Steve Jackson Games Forums - View Single Post - Is there a good article/post on story ideas that work in RPGs versus film/literature

~~Peter Knutsen~~ · 12-20-2014, 08:47 AM

Part of the prep work can be procuring unspecified (or vaguely specified) equipment, from the black or grey market, like early on in the movie "Ronin".

Again, a crucial element of my idea is that you don't just make the Plan: Heist or Plan: Long Con roll right away.

Instead you know - collectively - that if you were to try to formulate the plan right away, there'd be a huge penalty and the plan wouldn't be a very good one. So you engage in various pre work, each activity to be played out, such as various forms of scouting and espionage, serving to reduce the penalty, until the point is reached where the characters (not the players, the characters) assume that it's good enough and that the attempt to formulate the plan should be made.

Ideally the penalty to the Plan roll is kept secret from the players, so that they can't know when they've done enough, but can still know that each thing they do serve to reduce the penalty, and that even work beyond reducing the penalty to zero has some value.

When to roll is, of course, not always entirely up to the characters. Often they're under time pressure, and so may be faced with several prep actions to take, of which they have time for only two, and so which ones they choose might well be based on how good they are, e.g. if one or two party members are known to be (or incorrectly believed to be!) a social engineer, or if several are good at Stealth, or it might be based on risk assessment (in which case players whose characters have Overconfidence or analogous flaws must of course roleplay them!).

12-20-2014, 08:47 AM	#16
~~Peter Knutsen~~ Banned Join Date: Oct 2007 Location: Europe	Re: Is there a good article/post on story ideas that work in RPGs versus film/literat Part of the prep work can be procuring unspecified (or vaguely specified) equipment, from the black or grey market, like early on in the movie "Ronin". Again, a crucial element of my idea is that you don't just make the Plan: Heist or Plan: Long Con roll right away. Instead you know - collectively - that if you were to try to formulate the plan right away, there'd be a huge penalty and the plan wouldn't be a very good one. So you engage in various pre work, each activity to be played out, such as various forms of scouting and espionage, serving to reduce the penalty, until the point is reached where the characters (not the players, the characters) assume that it's good enough and that the attempt to formulate the plan should be made. Ideally the penalty to the Plan roll is kept secret from the players, so that they can't know when they've done enough, but can still know that each thing they do serve to reduce the penalty, and that even work beyond reducing the penalty to zero has some value. When to roll is, of course, not always entirely up to the characters. Often they're under time pressure, and so may be faced with several prep actions to take, of which they have time for only two, and so which ones they choose might well be based on how good they are, e.g. if one or two party members are known to be (or incorrectly believed to be!) a social engineer, or if several are good at Stealth, or it might be based on risk assessment (in which case players whose characters have Overconfidence or analogous flaws must of course roleplay them!).