I’m not trying to commit to anything specific right now, but here are some thoughts based on a Twitter thread I did a little while back. Following up on this post.
It seems to me that a lot of the good drama in heist fiction comes from either not having enough people to deal with the complications that arise before or during the heist. It’s a good moment when a robber has to break into the governor’s safe while also keeping up appearances at the dinner party or when the fighty person has to do tech stuff. Any time Danny Ocean and Rusty throw Linus Caldwell into an unfamiliar situation is a great example of this.
I think you could model this pretty well by representing each robber in a heist as a “worker” (probably with an expertise or two each) and assigning them to tasks during the job. Cracking the safe, keeping the mark distracted, drilling the escape tunnel, all that’s a different task. Some tasks need multiple people. Some tasks are ongoing, some can be finished quickly, some probably need a progress clock or similar. The more people you bring onto a heist, the more stuff you can do simultaneously, but the greater the risk, publicity, etc.
During the heist itself, each robber gets one flashback. As complications arise as results of bad planning, unlucky dice rolls, etc., the players can either send a robber to deal with it, abandoning their current post, or spend flashbacks to say how that robber mitigated or negated the problem (think of this as resistance rolls from Blades in the Dark). As the game progresses and more complications arise, players have a narrower selection of robbers to use in flashbacks, leading to situations where a robber will have to do something they are completely unsuited for. That’s the good heist drama we want.
This should make running the heist a question of planning to get ahead of complications, prioritizing tasks, quickly changing the plan, stuff like that. The more you anticipate, the less you have to scramble to fix your problems with flashbacks. Hopefully that makes players feel like they’re actually running a grift or heist, not just pretending to.
There’s some nice potential for interplay between robber skills, progress clocks, and flashbacks. Maybe some different mastermind playbooks that lets each player mess with the economy in a different way? Robbers that can swap skills for more flashbacks? It might get kind of crunch, but I think that’s okay so long as you can still play out scenes and have it matter.
All of this is up in the air for now. I’ll try to get something playable ready.
NMBJ 