Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Unwise" data-source="post: 8772837" data-attributes="member: 98008">On a semi-related note, regarding the Mastermind not really fulfilling the fantasy of the its trope, my gaming group did tinker with an option that captured it very well. We made a version of the Mastermind that had "preparation points", they had X (proficiency?) amount per day and could only spend them if they had an hour of free time off-screen previous to a caper.Each point could be spent to do anything that could semi-realistically have been done previously.For instance:The party fails a stealth check sneaking up to the fortified manor. The Mastermind says "Don't worry, that guard on the roof looking at us is Dave, he is an old friend of mine / I bribed him earlier".The party healer goes down and is dying, the Mastermind pulls out a healing potion that was not on his character sheet. He crosses off the gold cost, he bought it earlier when he was in town.Things go terribly, the party has to jump out of the third story window to escape. Luckily the Mastermind thought they might need a quick exit. There is a wagon full of soft hay to land on, and maybe ride away with. The Mastermind crosses off the appropriate gold cost.<edit> In actual play, this really helped to get the action going, as people still did planning, but did not agonize over every little aspect of a plan. They knew that Inigo the Mastermind will "fill in the details". As I was GMing, if I wanted the action to move on, I could say that after they spend a day scoping out the target location, following its denizens etc, they could get a bonus of X amount of preparation points. Sometimes it let us skip the dreaded 'shopping episode'.</blockquote>

Verification