City of Thieves- A Heistbox System- Part 1

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, I'm going to be posting details about the setting and rules I'm creating for my Heistbox game.

(For details on what a Heistbox is, check aforementioned previous post)

To start off, I'm going to list the game systems I considered before settling on creating my own and a brief reason why I didn't go for those.

FATE (Strange or Core): Narrative, it placed equal emphasis on social, mental, and physical conflicts but didn't do anything special to support the Heist structure. I also didn't want as much emphasis on physical conflicts.

As I've mentioned before, my design philosophy includes the idea that the amount of rules in a game shapes the nature of play. If a game says it is about tense intrigue in an imperial court but only includes detailed rules for combat and leaves intrigue as a set of simple rolls, then the game is really about combat.

I also looked at the Powered by the Apocalypse engine which would have been fairly easy to adapt, just by writing some custom playbooks, and maybe some custom rules. However, I wanted to focus on the structure portrayed in some heist movies, with game rules simulating the cuts between the planning stage and the actual heist. I thought this would be too difficult to do in PBtA.

GUMSHOE has a pair of major issues. It solves one of the problems of the PBtA engine in that the preparedness mechanic could be modified to simulate the narrative structure mentioned above. The downside that GUMSHOE and, in fact, all of the systems listed so far, do not have a complicated set of social mechanics that replicate real-life social systems, which one of my players professed interest in. The second issue is the idea of spends. GUMSHOE is primarily based around the expenditure of points for bonuses or simply to gain certain information. While this plays in nicely to the tactical side of things, I feel as though my current system can do timing based tension better. Also I have concerns about balancing the economy when shifting from the investigation narrative structure to the heist structure.

The Leverage RPG which uses the Cortex Plus system was recommended as a system to look into for heists. While there are some interesting ideas to pull from the book, it's pretty inflexible in setting and roles. There are five roles which function something like character classes, and all of them seem pretty important for play. One of those roles is the Hacker. In a Heistbox with a rotating cast and pre-digital setting, this system just doesn't look like a good fit.

Now, for here on, I'll be describing the setting and rules, but everything here is subject to change as time goes on.

After talking to my players, I've decided on a 1920's Dieselpunk setting. World War I went on longer than in our universe, and I'm thinking that some actions during the war are responsible for less racism and sexism in the era compared to our own universe- as that's not really something I want to include in my game. In addition to the societal changes, it wouldn't be dieselpunk without some weird technology. I'm thinking of having robots programmed with punch-cards (German made-responsible for prolonging the war and keeping the Weimar Republic stable), hovercraft, and hand-held versions of Tesla's teleforce weapons (particle beam weaponry, in essence). I'm also including magic, although it won't be as big a factor in shaping the world as the new technology is.

The basic resolution mechanic is a Roll & Keep system similar to the one I detailed in an earlier post. The main difference is that this one uses pools of d6s. There are no 'exploding' dice, but players can re-roll against a diminishing difficulty- the main resource here is time.

Stats determine how many dice are kept and skills determine how many are rolls. I'm not sure if there is some kind of bonus for being proficient in a skill and characters base pool is determined by their kept dice, or if the rolled pool is determined by stats+skills. I'm leaning towards the latter right now.

I'm thinking of doing initiative similar to the 'slot' system seen in the Fantasy Flight Star Wars games. Players roll to mark places in the initiative order and then everyone fills them as they see fit. Normally everyone must take a turn every round, but I'm thinking of adding in the ability to take what I'm calling 'focus rounds' where a single character can take as many turns in a round as their teammates allow. This would be limited in some way, either by cost, or just a flat once per session/heist.

The stats are:

Muscles: Violence and unsubtle physical actions

Fingers: Daring and subtle physical actions, technical skills

Brains: Knowledge, Planning and Observation

It: Sex Appeal, Social Skills & Social Connections

And here's what I'm thinking for skills:

Muscles:

Shooting

Hand to Hand

Athletics

Intimidate

Resist

Explosives

Fingers:

Driving

Cat Burglary

Palming

Sneak

Lockpicking

Build

Brains:

Mysticism

Planning

Lookout

Safecracking

Appraisal

Forgery

It:

Connections

Size up

Con Schemes

Impress

Manipulate

Convince

As you can see, they're divided up by their governing stat. I wanted to keep the number of skills under each stat equal so no stat is immediately better than others.

In regards to the stats, I've gone for more of an abstract take on them, partially in order to keep them all relevant, but also to cut down on the number of stats. Taken with the small skill list, it should make character creation simple and fast. I wanted fast character creation, to not slow down play too much with the rotating cast. One of my players wanted simple character creation because she sometimes get bogged down with choices in a game like Eclipse Phase or D&D. I'm looking to throw together skill packages in order to streamline character creation even further. Some of these would act as classes, and some would be smaller amounts of skills to piece together in a character. As you might imagine, I'm looking to make character creation a points-buy affair.

So that's most of what I have so far. I have some other ideas, but nothing cohesive right now. Hopefully I'll be able to post more about this soon.  

The Heist Structure and Heistboxes

I can think of three major “plot” structures for an individual game off the top of my head. I put plot in quotations because I think a properly run game shouldn't have plot so much as theme, but then again, I'm a big fan of sandboxes.

The three structures are:

Dungeon Crawl- the core components are combat, exploring and retrieving loot

Investigation- exploration comes in the form of information and social networks and the”loot” takes the form of clues integral to the investigation

The third is a blend of the two styles, the Heist.

Heists usually deemphasize combat and emphasize loot. Like in an Investigation, exploration takes place outside of the “dungeon”. To put it another way, while exploration in a dungeon crawl takes place in the dungeon, with the players/characters slowly learning the lay of the land as they travel through it, a heist typically involves the players/characters getting access to a map of the location before venturing inside. The primary challenge is obtaining information about the location and then using it to plan a route or method of metaphorical attack.

The three styles exist on a spectrum of method to goal oriented, with dungeon crawls being primarily method oriented, investigations blending the two, and heists taking the position on the far right of the spectrum as mainly goal oriented. As an aside, assassinations are structured similarly to a heist, but the end goal is someones death.

What does all this junk mean for a game?

Handouts are important. Especially maps. This gives players information they can all see and reference while planning. As part of this, an easily accessible reference to character abilities is very useful.

Improvisation is back loaded on the part of the GM. The guts of the heist shouldn't be thought up on the spot, as it may make it difficult for the players to generate a plan. Complications and antagonist reactions to the plan may be improvised.

Speaking of complications, in other pieces of fiction, the more the audience knows about the plan of a heist, the more things are going to go wrong. To make this a gameable concept, the more the GM knows about the plan, the more complications are going to take place. This could take the form of a token economy, players buy information and the GM uses those tokens to buy complications, possibly in the form of a random roll table.

Heists usually have a complication. Everything can't go smoothly for the players, or there is not challenge during the heist itself. To offset this, consider the concept of the Tilt from Fiasco. While Fiasco games don't usually follow the narrative structure of the heist, midway through the game, it introduces a complication called the Tilt. This is something that helps turn everything on its head. These are short phrases like “something valuable catches fire” or “magnificent self destruction” that guide the players into setting up a situation where everything goes wrong.

Another concept that Fiasco embraces is the flashback. It doesn't come up much in the rules of other games, but it is a perfect way for a character to say “I saw this coming” while keeping the player in suspense.

The GUMSHOE system, with it's concept of the preparedness skill could easily translate into a set-up for flashbacks.

Action scenes aren't as important in the heist model. Think of the Thief video games, combat is dangerous and loud. If you have to fight, you want the advantage over your opponent. So while you could run a heist game using something combat focused like D&D, games focused on investigation might be a better choice as they hopefully inject more detail into the use of skills.

Now that we know what a heist is, what is a heistbox?

Well, like a sandbox game, it is player focused. It is similar to the ocean-centric saltbox in that it is a sub-type of the sandbox structure. A heistbox is a game structure focused around player devised/selected heists and/or games with the heist structure.

In my regular game right now, I'm running a sandbox in the hexcrawl style, where wilderness is traversed much in the same way as a dungeon crawl. I chose this style because it allowed players to drop in and out without disruption to the overall flow of the game. A major facet of the game is that the players wanted to create an organization, in this case, a guild of adventurers.

A heistbox is the perfect setup for this. There are multiple examples in fiction and real life of criminal organizations: the crew from a heist movie like Ocean's 11, organized crime families, gangs, thieves guilds, and so on.

The framework of a criminal gang also makes it easy for players to slip in and out of the game. The idea of a gang comes with the implication that there is a headquarters, or hideout. My previous sandbox game divided the headquarters role between the town and a central inn/tavern. Town was a safe area, and characters couldn't come to harm during sessions where they weren't present. During play, the characters always started, and planned their activities for the session from this central tavern, it also was the location where they gained information about local events and interacted with some recurring NPCs. My thought for the Heistbox was to combine the two. Since the action of the other sandbox took place in the area surrounding the city, it made sense that the city would be a safe zone. Conversely, the action of the Heistbox takes place entirely in a single city so they cannot be safe there. Additionally, when I spoke to my players about the idea of the Heistbox, one of the notes I made was that they were very invested in the idea of a hideout, and one of them even mentioned the potential for raids. So safety is not an option for anyone present at a session. As for the other players, as thieves and rogues of all kinds, I would imagine personal safehouses and boltholes would be a common investment, making their safety a moot point.

In my previous Sandbox, I made use of the faction turn from the Sine Nomine game line. In between sessions, I used rules to simulate the power struggles of the various factions of the region in order to generate content. While interested, it was time consuming. For the Heistbox, I want to create a set of tools to easily generate Heists, especially at the player's direction. An example of this would be, one player saying “I want to pull a bank heist” or “I want to rob a mafia poker game”. While I could try to predict the wants of my players, or have them wait a session before embarking on the heist of their design, it would be best to have the tools available to generate these situations on the fly. The second system paralleling the faction turn would be something to simulate the power struggles of the local factions. My current thoughts are to create two 'currencies' Reputation and Heat. Law enforcement factions distribute their Heat among the various criminal factions, making jobs harder for them. Criminal factions gain Reputation at the expense of the other factions (representing the transfer of power and standing in the criminal underworld) for their jobs. Jobs would be simple, one chosen per 'faction turn' and from a specific list of general jobs, like burglary, heists, protection rackets, or smuggling. Law enforcement would then distribute Heat and the factions would make a single roll. The players would also interact with this subsystem as a group, build/losing Heat and Reputation based on their performance which would apply to the other factions before they took their turns. These are just my current thoughts and it's likely to change as time goes on.

As I develop the setting and rules for the Heistbox, I'll try to post them here so you get a glimpse of what I'm building in real time, and my process for designing them.

Further Reading/Listening:

Writing Excuses Podcast: http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/06/17/writing-excuses-7-25-writing-capers/

Transcription of linked episoder: http://wetranscripts.livejournal.com/60653.html

Hollowpoint: http://www.vsca.ca/Hollowpoint/

Fiasco: http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/games/fiasco/

Makers of the GUMSHOE system: http://pelgranepress.com/

Sine Nomine: http://www.sinenomine-pub.com/