Image courtesy pixabay.com / DasWortgewand

Late last night (as I write this), one of my favorite Anime movies (outside of the works of Studio Ghibli) was repeated on television. The Castle Of Cagliostro is a complex interaction of several different plotlines, but at it’s heart is a variation on that old plot standard, The Heist.

More pure representations of that plot type include Ocean’s 11, 12, and 13; The Sting; and The Italian Job. Heist subplots and variations also find their way into a host of other movies – everything from Terminator II to Indiana Jones I, II, III, and even IV, to Big Trouble In Little China, to Star Wars. Note that a “rescue” plotline is simply a heist with less planning and a living “treasure”.

As a result, the Heist plotline has been on my mind today, and I have realized that – if this is any example – the Heist is drastically under-represented in most RPG campaigns, especially Fantasy.

Under-represented? What about The Dungeon Crawl?

There are substantial differences between the Heist and the Dungeon Crawl, just as there are a few similarities.

In a Heist plotline, the protagonists goal is to steal a specific item and get away with it. In the process, they have to first identify the security measures protecting the item and plan a solution to them. In the course of the plot, there will be setbacks and reverses that the protagonists have to overcome, some without notice. It is the struggle to overcome these obstacles through cleverness, planning, and preparation, and escape with the loot, preferably before the theft is even discovered, that is the central goal and climax of the plot.

In a dungeon crawl, the protagonists goal is to discover what treasure there may be, killing or evading all opposition. Security measures are to be discovered and overcome as they come to them. While setbacks and reverses may occur, these are mostly in the form of mistakes by the protagonists or conditions that handicap them unexpectedly (relative to the opposition), or some combination thereof. There is often no overall plot, just a sequence of things that happen. Obstacles are overcome with a combination of cleverness and main strength. Once they have the loot, it’s usually pretty easy to escape with it, though force may be applied again to deal with enemy creatures that stand between the protagonists and the exit. Little or no research and planning is involved. The ultimate room contains the equivalent of an end-of-level monster that has the best loot and overcoming this is the climax of the plot.

Better versions imbue the dungeon with a theme and a narrative thread, often related to the creation of the dungeon or the placement of valuables within, and this often holds clues to the nature of the final threat. But even in such cases, each room is usually a small plot within itself, and force is usually the ultimate solution.

Comparing the two, it can be seen that any resemblance between a Dungeon Crawl and a Heist plotline is usually pretty superficial.

Why are Heists so rare in Fantasy RPGs?

This is a much harder question to answer, and I think that it often comes down to a combination of the GM wanting to show off his cleverness and the GM not wanting to waste prep.

You see, a heist doesn’t require every room to be cleared – protagonists will only interact with those areas that lie directly between them and their planned course of action. Every room that the PCs don’t have to go through but that is prepped by the GM (which he has to do, since he doesn’t know what the PC’s plan of action will be until they create it, and the PC’s plans will be formulated upon the basis of the GM’s designs and what they can learn of them) is perceived as wasted effort.

If you go to all the trouble of decking out a room with a fiendishly clever challenge, it can be extremely frustrating for the PCs to blow on by. The natural temptation is to give the PCs no information, or unreliable information, forcing them to interact with and solve every challenge. And that transforms the Heist into the Dungeon Crawl.

Heists in non-fantasy genres

Some other genres fair a great deal better when it comes to representing the Heist plotline. They are a staple of Cthulhu/Gaslight campaigns, and often represented in Steampunk campaigns as well. They are the sine-qua-none of Spy campaigns, where the “loot” is usually information, and which often add the reverse heist (breaking into somewhere to plant evidence or information and getting out undetected) for variety.

Superhero campaigns often put the shoe on the other foot – the GM’s NPCs are those planning The Heist and the PC’s goal is to stop them, or work out (after the fact) what was stolen, how, and by whom. There are usually larger-than-life ramifications to the answers. Occasional variations will put superheros into the position of a spy adventure, and that usually as close as they come to a genuine Heist plotline.

Western-oriented games may have a heist element, but the security options available are so limited that little finesse is required in either bank heists or rescue-the-prisoner actions.

Pulp campaigns would seem ready-made for the occasional Heist, but it’s all too easy for the GMs to fall victim to the same motives that inhibit Heist plotlines in Fantasy Games, turning these into Dungeon Crawls.

Sci-fi Heists often run adrift on the same difficulties that face Sci-fi mysteries and detective stories, which I have written about in the past on at least one (and I think two) occasions – though, without internet access (this was written while my internet was down), I can’t offer links. Mostly, this genre also falls back on the occasional spy-oriented plotline as a way around this difficulty.

A possible solution

If I presume that I have correctly identified the problem, let’s attempt a solution.

Well, to start with, if my diagnosis is correct it means that the problem should be significantly smaller in scope in campaigns with a high level of improv by the GM. This might well be a case of over-plotting.

That offers a key point of direction: the problem lies in trying to structure and prep a Heist plotline the way the GM would a dungeon crawl. So, let’s look at a different plot structure and see where that takes us.

  1. Start by laying out the main approach that you expect the PCs to employ, the one that they have the skills and resources to overcome. Do this in a step-by-step manner – challenge and solution. Ideally, you need one challenge for each PC to overcome.
  2. Next, you need to ensure that force is not an acceptable solution to any of these challenges. The goal is stealth. Note that strength is not the same thing as force; having a nimble character climb something and secure a line to which the team’s heavy equipment is attached at the bottom enables the rest to climb up, but hauling their equipment up after them might require strength. Or there might be a spring-loaded door that the strong man has to hold open. Or any of a number of other challenges where strength provides the answer or part of the answer.
  3. Third, you need at least two alternative routes. These will hold some challenges that the PCs can overcome and some that they can’t, though it’s possible that they could do so with the right resources and a bit of creativity.
  4. Fourth, you need to think about escape routes that the PCs might use. Their first instinct will be to go out the way they came in, but that’s no fun; you may need to alter one or more of the challenges listed on the primary route to something in which the solution blocks that path as an exit. Once you’ve done that, look at the alternative routes – can one of them be used as an exit, or do the challenges they present all function in a bi-directional manner?
  5. Fifth, you may need to shift the paradigm of the players’ thinking from Dungeon Crawl to Heist. You can do that by several means – one is by having the PCs learn of failed past attempts to penetrate the security by similarly-proficient groups who tried to simply bull their way through, or by explicitly mentioning the paranoia of the in-game designer of the target location, or even by starting the adventure off with the PCs running headlong into one of those barriers that they don’t have the expertise to penetrate and needing to get away and regroup before trying again. Consigning the whole initial attempt to penetrate the target to backstory taking place in-between adventures tells the players that their usual approach won’t work and you don’t want them to waste time on it. However, I recommend that you make sure that the PCs accept the commission in-game, probably at the end of the preceding game session, so that the sequence is: roleplay accepting the commission, end session, and start the next session with the PCs neck-deep in hot water as a result. Also, if you adopt this technique, make sure that they are down but not out – everyone needs to get away (relatively) unscathed, though you should make them sweat on the escape.
  6. Go over everything and excise-and-replace anything that’s silly or foolish. A room that you can only safely cross while walking backwards is silly. You might get away with that in a dungeon crawl, but this is NOT a dungeon crawl.
  7. Put together a backstory for the place, the mission, the target, etc.
  8. Do a rough map of the target, assigning each challenge to a room and using the flow between them as indicators of the exits from each room. Prepare a minimal description of each resulting space. You could do this before preparing the backstory, but I find that the backstory helps inform the map contents.
  9. How are the PCs supposed to gather the information that they need to execute a planned penetration of the target? Information sources, how the PCs find those sources,
    and how they can get the information out of them.
  10. Plan your setbacks, and how they can be overcome. As I have written many times before, where there is one solution to a problem, there are usually several. The same principle applies to the challenges you’ve posed.
  11. Add some dynamic, changing, elements. Do a schedule for wandering patrols, for example, making sure that these do not compromise the challenges that you’ve set in place. Think of the heist location as a bulls-eye surrounded by multiple layers; each challenge gets you past a single layer, one step closer to the center. There’s a trick that helps in this regard which I’ll show you in a moment.
  12. Prep the personalities and attributes of the occupants. Make sure to include the interplay between small groups, e.g. pairs of guards, as a dynamic element (“The first time you see them, they are discussing baseball. The second time, they are talking about the high prices in the market place. The third time…”).
  13. Finally, prep exterior descriptions of the target location in rather more detail. I like to factor in some external circumstance that affects that description, because that makes the whole situation feel more dynamic and real (“In autumn, add leaves on the ground. In winter, there’s snow. In summer, there are decorations for a local holiday. In spring, children often steal fruit from the trees around the target”). These all pose additional minor challenges to the Heist and/or the escape, but may also present opportunities. It’s a small touch that packs a lot of verisimilitude. Of course, lots of dead leaves implies a gardener to rake them up; snow implies someone shoveling it off the primary walkways, and so on.
  14. That’s it – you’re ready to play.

The Heist Challenge Map

This is a “map” of an entirely different sort, and one that’s rather easier to draw up, once you get used to it. For the benefit of the visually-impaired, I have also provided a text version (not as user-friendly, I’m afraid), with some additional explanatory notes – you can download it as a PDF from this link (32.7K).

The first column shows (symbolically) an alternative route in (which may also furnish an alternative route out); the second shows a second alternative route in, but note that there’s a one-way passage in the fourth room, so this can’t be used as an escape route. The third column shows the expected path, and observe that it also has a one-way passage in the third room. The fourth column has the default escape route planned by the GM, complete with another one-way passage – this time, one pointing outwards, so it can’t be used as an entry point.

This adventure is clearly meant to challenge the PCs – along every path, they encounter at least one challenge that they don’t currently have the skills and/or resources to master. However, before each of them except the penultimate challenges on the alternative routes, there is a dynamic element that could potentially be hijacked by the PCs to get them around that hurdle – often only to face a different one, but still… Those two challenges without alternatives are the main difference between the primary entry route and the alternatives, and are what makes the primary route a better choice than those alternatives.

Finally, notice that almost every dynamic element links to or from either the primary route or the escape route, ensuring that almost all of them offer a potential interaction or setback to the PCs in the course of this heist.

You can also distinguish this arrangement into three layers – the first two spaces on the primary route and the last two exit spaces are challenges that the PCs can overcome; they simply mean giving up this attempt and getting back to square one. Add to that the first two spaces of the first alternative, and you have a situation in which it is relatively easy to get in part-way; getting past these challenges, however, only gets you into the second layer, where security is considerably tighter. And, even if you should manage to get all the way in, getting back out is almost as difficult.

This is an environment designed to isolate intruders and confine them, making it relatively high-security.

You can also think of this as a schematic for a dartboard, as suggested earlier. The Loot is in the bulls-eye; each row above it represents another ring, divided unequally into four. That also implies that you might be able to progress left-to-right or right-to-left from one space on a given level to another (assume that there’s a wrap-around from escape route to alternative one).

If you were to use this as your guide to a physical map of the premises, making the dartboard square or rectangular instead of round, you would generate a perfectly plausible secured facility of some kind. That could be a Necromancer’s Lair or a bio-weapons lab – the same general principles apply.

But I would rather generate a symbolic map like this, and a set of verbal descriptions of the spaces (in highly abbreviated form), to which I would improv additional description. That means that there would be absolutely no angst involved in the PCs not visiting any given space on the map; most of them are there simply to pose challenges to the PCs. If they can’t find a solution, the resulting roadblock simply steers them to another challenge.

By forcing the PCs to plan each possible route and assess the challenges posed after gathering intelligence on the target, they experience each space in a virtual sense, anyway. Nothing goes to waste.

So if that is the only reason for the under-representation of Heist plotlines in RPGs, consider it solved!


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