Is it fun to plan a heist?

[hawkeyefan]

Some people want the "I love it when a plan comes together" experience, and they want it honestly. So there is no singular right answer.

I agree with your last sentence 100%.

I really disagree with your use of “honestly”, though. No one’s being dishonest by doing it another way.

No one’s make believe is more true than anyone else’s.

 

[Emberashh]

Then what is the point of playing a character who is good at talking? Is that relegated to the players who know how to talk?

I didn't say social mechanics are a dead end; I said social combat is.

 

[Reynard]

I agree with your last sentence 100%.

I really disagree with your use of “honestly”, though. No one’s being dishonest by doing it another way.

No one’s make believe is more true than anyone else’s.

I think you are misunderstanding my use of "honestly" there. I only meant without the benefit of plot manipulative mechanics -- to make the choices at the time in play from the perspective of their character, as someone else put it upthread.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think you are misunderstanding my use of "honestly" there. I only meant without the benefit of plot manipulative mechanics -- to make the choices at the time in play from the perspective of their character, as someone else put it upthread.

Yes, I understood what you meant. I think “honestly” is a poor choice for the reasons I said. It implies dishonesty to the other method.

No one’s actually planning a heist and pulling it off. Everyone’s pretending to do so. I don’t think that needs a value judgment.

 

[Reynard]

Yes, I understood what you meant. I think “honestly” is a poor choice for the reasons I said. It implies dishonesty to the other method.

No one’s actually planning a heist and pulling it off. Everyone’s pretending to do so. I don’t think that needs a value judgment.

I wasn't making one. That is a thing you are applying, even after I explained. So how you feel about it is on you.

 

[Blue]

Not necessarily. Thats why I pointed to the issue of mechanizing what humans are good at doing. You don't need fantastical traits to do something like planning a heist, even in a fantastical context.

This is why I've said in other discussions that things like Social Combat are complete dead ends as mechanics. You don't need rules to talk.

Except human beings in heist fiction don't rely on hindsight in their adventures.

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.

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.

D&D is a blend of player ability and character ability. Combat is player tactics and character numbers. Anything you arbitrarily decide there shouldn't be rules for, you are really saying "characters shouldn't be able to do this well unless their players can do it well". And that's the exact opposite of escape fantasy where we play mighty wizard casting spells and sly rogues jumping on the back of dragons.

Oh, hey, though that reminds me. That's another reason we need Flashbacks - to allow players who aren't so great at planning to play mastermind characters. Which should be just as valid as my tone deaf self playing a bard.

Thanks, your bad example about denying people mechanics to allow their character to be good as something even if they aren't brought up an additional reason why every game that spends a decent amount of time on planning needs rules for it.

Sure, if time efficiency is absolutely critical I can buy that for a dollar.

One of my regulars is a teacher who gets up at 5:30am. We stop at 10pm. We gather online at 7pm after dinner and are social for a bit, leaving about 2.5 hours for play. During the summer that spikes up to 3.5 hours to play. I don't believe that I'm in some exceptionally small minority - lots of people play weeknights after work.

So, we know that for some reasonable sized group of players, time efficiency is important. We have a rule that can help it greatly, and can be completely ignored by those who don't want to use it. Do we add this?

Of course. It improves the experience or is neutral.

I know people who don't like playing spellcasters. They don't play spellcasters. But they don't push to exclude players by saying there shouldn't be spellcasters. And that's what your arguments feel like. Having a flashback mechanism allows the table who want to use it the benefits, but takes nothing away from the table who don't. So as a net positive for the playerbase at the whole, arguing against it seems exclusionary.

But at the same time, when I'm talking about tools I'm not referring to overly complex Planning procedures that have to be followed in X way every single time.

I'm referring to having your basic "controls", to simplify, having the right cross section of depth and simplicity that people have the freedom to act in the way they want to accomplish whatever task they set themselves.

If one takes to rulings over rules, you can typically get there with just Ability scores if you want to go super minimalist.

Okay, I've talked about how I Flashback provides a lot of benefits. If you are saying "You can flashback, I just don't want rules for it", then I'll doff my hat to you. You'll still be wrong - I explained why with the example of RPGs with no rules and why rules are good to provide consistency, shared understanding, and take a load off the DM. But at least you'll be in the right direction.

But if you're saying that "by no tools except these, you can't do things like flashbacks", then NO, you literally can't create the same experience with all of the benefits I've explained. So this is not a worthwhile replacement and worth no discussion.

I'm deleting the skill discussion - there is nothing here I can respond to because none of it in the slightest addresses the point about flashbacks I have made again and again. It talks about other things with planning which I have no problems with.

And if you can square the difference there in a way that isn't just dismissing it, you'll probably be the first person Ive ever had an argument with over these games that I can see eye to eye with.

If no one you talk to can see eye to eye with you on this, the common element is you. Are you saying every single other person you talked to about this is wrong and you are the only one who is correct? Let me know, because I don't think I would have a chance to change your mind if everyone else has also failed.

Sure, but it doesn't have to. The mechanic fundamentally works on the basis of conjuring things into the gameworld after the fact; thats the issue with it.

It didn't.

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.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I wasn't making one. That is a thing you are applying, even after I explained. So how you feel about it is on you.

Sure, I get that. Just explaining why it’s a poor way to frame it, in my opinion.

I think part of the allure of simulation… and any similar take on it in RPGing… is the idea of “I did it”. The idea that the player has acheived something… that if they were going to plan a heist, they could do it.

And that’s just not what’s happening at the table. One method is not any more of an accomplishment than the other. Because all anyone is doing is pretending.

Perhaps we could say it’s puzzle solving. Or game play. But to do that, we’re then putting both methods (and any other) on a level playing field. Good play or poor play, good puzzle work or poor puzzle work.

Not honest or dishonest.

 

[Emberashh]

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

Well for one, hindsight isn't a skill or something you can practice. And more than that, the actual benefit of hindsight is about learning from your past experiences and applying them to future experiences.

So if the flashback is supposed to be leveraging hindsight, then its completely backwards, and no, it does not fit anything I've said. Please don't try to play twisty word games; I meant what I said and I explained my reasoning. It doesn't suddenly mean something else.

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.

This is why we have descriptive roleplaying. You do not need rules to talk.

Anything you arbitrarily decide there shouldn't be rules for, you are really saying "characters shouldn't be able to do this well unless their players can do it well". And that's the exact opposite of escape fantasy where we play mighty wizard casting spells and sly rogues jumping on the back of dragons.

Yes, that's called player skill and it doesn't conflict with power fantasies. And its completely beside the point, because you're not getting what I'm even talking about.

Again, I called out social combat. That is what's a dead end.

When I say you don't need rules to talk, I'm saying that literally. You do not need rules to talk to your real life friends sitting across a table from you or on a discord call.

And keep in mind too, what you point out goes the other way and is just as bad. If someone makes an eloquent speech IRL and the game forces that effort to be wasted because of a dice roll, that's still bad. But the rhetoric you stumbled into would pose that situation as a-okay, when it really shouldn't be.

to allow players who aren't so great at planning to play mastermind characters.

This just tells me you have a low opinion of what people are capable of. And also that you don't get these games aren't competitions.

If you've set yourself to be in a mindset where any of that matters, you've already taken on an extremely bad attitude to have in RPGs.

Thanks, your bad example about denying people mechanics to allow their character to be good as something even if they aren't brought up an additional reason why every game that spends a decent amount of time on planning needs rules for it.

I mean, knock on wood, but I've literally run RPGs for kids with downs syndrome. You wanna take a guess what those kids didn't have an issue doing?

Expectations are important too. I didn't expect them to be conjuring up Oceans 14 (not that we did a heist anyway; they wanted to slay and capture dragons and slay and capture dragons they did. No easy feat in 5e), but they weren't sitting there at a loss either. And in fact that particular group were really big on the whole story telling aspects because despite their conditions they were all pretty voracious, if slow, readers.

Putting ones opinion of an aetherial other person so low that you put them lower than the capabilities of children with debilitating cognitive issues, is just gross.

And besides all that, it just goes back to the fact that it isn't a competition. The plan doesn't have to be good or clever than what Jimmy the City Planner could come up with, it just has to work, and that doesn't take much in a game where half the fun is in the plan going sideways anyway.

So, we know that for some reasonable sized group of players, time efficiency is important.

Sure, but again, that doesn't make it a universal.

And particularly so when you're loading the question. You're talking about efficiency in terms of seeing all this plot and stuff happen, and that isn't actually important to everyone.

Quite a lot of people are there for the roleplay, and aren't going to care if we're speedily running through 5 adventures in 3 hours. After all, a lot of new RPG players these days, almost all of them in my experience, are coming from places like Critical Role or Dimension 20, and screaming through plots or adventures isn't what's appealing to these players.

And in the greater scheme of things, people don't end up playing DND or other rpgs for decades just because they're time inefficient or whatever. They play that long because they're there for more than just a plot or some speedy adventure.

Having a flashback mechanism allows the table who want to use it the benefits, but takes nothing away from the table who don't.

This kind of wishy washy argument can be thrown at anything you want, so its not particularly good.

And especially so given the exclusionary argument is completely fictional, conjured I'm sure by your hindsight to discredit what I've been saying.

But if you're saying that "by no tools except these, you can't do things like flashbacks", then NO, you literally can't create the same experience with all of the benefits I've explained. So this is not a worthwhile replacement and worth no discussion.

Well for one you seem to be losing the plot here. Its not a replacement, its an alternative way to structure a game as a whole to support different kinds of experiences, and one I'll add isn't some newfangled thing I came up with.

I'm literally describing how OSR games work.

If no one you talk to can see eye to eye with you on this, the common element is you. Are you saying every single other person you talked to about this is wrong and you are the only one who is correct? Let me know, because I don't think I would have a chance to change your mind if everyone else has also failed.

So again you're deliberately exaggerating and misrepresenting what I say. That is not a constructive way to argue and you should reconsider.

And for two, its been my experience that people like yourself don't actually want to reach any mutual understanding, because that would violate the dogma. And given what you've said in response here, that isn't an inaccurate assessment of you.

I went in pretty deep on discussing the flashback from a design perspective and peeling away all the chaff so we could examine what it does and how it does it, and compare and contrast with other takes on the exact same mechanic. I explicitly offered up my own game design for scrutiny to do this, explicitly so that it couldn't be claimed I'm just asserting things without evidence.

Your response was to completely ignore all of it. Do you really think you're going to make me or anyone else come around when you argue like that?

I get into these discussions because I actually like talking about game design and really digging into things, and especially so with regards to games like BITD because they do have good things to offer from a design perspective, and thats evidenced by how much its influenced my own game as I've become more learned about design and how to critically examine games at a mechanical level.

But with you folks its like you just really want to hear nothing but praise for the game and any dissent has to be quashed by any means necessary, even if you trip over yourselves. Its all a pseudo form of dialogue that never goes anywhere and just goes round and round in circles until somebody either gets kicked out of the thread or they give up.

Nothing is conjured into the gameworld after the fact. That's who point of it being a flashback. It was done previously.

Did it or did it not exist until the mechanic was engaged?

Rhetorical question, it did not. Scrodinger's Mechanic isn't a thing.

 

[Emberashh]

Can't exactly delete a comment after it occurs me I don't actually want to interact with somebody. Oh well.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I’m not dismissing anyone’s game at all. I’m placing them all on equal ground.

And the games are pretend. I don’t know why that should be seen as dismissive at all. Pretend is amazing!

Also, @Emberashh - you continue to reply to me and then block me. That’s against forum rules. It’s not the first time you’ve done it.

@Umbran @Dannyalcatraz - I don’t know if @Emberashh will see this post as he appears to have placed me on ignore again. Can you please let him know that if he wants to block me to do so without replying to me first per the forum rules?