem) are mostly GM-end.
One tactic is to not make a single failure cause the failure of the whole. For instance a missed bluff check could cause suspicion and scrutiny, rather than recognition as an infiltrator or a failed stealth check attract a guard who checks to see if the noise was something they should care about instead of being enough to spot the sneaking character. Similiar principle to how a failed attack roll in combat doesn’t mean you lost the fight and now have to flee, or negotiate a surrender.
Another possibility is to just call very few rolls and letting them stand for the heist as a whole, so the singular bluff check you roll at the start to convince people you are a technician that’s allowed to be here counts for all the “I’m allowed to be here” bluff checks for the entire run.
For forgeries and false keycards in particular it helps as a GM to remember that it’s probably happens a lot more often to the guards that some technical/human error results in the keycard being rejected/the paper form being filled wrongly than they encounter forgeries. So a bluff check (possibly at a penalty depending on security level) which success meaning they let you in anyways and failure just meaning they tell you to get it fixed and come back later might be more appropriate than a full arrest.
On the player end, one thing one can do is try to layer plans in such a way that failure is OK as long as not all the layers fail at once. For instance you might see if you can take a penalty to sneaking in exchange for your sneaking just consisting of walking quietly without drawing attention while acting as through you are lost. That way if you get spotted it’s just bluff check time instead of time to go loud.
I think you’re talking ‘Let it Ride.’
https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/38313/roleplaying-games/the-art-of-rulings-part-8-let-it-ride
That is indeed the fancy, cool, easy-to-remember term for that which I couldn’t remember when I was writing that longer explanation out.
I don’t think I have actually read the article that birthed it before through, so thank you for sending that my way.
Oh, I love the complex planning. It’s not usually productive in a game sense, since the usual rule about “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy” applies — but it can be so much fun, everyone discussing, putting together an over-complicated plan… and then getting to see just how long the plan actually lasts…
…although last time we put together a plan for a heist, it ended with the party leaving town in a hurry as a civil war erupted around us. I think that holds the record for the biggest fiasco in this group’s history… and I’m counting the actual Fiasco games.
How long do you typically spend on the planning phase? How do you know when you’re done?
Half the session, sometimes… it depends on how long it takes before everyone gets tired of asking “but what about…?”.
The point is that gaming is social, right? And it just happens that sometimes we’re having so much fun out of character discussing what we’re going to do, that half the evening has gone by before we actually start executing the plan. Whomever is GM is usually happy enough with this, since it’s entertaining to watch the players overthinking everything, and it saves on prep…
If you are a tactical planner.. Get used to disappointment in most groups.
Most folks are going to fight you on ideas, or basically just want to hit things.
And plans are where I just simply don’t bother anymore in party’s. They’ll do what they do.
And only when you are the leader can you basically follow the KISS method for keeping folks happy.
Otherwise, just don’t bother or you get someone that wants to fight about it, and it devolves.
Coordinating tactis is hard, yo. Go too hard and you wind up pulling a quarterback:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/general-disarray
Go too soft and it’s all cat herding all the time. That’s why I like “very general plans.” Sort out the buffs, decide on an opening gambit, and then just go for it.
My WFRP parties standard fallback tactic was the ‘reverse ambush’, which basically amounted to walking headlong straight into whatever trap or ambush is waiting for them, triggering it, then just bashing whatever came along to kill them.
I think I know that party: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5d/46/2f/5d462f5465c553b9f6de44023fe2bd76.jpg
We usually go with slightly more sophisticated versions of ‘reverse ambush’. One is that we send the rogue into the ambush — because the evasive rogue is the only one likely to survive when the casters start lobbing dex-saves into the battlefield.
The other is that the stealthy types go hunting… sneak around the perimeter of the ambush site, and quietly make some changes to the odds while the rest of the party walks into the killzone. As the player of the rogue, you can guess which of these variants I prefer.
Where’s Cleric for this brilliant heist? Too lawful for him to be able to participate?
Off-screen casting atonement. Dude is pretty lawful.
Now that I think about it, I think I know what ele might be keeping him occupied – and perfectly details the problems of a heist plan as well. If only I could easily find the comic again… Oh well, might as well check up on all the alt text…
Huh, Cleric got a kitten for Christmas one time. What happened to it?
And there seems to be a recurring owl/owlbear child in the older comics…
Oh, there’s the kitten. Shame Wiz has a phobia of it. Is he like that around Magus too?
Ah, there we go! The other probable reason he’s not in on this plan.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/dithering
It would appear that the phobia only extends to literal cats: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/behaving-intelligently
I feel like planning for a siege is good fun (if you are the besieged group), as you can set up physical traps and barricades (or guards and wards ) and then they are in place and will be reacted to. Can’t say I’ve ever pulled off anything similar to heist planning.
I feel ya on the siege. I’d never had the opportunity though, which is why I wound up writing this thing.
https://adventureaweek.com/shop/pathfinder/pathfinder-adventures/b20-rent-lease-conquest/
It’s set up to be full-on Home Alone for the climax.
Anatomy of a Shadowrun may be one of the best tools for planning, being a full breakdown in character and by mechanics for planning a trenchcoat run. Notably did their best to cover but was by working backwards seemed a great way to help contingency paralysis.
And when that all fails, geek the mage first.
I’m pretty sure that pausing to read a 32-page pamphlet would indeed have been a time savings.
But for serious though: that’s a cool document. Thanks for the tip!
Where is Cleric in this scenario? Does Wizard have access to Telekinesis or Bigby’s Hand?
Off-screen casting atonement. Dude is pretty lawful.
Unfortunately, Fighter got to plan this one. That means a hard-labor-first policy.
Why did the guy who obviously dumped Intelligence the one doing the planning? Hell, just climb up there and slip some Thieves’ tools through the bars, and Thief Rogue could let herself out. Stone Shape, and Knock could also work.
Because arguing with Fighter for 8 hours is less productive than playing tug of war with a wall.
I do really like how well the art conveys Wizard is giving her all to the ‘roll percentile dice to Bend Bars/Lift Gates’ plan and it is really not doing anything.
For the low, low cost of [student debt amounts redacted], you too can convey the struggles of wizards in the world of manual labor!
My pet-theory as to why so many Wizards adopt ridiculous names like “Mordenkainen” or “Elminster” is that they had to change their identity to avoid Wizard-school debt.
Headcanon accepted.
And now I want to run an adventure where, after 1000 years or however old those ultra-powerful wizards are, they’ve racked up interest the size of a large nation’s economy, and are in need of help from the players in avoiding the flying air-breathing loan sharks.
New backstory: the tarrasque is really just a mage tower repo agent smeared unjustly by a magic-using class outrunning their debts.
So is “Wizard” the handbook Wizard’s pseudonym?
I trialled a Firefly campaign some years back that ran into the same tar pit; too many ideas, no consensus, time just gradually sucking away, and very little fun had. I think it lasted four sessions.
Which is why for my Dark Heresy campaign I did things a little differently. By having an Inquisitor superior, I was able to take a lot of options off the table right at the beginning during the breif, and then by having the superior sit in on the planning phase (so they could straight up shoot down the more outlandish plans). It cut down planning time vastly, and encouraged the players to back each others plans up in the face of a doubtful (and killjoy) superior.
I always like putting at least one speech-capable NPC in the party for this reason. Of course, I tend to prefer snarky servants to scary bosses, just so that the players feel in control. All you really need is someone to point out the obvious flaws in a plan.
One of my favourite characters in the Girl Genius comic is Moloch… the born minion who’s spent enough time around sparks to know exactly how a mad plan is going to go down… but also enough to know that nobody will listen to an underling until it’s too late.
“And it’s all the same if nothing of mine persuades you, of course: the future will come; and you will soon be at my side to pity and call me too true a prophet.”
I’m in a dnd 5e campaign that’s pretty much a series heists and rescues (We’re a criminal gang in Sharn). We use the flashback mechanic drawn from Blades in the Dark and I’m enjoying its use. The game flows better, as we can feel like we’re planning effectively without wasting an inordinate amount of time trying to plan for every scenario. I’d recommend trying something like flashbacks (or Brilliant Planner) in any campaign. I find it also helps offset the problem that communication between players and DM will always be imperfect.
I wonder if that kind of device could work along with the note-passing discussed last comic? I mean, my problem with note passing is that there’s often a lack of foreshadowing. There’s no way for the other players to know that something is going on in a private chat, meaning that the big reveals of PVP can come off as arbitrary rather than interesting.
Could the flashback mechanic be adapted to treachery…?
As I recall, we were raiding a camp of demon-apes to rescue a lost paladin. We had already made friends with the local volcano god and promised to send him a signal when the time was ripe to strike.
We plotted for about.. 20 minutes? and settled on our strike-plan.
GM: “Your plan is fireball, fireball, fireball?”
The sorcerer and wizard in unison: “Yep!”
GM: “And then..?”
Wiz and sorc look at each other in confusion..: “More fireball?”
Now that’s my kind of planning! Wish we had some players like you guys in that Shadowrun game. >_>
Where is the fun in a heist without get nuts from trying to plan for every contingency? 😛
But in truth we have not done too much heist-games. Too simple and common for us, i suppose 🙁
The Oglaf comic, i din’t know you liked that kind of things wink wink, at least make me laugh. It remind me of a game i DMed a while ago 🙂
I just realized that I should approach the Oglaf guys about doing a crossover.
With the Handbook of heroes, or the erotic fantasy one? I approve both approach but i would prefer the heroes one. Mainly for economical reasons 😀
The Cure light wounds comic have always made me want to play a cleric 😛
Heh. Stabbing humor.
My group actually executed an extremely successful heist, so I’m going to say the key is coming up with the plan in between sessions and being willing to abandon the specifics of the plan at the drop of a hat. Or in other words, going for broad strokes rather than specifics.
After coming up with an elaborate plan involving timing teleporting, stealth, and grapples to take out the guards without causing a fuss, we were intercepted on the way to the location by a rival thief trying to slow us down/scare us off. Several injuries, chase sequences, and one psionic charm person later, we convinced her to ally with us and she told us that we were mistaken about where the goods were actually being kept. So we snuck in through the sewers to the actual location, bested the alchemists and guards while stopping errant fires from spreading, and made good on our original idea of using Tenser’s Floating Disc to carry the loot out.
At this point, we split up. Half of us went to burn down the corrupt governor’s mansion as a diversion to attract all the soldiers, the other half went to our ship’s hiding place (running into the other groups rather miffed members along the way, but I was able to convince them their odds of taking advantage of the chaos we were causing were better than their odds of taking us on without casualties).
We reconvened at the docks, and boarded the ship the distracted soldiers had been using (which was much faster than ours) with the plan of either seizing it or destroying it so it couldn’t just chase us down. After a particularly dangerous fight with the remaining soldiers (my character was one misremembered rule away from dropping to -20 hp in the surprise round and becoming a fine character shaped mist), we succeeded in seizing the ship, found out that our employer was actually its owner and on board, had an awkward conversation in which we worked things out, and sailed off with our new ship, leaving her to reestablish control over the island (we may have neglected to tell her that the rival group was actually an insurgency likely to take her hostage in order to negotiate for independence).
So yeah. I’m not the DM, so I can’t know exactly what was going on behind the screen, but I imagine that he had a list of the factions/elements present in/around the town, and figured out as we acted what the most appropriate way for them to react based on logic and drama. As for our part, we rolled with the punches, took advantage of new information, abandoned aspects of the plan that were revealed to be unfeasible/unnecessary, and sowed chaos to keep the other groups confused as to our capabilities, our plans, and what the heck was actually going on at any given moment.
It probably helped that the island was essentially a relatively small closed system, with a limited number of factions and a limited number of resources they could draw on.
You know what’s interesting to me about this approach? It almost exactly echoes DMing advice. Check out “The Invisible Railroad” on page 75:
http://www.wizards.com/dnd/files/DM_Experience_2011.pdf
You make a plan, but you abandon it easily and adapt on the fly.
Played a bit of Karma in the Dark, which is effectively a heist-based RPG in a setting that’s modified to match that of Shadowrun. Rules include being able to flashback and retcon events or preparation during the mission, and generally lets the heist’s brilliance happen on the spot and avoiding having to accomodate for every contingency.
We needed to infiltrate a building full of security guards, cameras and security drones locked by a keycard, break into an office and nick some blackmail material from a celebrity’s manager’s safe.
Beforee the heist itself, my hacker got good luck hacking the cameras (learning of the drones and other details), one player managed to bribe some of the guards, another focused on safecracking practice, and a third used magic and klepto habits to nick a keycard.
The mission itself was fairly smooth – we sneaked in easily, unlocked the office with hacking a blank keycard (at the cost of my tools getting damaged), found the hidden safe thanks to my reviewing of camera footage, unlocked a safe (which our safecracker could talk to, thanks to their class ability) and stole the data with time to spare for an escape. My hacker, unwilling to leave a trail behind, lingered to wipe away all evidence of their entry, which gave one guard the time needed to investigate the disturbance in the office and catch us red-handed.
Luckily, said guard was already bribed by us! We tossed him his agreed-upon drugs and gained a new friendly contact before escaping into the night, with extra evidence of the celebrity’s own misdeeds in tow as paydata. Overall, a near textbook heist.
Gotta love that “we already bribed the guard” trope. It’s an extremely cinematic moment as the boots approach, the flashlight shines on the men in balaclavas rifling through files…
“Dammit Phillip. Would you get that thing out of my face?”
“Sorry. Do you fellows need anything? A coffee maybe?”
At one point, the very first group I was in was starting a session, and we absolutely for the life of us could not decide what it was we wanted to do. After like 20 minutes of dithering, the DM eventually stood up, said “Right. As you try to decide where to go, a storm sucks you up off your boat and spits you out in the middle of an orc fort on the other side of the continent. You are now behind enemy lines. What do you do?”
While it was heavy handed, it sure did settle the debate of where we were going. I took a lesson from that for my own DMing: when in doubt, hit somebody with an orc until they start moving.
There’s a range of attitudes on this point. My GM waited for two sessions. Yours waited 20 minutes. A little further up the page Simon said, “Half the session, sometimes… it depends on how long it takes before everyone gets tired of asking “but what about…?”.
Like so many things in the hobby, knowing when to step in as the GM is a matter of reading the room.
For my part, I think it’s best to error on the side of giving the players time to argue, and to only step in when it’s clear that they’re frustrated. That’s a judgement call though, and it’s a tough one to nail 100% of the time.
Currently playing through Crimson Throne (finishing up Book 2 in the next couple of weeks) and the difficultly of just 3 players agree on a plan in a timely manner definitely makes this comic’s comments hit home. I can’t even imagine 9 players trying to agree on something. Shadowrun in particular is tricky since it is such a massively complicated system in terms of what you can do and what you have to prepare for. At least with 9 players you would have enough specialists to realistically deal with almost anything that might come up.
It was… not an easy group. Lots of my favorite gamers in that party, but there were just too many of us.
How are you handling 3 plaers in Crimson Throne? I’m running with two PCs in a gestalt game, and gave them a free cohort healer (not-gestalted) to try and make up the difference in action economy.
Our GM is running an Oracle specializing in raising skeletons to help out. I’m playing a Warpriest (Bulwark archetype), and the others are playing an archery focused Ranger with a pseudodragon companion, and a Bloodrager. We’ve also managed to grab a couple of NPC Korvosan guards and a priest of Abadar to help us out in the last dungeon that we’re all individually running to avoid putting too much on the GM. As it is, we’ve nearly had TPKs at least five times prior to the final dungeon, most of which were completely avoidable. Additionally, almost all of our characters are rather dumb, so we miss out on a lot of the background information that could seriously help us out due to not being able to make the checks necessary (my character has the highest Intelligence at 10). We’re fortunate to have a fairly balanced group, but it would really help to have a more skill focused character that could ensure that we can actually get the information that we need.
Oof. That necromancer must have gone over well with the Pharasmins.
“Excuse us good ladies. We are here to stop a corpse robber. Never mind the walking corpses.”
Fortunately it hasn’t come up yet, though it’s only a matter of time, especially since his character lives in the graveyard as a gravedigger. Plus we’ve made sure not to have corpses marching down the street, so it’s only been recently that he’s been digging up mass graves to get more skeletons.
An NPC friend of the party had disappeared, and when we discovered her fate, she was kept prisoner in some sort of fleshy demonic demi-plane where the entrance was on an island magically covered in mind-numbing fog, populated by very nasty locals. Her essence was being slowly drained to empower a demon lord, like those sort of evil magical sarlacc.
After looking at various ways to stage a rescue, each time ending in a brick wall of “far too dangerous”, our final plan was to cheese it as much as possible. See, in our campaign, the ethereal plane connects pretty much everything if you know how to walk through its mists: you only need to have a clear idea of your destination and you can reach its ethereal side. Then of course you also need to know how to enter and exit the ethereal plane, but we’ve got spells for that. So we traveled to her prison through the ethereal plane instead of geographically, yeeted her into the ethereal, and replaced her with her weight in alchemical high explosive and a holy delayed blast fireball. It was very satisfying.
After that we have started using ethereal raids more and more because it works, so the GM has introduced various side effects to discourage the cheese, including being scolded by ethereal spirits for the method we use to cross (if you’ve read The Subtle Knife from the Dark Materials series, it’s kind of similar in concept). Still, sometimes, it’s worth it.
Archive binge complete. Nice webcomic you have here. Got linked from Rusty and co. a few days ago.
I, for one, enjoy overplanning. The planning itself is interesting (assuming you have enough tools and information to work with), and there’s nothing quite like having one of the contingencies you thought of save your bacon.
…but I wouldn’t subject my gaming companions to that if I wasn’t fairly certain they also enjoyed it. But I am, so we do.
I also am not a big fan of heists – if anything, I think I’m kinda like Paladin, most of all, bahaha – but I have run two, and I have something that’s worked really well for them, in my experience. Keep in mind that it may be because of my style as a GM. Anyway.
With both cases, I had an NPC ‘info-broker’, who could have been a PC if a PC filled that niche! The party consulted them to ‘case’ the area of their heist, and on both sessions I closed with the info-broker promising to get floor plans, notable info, security, etc.
When they got back, I had the character go over the layout of the place, with a section suitable to several of each character’s skills, and various ‘recommended’ plans of attack. The reason I had several skills per character was that so that it wasn’t me arbitrarily making buildings that were a good challenge/target for the PCs, but…
“Keseslrig, it’d be a cinch for someone like you to drive up, you know, say you’re one of the contestants. Or perhaps take a truck in, blending in with the mechanics for an in is more your style, eh? And of course you could try ‘requisitioning’ a chopper…
And Roberta, of course, I know you that cracking a vault doesn’t mean anything when you’ve got such an explosive wit. But maybe blowing the door would be a bit busy, too busy for a night like this? There’s an underground maintenance tunnel underneath the hedge maze that connects to the main building, and what’s more, the storage shed – you could make an even more bomb-bastic entrance, that way…”
… It did two things.
One, each player got hyped about how they wanted to handle their ‘segment’, focusing solely on their plans for that. Two, it was up to them how they’d link their bits together, meaning they had a vested interest in doing that instead of just ‘showing off.’ Finally, since every option would take them where they needed to go regardless of how they go there, it didn’t matter how needlessly complex their plans were – though they weren’t too bad, in my examples.
Finally, in case one the info-broker was killed, and the in the second kidnapped for helping the PCs after their successful (I would’ve let them fail, too, of course!) heists, giving them something to focus on right after what was supposed to be a triumph for them.
I still don’t like heists, I’m boring and not a big fan of them. But my little schema helps me help my players have fun, so!
Sounds like a lot of work coming up with multiple plans for the PCs to choose from a la carte. But by the same token, I can see how that kind of prompting would speed the process. So in short, I think this is a great technique, but I have theories about why you might not have much fun running such a thing.