Well - three months have passed... I wish I could say I have been so busy playing and something that I couldn't find time to blog - that would be a lie. What might be worse is that I have had two or three posts percolating in my head for a while, but just haven't had the energy to put them down. Sad. But this is not a post about sadness, this is a post about a game we played a while back.
I've been wanting to work up games in urban settings - we've managed to play a few bits in cities through the years - I should name the games we play. The Bard's Pants! Where in the World is Narvy? Trolls in the Sewer! Those are all urban adventures, a couple different kinds - The Bard's Pants was a kind of infiltration game - a trio of lowly thieves were tasked with breaking into a house and retrieving the pants a bard had left behind, preferably without being spotted. They did it - it was great fun! Where is Narvy was a different group of characters, three "detectives" sent from somewhere far away to Waynesburg to track down Narvy, a prodigal son, a university student gone bad. They came to Waynesburg and had to track Narvy down there - they did, eventually, and now they are about to find out why he went missing. Well - that's where we left the story a year and a half ago. Trolls in the sewer had the plot you would expect, and was more of a combat oriented game. Anyway.
This year, I conjured up another one - a heist scenario. Something simple - we have never really played a heist game, and were not sure how well it would work, so I made a very simple one. Used the three thieves from the Bard's Pants - gave them a simple assignment, involving breaking into a warehouse. The story was: an old man died, an old collector of stuff; his family removed all his belongings and stuck them in a warehouse until they could go through them and see if he had anything valuable; he may or may not have owned anything valuable - but when he died, he had a very valuable book, locked in a chest in his flat. None of his relatives know about it, but another old book collector does. The old man did not own this book - he borrowed it - but his relatives don't know that, either. The other book collector needed to get it back before they found it - he hired the adventurers to retrieve the book from the warehouse without letting anyone know that it was ever there. I wanted a simple McGuffin, something that would not really tempt them to steal it, but could give them something to think about if they wanted to, so a strange printed book it was - it worked out pretty well.
So they set about the task. I kept it simple - I set up the locations, the warehouse and the shops around it, drew some maps and set up the likely figures they could find, tried to just describe it, and let them figure out how to get in. They latched on a couple ideas - one, to rent space in the warehouse to case it, then come back and find the book; the other to go in through the sewers which connected to spaces under the warehouse. They did both - cased the place, making up an elaborate story about a traveling magic show; then sneaking in through the sewers and cellars at night. They knew there was a trap door from the cellars to the warehouse - they did not know it was chained down! That led to some scrambling to figure out how to continue, and some shenanigans inside. But in the end, they accomplished the mission without getting caught or starting a fight or anything. Success!
This was, I will say, a complete blast. We played it in three sessions. The first one was outstanding - it felt slow when we were playing, since they spent a lot of time talking in circles, coming up with elaborate schemes to get in, then after a lot of them, going and interacting with people at the warehouse, at neighborhood merchants and passers by, with a bookseller who could explain the book they were supposed to be retrieving. It felt slow, but it was also a huge relief - just walking around, talking to people, being able to spin yarns and characters on the spot, spill exposition and history, have them make up their own schemes and personae and all the rest - it was a joy.
The second session didn't go as well. One of the players kept falling asleep - that didn't help. they also kept splitting up, one or two of them going off on their own, so there were quite a few times I'd end up running something for 1 or 2 people for half an hour, then switch to the other one, with the others left out. That can be a problem, and probably worse when their missions are as open ended as they were - the second session was mostly exploring around the warehouse, looking for secret entrances and so on.
But the third session made up for it. They made their final plan, then went in through the sewers, they found the door locked - it took a while to figure out how to get it open. Once they did, they found themselves in the warehouse along with the guards and some fops having a party. They snuck around and bluffed the guards and managed to get the book and run, though one fo them was trapped in the place. But he played drunk, and the guards were pissed at the partiers so they ignored another drunk, so he was able to get away without making trouble. Success!
It makes me want to resurrect the more elaborate urban adventure we started last year. (Where in the World is Narvy?) I find it very refreshing to have to interact with a city - as DM, it's great fun, though a ton of work - creating settings, people, events, and so on, then playing these things. It is a very welcome relief from the more common dungeon crawl style game we tend to play. Being able to devote the session to talking, planning, sneaking around, doing things, learning things, whatever it is, without fighting everyone, is a great relief. It's different, a different way of thinking, and it helps, it's good for you. It in inspiring - it makes you want ot find other ways to play in different kinds of games.
All right: I will end this with a few observations on running this kind of scenario. Not htat I am an expert - but I noticed these things:
1) For a heist game, you have to build a situation that let's you play this way. It has to be simple, flexible, and you have to build the setting, the place. The goal, the location, the obstacles have to work together, and they have to be flexible enough to accommodate what the players come up with. You have to create the problem for them to solve. This one was very simple - but I think you can scale it up, in size and complexity, with some practice.
2) In the game itself - you have to find ways to keep pressure on them. This one did bog down, as they planned and replanned and planned again - you have to come up with ways to keep things moving. At some point they have to act. I didn't worry about it too much here, but a more trying heist needs to have some kind of ticking clock, for the players as much as the characters.
3) You have to be flexible with rolls. We went a long way in this game without making any rolls, especially the first night - but sometimes you have to make checks. To make this kind of game work, you have to be flexible sometimes. This was quite explicitly not meant to turn into a fight - they would have been obliterated by the people in the warehouse if it came to swords, anyway. But I think there are ways to do this. In this case - when the rolls went bad, I escalated the stakes, rather than starting a fight. I brought the guards down to where they were, so they had to do something to hide better; I brought the whole party down (party in the sense of booze and women and drunken aristocrats), which added lots of possibilities if they blew some more rolls. I also made a point of trying to play the guards - the drunks, the ones who were on duty and annoyed at the partiers, and so on. The goal should be to make the players come up with something to avoid trouble - make up a story, do something fun or daring, run, anything. They were pretty good at this.
(This is something of a pet peeve, by the way. In too many games, non-combat rolls tend to be far more consequential than combat rolls. I mean - you blow a stealth roll, and that's the end of trying to sneak past the guards; someone blows a deception roll and the bad guys know who you are and Roll Initiative! It bugs me. It means attempts to avoid combat all too often end up with a single point fo failure - with way too many chances to fail, since every character in the party ends up rolling that stealth or deception roll. There has to be a better way - ways of escalating, ways that players can try to recover from a bad roll. Otherwise, you just aleways end up fighting. That's fine when you want to fight, but not when you don't)
4) I should add that I can see places where you might want to bring in ideas from other games (besides D&D). Call of Cthulhu's pushed rolls are a pretty obvious way to address my previous point, say. Or bringing in ideas from other heist games, where you can retrofit - where you can say (or at least roll) That you have some object you didn't think of until then. On the principal, say, that the characters are smarter about this sort of job than the players - so if it makes sense that they would have thought of it ahead of time, let them have it. One of the players here realized he should have gotten some pine tar (or similar substance) before coming in - would I let him add it? Sure! It made sense - it is something the character would have thought of before. I think this kind of scenario rewards flexibility all through.
All right. That was that. A very enjoyable outing, one I hope we do more of.
