Is it fun to plan a heist?

[Wofano Wotanto]

DM complications can indeed take many different forms, be they wandering guards, locked doors, unexpected security upgrades or wandering monsters/civilians.

Add "another group of heisters after the same target" to all that. Rivals are such a common trope in heist fiction it's surprising how often they get overlooked when roleplaying.

 

[Pedantic]

I would like to recommend the underrated Dusk City Outlaws as a game that makes planning a heist fun. Planning a heist in say, Shadowrun can turn into drudgery for exactly the reasons you describe. It doesn't have to, but I think the large number of people saying planning a heist is not fun is strong evidence that it sometimes, or even often, does. Dusk City Outlaws is a game specifically about executing fantasy heists in a sort of Renaissance Italian city-state. It makes planning fun by mechanizing it. PCs get the description of the job, then they have a 15-minute real time scene to make some tentative plans and strategize about what info and gear they'll need for the heist. Each heist has a time limit - "They're moving the stagecoach full of gold in 3 days," etc. - and so they have a limited number of scenes to gather info and set up their schemes. In so doing, they learn concrete, pre-determined info about the target's security measures and what additional complications might lie hidden.

As long as they can come up with plausible solutions to those problems, their plans will generally succeed - 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.

It's designed for one-shots or short campaigns, with a heist being done in no more than two or, for a really complex job, three sessions. The use of some real-time elements is very clever, as it ensures the game moves along at a good clip. That said, you should be careful with introducing it; some people really don't like having to work under time pressure. I found that imposing a 15m limit on planning sessions was the right amount of time - it was enough to ensure that people stayed focused, and I think there might have only been one time where the players felt like it cut them off before they'd covered everything. I actually have taken that as an informal house rule in all my games, whatever the system.

How have I never heard of this? By Rodney Thompson no less. I went from here, to a series of reviews, to the publisher's website and finally to eBay to find an available copy within minutes.

 

[Pedantic]

It's strange to me that there's a plurality in the poll in support of heist planning, but at best the commentary in this thread seems to be endorsing various means to simulate planning.

To lean in to my earlier full throated defense, that is not a reasonable substitution for the activity, and will disappoint anyone who wanted to do it in the first place.

 

[CandyLaser]

It's strange to me that there's a plurality in the poll in support of heist planning, but at best the commentary in this thread seems to be endorsing various means to simulate planning.

To lean in to my earlier full throated defense, that is not a reasonable substitution for the activity, and will disappoint anyone who wanted to do it in the first place.

I think one of the thinks Dusk City Outlaws shows is that planning can be fun, but it has to be brought into the game, rather than being something than happens outside of it. I find that planning heists - and planning in general - often devolves to people talking about mechanics and offering purely mechanical solutions to problems. e.g. "There's a locked door, who has the best Sleight of Hand?" That's not necessarily bad, but it's rarely interesting. DCO prevents that by restricting the table time spent on that talk to one or two 15-minute sessions and by making the legwork and the planning process itself something that happens in character. It makes the players decide when they've made enough of a plan as well. I really think it's worth reading for anyone interested in GMing heists. Even if you don't go for the system there's a lot of good ideas in it.

 

[SableWyvern]

In games like Shadowrun I have spent far too many sessions where the first half was arguing among ourselves trying to plan the heist and making information gathering checks, 12 minutes of things going to plan, and then the rest of the session dealing with either something we overlooked and alarms are going off or one of the party got trigger happy and alarms are going off. In every case I've played, plan has not been enough and planning characters are shown to be some degree on non-competent at their primary function.

I've played Blades in the Dark, and the ability to deal with an obstacle via flashback changes the dynamic completely.

1. We've just saved half the session. Let me repeat that: WE'VE DOUBLED OUR PLAYTIME IN THE SESSION. Absolute win.
2. The narrative supports that we're competent and knew about this ahead of time to put in place a solution. CHARACTERS WHO NEED TO PLAN CAN BE COMPETENT AT IT.
3. We can still information gather and plan to the point it's fun, and none of that takes the currency (Stress) to have a flashback. So literally anyone who likes to plan can do so - up to the point where it's a more fun use of session time to move forward. Let me repeat this again: IT CONTAINS ALL THE GOOD AND NONE OF THE BAD OF THE PLANNING SO AT IT ABSOLUTE WORST IS EQUAL AND IN ALL PRACTICAL CASES IS SUPERIOR.

Conclusion: Even if you love to plan, live to plan, and planning is everything, having a flashback mechanic can't hurt you and can only improve the experience.

You have just shown that you will always be happy to have a flashback mechanic. In no way have you shown that everyone should always enjoy flashback mechanics, or at least not mind them.

Some people like playing games where they only have control of their character, in the moment. And if their character doesn't have the power to spontaneously invent or rewrite past events, then they don't want that ability as players. Such players will find a flashback mechanic a net negative.

It's OK to like something without needing to convince everyone else that they also like it.

Edit: It occurs to me that you could perhaps be saying that the fact flashback mechanics exist at all is a good thing, because it enables them to be used at tables where it's agreed that they are useful, and they can be not used at tables where they aren't wanted. Which is true, but I don't think needs saying.

 

[SableWyvern]

Personally, I have fun watching my players plan heists, and they typically enjoy doing the planning. If things start to drag, we move everything along, and there is typically an underlying assumption that the PCs are competent, so I'm not going to spring a gotcha on them over something a character would have known but the players overlooked.

At the same time, just diving in head first ala Blades in the Dark can also be it's own, different type of fun. Interestingly, I don't think my players ever actually used the flashback mechanic in the 8 - 10 sessions we played.

 

[Committed Hero]

Gumshoe is my system of choice, and also has mechanics that simulate the effects of planning, rather than encourage planning itself. But that doesn't keep folks from planning, either.

 

[Fenris-77]

Personally, I have fun watching my players plan heists, and they typically enjoy doing the planning. If things start to drag, we move everything along, and there is typically an underlying assumption that the PCs are competent, so I'm not going to spring a gotcha on them over something a character would have known but the players overlooked.

At the same time, just diving in head first ala Blades in the Dark can also be it's own, different type of fun. Interestingly, I don't think my players ever actually used the flashback mechanic in the 8 - 10 sessions we played.

In the games I've played the flashback has been a break glass in case of emergency sort of thing rather than a core gameplay mechanic. I think it does that job quite well. I also think that a lot of people who haven't played Blades think it's got some kind of obstacle-flashback play loop that obviates the need for planning of any kind, which simply isn't the case.

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

I hate planning because all that we're doing is nothing.

A small amount of it is fine, but if all we're doing is talking without progressing anywhere it gets boring.

 

[payn]

I hate planning because all that we're doing is nothing.

A small amount of it is fine, but if all we're doing is talking without progressing anywhere it gets boring.

Yeah a GM and even other players should be mindful of the planning phase. Ive had some players agonize over every detail and spend an entire session planning, which wasnt terribly exciting. I also had a GM that would set up situation that seemed like heists, but the answer was always kick in front door kill everybody. Why his players of years and years hadnt figured this out was beyond me. Though, I finally got the GM to tell folks to move it along when they been spinning their wheels too long.