Is it fun to plan a heist?

[pemerton]

Okay, who's a human who is actually thinking? The player. Are they better at hindsight then foresight? Yes. Flashback mechanics fit what players are better at better than none.

Who's a "human being in a heist fiction"? The characters. Are the characters relying on hindsight in their adventures? No. The flashback are things that happened previously for the character.

In other words, flashbacks meet all of your requirements better than no flashback mechanism.

<snip>

Nothing is conjured into the gameworld after the fact. That's who point of it being a flashback. It was done previously. It just was done off camera without those outside the gameworld, such as the DM or players knowing about it. But in the gameworld, it happened before. And it needs to follow all the rules and sense of the gameworld.

It is striking, to me, just how difficult a lot of discussion of RPGs makes it to express simple points like the one I have quoted.

RPGing is shared fiction. That fiction gets authored at all sorts of times - some as prep, some during play. And the temporality of that fiction is in all sorts of relationships to the "now" of the PCs: when the GM decides to tell the players about a castle their PCs sees, that establishes that, prior to "now", someone built the castle; when a player decides to write "10' pole" on their equipment list that establishes that, prior to "now", there was a tree and a logger and a maker of timber wares; etc.

Suppose, in a game of D&D, that the GM tells the players that their PCs see the castle, and a player says, "Can I recognise who might have built it?" And the GM asks, "How would you know?" And the player replies, "Well, my PC has training in History and the Soldier background, so I know a fair bit about castles and who builds them." So the GM replies, "Fair enough. Make a roll on INT (History) against DC 15". The player rolls, and succeeds, and the GM tells them what the know and recognise about this castle.

That seems to me a completely unremarkable episode of D&D play. It's also a flashback - it establishes that sometime in the past, the PC did or learned something that is relevant to what they do or think or recognise "now".

The difference with a BitD Flashback, as far as I can see, is that the BitD version more easily extends across a wider range of activities, a wider range of upshots (eg not just remembering things you did, but still having the tangible benefits like the rope you remember you brought along), and more immediate salience to the problem that the PCs are currently confronted by.

Those differences might be interesting to talk about, but none of them pertains to anything to do with the temporality of events in the fiction, or of the temporality of authorship at the table.

 

[Anon Adderlan]

All depends on whether planning actually helps you achieve your objectives. You can't form a plan without gathering intelligence first, which can lead to potential complications in itself. But once you form a plan the GM will be adding complications anyway, so the only thing that does is provide inspiration.

Partially play through the heist during planning, including rolls…but then also play through the heist after the planning stage, “in real time” as it were, including rolls. It seem like going from disconnected “writers’ room” play to immersive “real time” play.

You’d just play through it twice.

Ultimately it's just the standard action loop extended: Assess -> Plan -> Execute.

but while they're out plotting, they're accumulating Heat, which goes into the GM's pocket as a metacurrency that they can use to introduce plot twists during the execution of the heist and which they'll need to improvise around. The longer you spend during the recon phase, the more you'll know going in - but you'll also have more Heat, which means more possibilities for surprises. Conversely, if you do the bare minimum of legwork, you might have missed some crucial intel, but the GM won't be able to throw as many nasty wrenches your way.

So does planning actually help here or is it all a zero sum game?

Also, you really should have rules to talk. Because just like the asthmatic math major can play a hulking barbarian, the shy stuttering introvert should be able to play their power fantasy of a silver tongued con man. I don't require the player of a ranger to be explain the woodcraft of picking a good campsite to deal with both weather and hide it from hobgoblin patrols.

To be fair they were talking about social combat, which never made sense to me either. And while it's commendable to make a game as accessible as possible, the core activity of play is conversation, and you can't remove the importance of that without entirely changing the kind of game you're playing.

Why do you feel it hurts your play if someone else makes use of a flashback? It's a long standing literary device. If it's like BitD flashbacks it will usually have a cost associated with it that means they are picking that over other choices, while your character retains all of that currency for the other, more common uses.

All depends on whether the more 'common' usages are as effective mechanically. Because if they aren't then not engaging with Flashbacks will put players at a disadvantage.

 

[Blue]

All depends on whether the more 'common' usages are as effective mechanically. Because if they aren't then not engaging with Flashbacks will put players at a disadvantage.

The way Blades in the Dark handles this is that the currency used for flashbacks, Stress, is also commonly used elsewhere. It's used to push yourself, to help others, and to resist damage. And it does not have a chance to refresh until after a heist is done, and even then usually does not refresh all the way. So there's absolutely an opportunity cost to the flashback, and not using the flashback mechanic leaves your character more able to do other things. Considering that on a crew, it makes more sense for some characters to flashback than others, doing so or not needs to be well balanced against each other.

 

[Schmoe]

It would be more fun if players did it like movie scenes. But they don't/can't.

They don't, because they are players and it's very hard to trust that a GM won't look to exploit a flaw in their plan.
....

I think it might be interesting if there were a heist game that had a planning phase that actually helped create the adventure, and then an execution phase that introduced various complications.

Imagine the GM sets an initial scenario and a goal. The players then go through an iterative process where they come up with a plan based on what they know, then ask questions like "what do you need to know to make this work?", or "what do you need to prep to make this work?". After several phases of this process, the GM actually has an outline of how the heist will proceed and can walk through each phase, introducing complications at different steps along the way, with complications drawn from some list of challenges that aren't instant failure for the overall mission. Failing to overcome complications successfully could instead make future phases of the operation more difficult.

I think this would make both the planning more fun by giving it some structure and procedure, and make the execution more fun by eliminating the "DM screws you" or "players fail to uncover the one minute detail that everything hinges on" aspects of it.

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

I think it might be interesting if there were a heist game that had a planning phase that actually helped create the adventure, and then an execution phase that introduced various complications.

Imagine the GM sets an initial scenario and a goal. The players then go through an iterative process where they come up with a plan based on what they know, then ask questions like "what do you need to know to make this work?", or "what do you need to prep to make this work?". After several phases of this process, the GM actually has an outline of how the heist will proceed and can walk through each phase, introducing complications at different steps along the way, with complications drawn from some list of challenges that aren't instant failure for the overall mission. Failing to overcome complications successfully could instead make future phases of the operation more difficult.

I think this would make both the planning more fun by giving it some structure and procedure, and make the execution more fun by eliminating the "DM screws you" or "players fail to uncover the one minute detail that everything hinges on" aspects of it.

There's a system designed by designer John Wick (nothing to do with the movies) which works like that. The GM says something like "your mission is to rescue these hostages" and the characters plan the operation and their plan guides the resulting mission.

 

[Pedantic]

But that's authorship of the situation, not planning to overcome a known series of obstacles. Planning is about martialing known resources against defined problems. You might not have perfect information on either side of that equation, but if you don't have specific resources or specific obstacles, you aren't engaged in the core loop of the activity.

These are all ways to generate an after action report or story about the events that happened that could have been the product of planning a heist, but don't treat the planning as the activity itself.

I could see a better procedure for generating obstacles that are aligned with the player's capabilities, a more consistent information gathering procedure, a review of the tools players have to proactively and reactively handle problems, and even a cleaner system to handle the evolving board state as a heist paid out and complications arise.

Fundamentally though, to be planning at all, the obstacles must exist in some discernable state before the heist occurs, and players must be able to devise more and less effective (or risky) means of overcoming them.

 

[CandyLaser]

So does planning actually help here or is it all a zero sum game?

It does help, but it comes at a cost, and it adds a bit of a push-your-luck mechanic - will the extra intel you get from doing more prep and planning help, or will you end up accumulating more Heat than it's worth?

 

[Reynard]

Maybe the solution is to make the info gathering phases fun, dynamic and consequential -- and frequent. That way the planning process is both distributed AND relevant to changing states. Use planning as a brief after action downtime activity at the end of an info gathering session. Rinse and repeat until it is time to actually do the thing.

 

[Committed Hero]

This is like the mystery genre, in that players who read and watch a lot of heist stories will be "better" at coming up with elements in a session.

 

[Schmoe]

Maybe the solution is to make the info gathering phases fun, dynamic and consequential -- and frequent. That way the planning process is both distributed AND relevant to changing states. Use planning as a brief after action downtime activity at the end of an info gathering session. Rinse and repeat until it is time to actually do the thing.

Right. I don't see planning as a static one-time thing. I see planning as an iterative process of question, followed by activities to generate the answers, which in turn yield more questions. Part of the way to make planning fun is to make it part of the game.