d100 Heist Game Devlog 1: Elephants in the Room
Taking a brief stroll on my desk treadmill while doing some brainstorming for my Richard Stark's Parker inspired d100 heist game. With some pillars of my design laid out, I decided I should begin to narrow down my skills. I've decided, keeping with Mothership's core system, to use the three tiers of Trained, Expert, and Master skills, which become more specific in utility, as well as the (brilliant) decision to have these skills work as modifiers to your base attribute rolls.
This is as far as I got before my mind wandered straight into my first roadblock.
Social Skill Rolls
Mothership notably lacks rules social skills. Keeping in line with an OSR position, players are meant to use their own knowledge to negotiate with the NPCs, the GM using their best (and hopefully somewhat generous) judgement as a somewhat-neutral referee to roleplay the NPCs response. My other touchpoints for the system, Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green, however, have a wide range of paper buttons to press for their social situations. So where should I end up?
There are many scenes in the Parker novels where our titular criminal is stopped by a police officer for some minor traffic infraction (speeding, broken taillight) while carrying the spoils of his latest heist across the country. In these moments, Parker is on his backfoot; all he can do is hope to talk the cop out of a search; if the money is found, killing the cop to escape may even be worse than just going to jail for the robbery. Thinking of ways I may resolve this scenario as a GM, I reduced my decision down to 3 options:
- Social skills as a last resort. These social skills are in the game, but their modifiers are low. Players are encouraged to make their best argument, and the GM should only call for the roll if they are unsure of the NPC response, or to determine how bad the consequence of a poor argument should be. Skills as saves, essentially. If you argue well, the cop lets you go. If you don't, it's up to the roll to decide if the cop dismisses you as just a weirdo and lets you off with that speeding ticket or decides to investigate further. These social skills can only be used on characters outside of your heist squad; anything PvP-adjacent should be handled by table negotiation first, this is not the type of game where your own character should be able to be persuaded by a single dice roll.
- Leave out skills, use your Nerves score. An encounter like this can trigger a roll against your Nerves, causing you to break, stutter, or generally give off some suspicious panicky vibes. The severity of a failed Nerves roll can determine whether or not you even get to make an argument, and determine how much scrutiny your alibi will receive. This will provide an incentive to rest often and keep your Nerves as low as possible even when facing the threat of skill rot (which I am definitely implementing, hopefully more on that in a future post).
- Leave out skills, use a Luck mechanic. Luck is already something I am considering implementing. As much as I want this to be a painfully planning-forward, linear-chronology heist game, there will always be moments where your players forget to buy something crucial ("Oh shit, did we forget gloves? Our fingerprints are gonna be all over this safe!"). GMs should lean towards generosity on dirt-cheap items like gloves and a few feet of rope, but more expensive things like flashlights at night or some high-quality lockpicking tools? I think we can use some Luck-expenditure rule to handle that. Additionally, there are countless times where things just happen to go Parker's way, those little "the bullet hit the flask stuffed in my breast-pocket" moments, Luck to reduce lethality just feels right. In these cases, Luck can serve as a neutral arbiter of those moments that can truly feel out of a player's hands.
Working this out on the keyboard, I think a combination of options two and three will be appropriate. These are both mechanics I'm likely to include in the game anyway, so why not give GMs flexibility to choose which one? That being said, there is still a pretty damn solid argument in favor of social skills: while the psychology of the heist will play a big roll with the Nerves mechanic, the actual OSR-esque challenge of the game rests around planning and organizing the heist. Perhaps it's more gameable for the planning stage to have these concrete, visible numbers to see where each character will best fit. I'll go forward without social skills for now but keep the option in my back pocket.
Alright, I think I can start designing the game now-
Knowledge Rolls
Oh. Shit.
Planning a heist is all about having the knowledge. In Ocean's 11, they have so much goddamned knowledge they're able to build an exact scale replica of the bank vault to practice part of their plan. In my favorite Parker story, The Score, which I adapted damn-near-directly into the GURPS module I discussed previously, the de-facto leader of the heist introduces the target via a scale replica made of cardboard.
"Better to give out too much information than not enough" is one of my core GM principles already but is especially relevant in a game like this. In my GURPS game, scouting the town gave them every single bit of knowledge they needed; they left their scouting mission knowing exactly how many doors each target building had, roughly how many people worked at each office and police station, where the few security cameras this town had were placed, they were incredibly thorough and knew everything they needed to know. The consequence, though, was that the heist was incredibly easy. Because of this, I can't help but wonder if it'd be better if some elements had to be left unknown. If there was a chance that players could try to gather knowledge but fail, or maybe provide incorrect information. On the other hand, failing to find key information and still deciding to go on the heist is a foolish errant a Parker-esque hardened criminal would never try.
A GUMSHOE method of automatically giving out information based on skill-gates could work here. Hell, the tiers of skills could map pretty well to the new Elmcat classic Common, Recalled, Obscure. Additional information could be found through spending some cash, either to hire a professional to scout it out for you, or to bribe someone for information. Additionally, failing to recall knowledge as a challenge could stack the complication tables that should be included with most heists as well as the unpredictability of the Nerves system to create something far too chaotic and punishing. This elephant will not leave the room so easily; they'll probably have to come with me through playtesting.
Next devlog, maybe I'll actually design a fucking game. See you next time!