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Message: <blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 8311100" data-attributes="member: 86653">If you're not aware of the game Blades in the Dark, you should be. It's a rather wonderful, focused game of criminals and heists gone awry. It has a really slick mechanic that uses flashbacks to avoid the endless tedium of players over-planning. The gist of the flashback is that you Act Now, Plan Later in the sense that you just jump into the action and when something goes awry (as it inevitably will) you can spend resources to have a flashback scene where you "pre-planned" a contingency for something like this. It's not time travel, you don't prevent whatever bad thing just happened in the on-going narrative, you just slip something into the past that helps the present. The idea is to use flashbacks to show the characters as competent and show that they did in fact plan the heist, but not have to sit through a few hours of the players trying to actively plan everything to the smallest detail. For that it just sings.A paraphrasing of one example given is: You’re about to break into the museum of antiquities but a roll comes up really bad — your crew is suddenly accosted by the patrol of moonlighting city watch who are working as security. Oh no! We should have planned for this! Nah, just call for a flashback. You can have a flashback to the night before. We see a character talking with our city watch contact. Maybe she was able to get some dirt on the local city watch officers that she can use for leverage now — for better effect if we can convince him to look the other way.I think it's a rather interesting mechanic and would vastly prefer that style of getting to the action first, planning second in most games. Sitting back and watching players painfully over-think and over-plan is one of the banes of my gaming existence. But, the question is, what kind of limited resource should be used in a D&D game to throttle the use of flashbacks? They're not meant to be used all the time. Some obvious limited resources are hit points, hit dice, spell slots, Inspiration, rests, and exhaustion. Exhaustion is incredibly punishing and I don't think it should be used here. Rests are a good idea, but most players would rather put something off than go in to any situation with anything less that absolutely full strength, and retconning the PCs missing a previously established rest would be a nightmare, and go against the core idea of flashbacks. Inspiration is too limited by default. If you had a larger pool of Inspiration to draw from, it would be easier to use as the fuel for this. Spell slots could work but not everyone has spell slots and again most players would rather go in with full strength, though losing one or two slots for something like this isn't too punishing. Hit dice are almost the forgotten mechanic in 5E, they matter a bit at low levels until the party has fairly reliable access to healing potions and enough spell slots to fully heal before a long rest. And finally hit points. Again...players would likely refuse to go into a situation with anything less than full power, so docking hit points seems like it's too harsh, especially at lower levels. Maybe simply limit each character to 1-2 or 2-3 flashbacks per heist or per day. What do you think? What mechanical limit should there be on things like flashbacks in D&D5E? I'm not interested in arguing about whether or not to use flashbacks, only what mechanical limit should be used to control how many can be done.</blockquote>

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