The Gaming Den

I'm looking for a good heisting RPG. What I really want is something that has the cinematic heist hard coded into the gameplay.

Not merely Shadowrun, which has a lot of heist-relevant content, but in the structure is basically D&D. Or Leverage. Something with mechanics for risk, suspicion, betrayal and all that.

There just is a Leverage RPG (add pdf to that and you'll have hits). I think its thing was that you can do flashbacks to prep instead of having to do actual prep, just like in the tv series.

D&D?
You can do heists in basically any game . .

Blades in the Dark sounds like what you're looking for, although I've found the "risk" to be rather contrived sometimes. No matter what you do or how well you pull off the heist, SOMEBODY in the party is going to get fucked for it afterwards, no matter what.

You can add a touch of betrayal to any RPG pretty easily by giving every player their own secret objective, some of which contradict each other.

To make something like Shadowrun or D&D better for heists, what you actually want to do is take out risk, not add more. Lots of heist stories have only like one or two things go horribly wrong in the whole adventure, and a lot of the time it's not even the heisters failing a check. I think that to make a heist mission in Shadowrun or D&D, what you should do is tell the players almost everything they need to know in order to plan the perfect crime, but secretly decide on one or two important details that they don't know about, like the owner of the prize actually being one of the PC's old rivals, or that some other team is also trying to steal the prize on that same day.

I intend to try out Blades in the Dark. I'm interested in how it works out in play.

I remember reading a bit about Dusk City Outlaws, which is an explicit heist game with supporting mechanics. I've never played it so no comment on how good/bad it is.

Foxwarrior wrote:You can add a touch of betrayal to any RPG pretty easily by giving every player their own secret objective, some of which contradict each other.

To make something like Shadowrun or D&D better for heists, what you actually want to do is take out risk, not add more. Lots of heist stories have only like one or two things go horribly wrong in the whole adventure, and a lot of the time it's not even the heisters failing a check. I think that to make a heist mission in Shadowrun or D&D, what you should do is tell the players almost everything they need to know in order to plan the perfect crime, but secretly decide on one or two important details that they don't know about, like the owner of the prize actually being one of the PC's old rivals, or that some other team is also trying to steal the prize on that same day.

Exactly. You don't fail to swip a keycard off someone. If it goes wrong, you take some delay or draw some attention, but you don't just roll a 3 and fail it.

https://boyproblems.ca/boyproblems

Why play any other heist rpg?

Akira Kurosawa would rent an inn for his writers to figure out how to bypass a scenario with given characters

You could try a free form roleplay that way, or use munchausen tokens

I played a fun homebrew heist one-shot that was basically a tacked-together version of the old D6 system and a "reveal how you actually planned for this" mechanic.

Play proceeds as usual, but when the party runs up against an obstacle that is going to ruin the heist, a party member can go "Oh yeah, the way we planned for this was..."

Then they set a scene and have to play through that in order to create a deus ex machina, which materializes out of the ether and saves them when the narrative focus snaps back to the present.

So when the party gets penned in as SWAT teams are racing up the emergency stairs, they run to the roof, and... "Don't worry, I never have fewer than three escape plans," says one character, who then narrates how, 2 days ago, he and a couple of other party members made a visit to his ex-boyfriend's place of work, which happens to do helicopter tours of the city. This leads to a roleplayed scene with whatever social mechanics you want kicking in. Then the party can call in a helicopter to haul them off the roof just in time as the cops burst through the roof access door.

Rich character backstories helps a lot. It's a lot easier to make call-outs to family members, exes, and police sergeants you've been paying bribes to when you've already fleshed them out in some capacity.

This sort of mechanic can probably be bolted onto any system you care to include it with. A base system that has reasonably good stealth and social diplomancing is probably a good idea, unless you want to risk making every flashback some form of, "And then we shot a dude in the face and took his stuff."

This feels like it needs a resource schedule. A token pool would make sense. It could be communal, or it could be per-character, to enforce that the spotlight is shared. But, in the one game I played, I don't recall that there was a mechanically enforced limit on the rewind/flashback mechanic. We wound up limiting our use of it anyway (even accepting some characters getting caught) because of narrative fatigue.

Edit: I see that this is basically Munchausen tokens, but without the competitive wagering.