Quote:
Originally Posted by doulos05
One suggestion not made yet is to say, "Hey, I'm looking for us to spend at least a little bit of time planning before each major battle. For an idea of what I'm thinking of, watch a heist movie like one of the Oceans series, The Italian Job, or a Mission Impossible. If you incorporate ideas from one of those movies in your plans, it will be rewarded in game, both with points and with awesome story stuff like explosions and plot twists." Obviously, you'd want to replace the specific movies with movies that actually match the taste of what you're looking for.
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I have to offer a cautionary note about that.
A few years back I ran a "consulting criminals" campaign, where the PCs were master criminals who got hired by other criminals to pull off challenging jobs and/or get the fat out of the fire after a job went wrong. We had the first scenario, and they researched the job in depth (stealing a lot of diamonds from the vaults of a specialized investment firm), worked out a detailed plan, and carried it offer with no more than a couple of trivial problems. It was a triumph. But all but one of the players thought it was as exciting as having their teeth cleaned.
And note that caper films don't do that. In a caper film you have just enough montage to show that the heroes WERE planning. Then you go to the carrying out, and the plan is revealed to the audience in its execution, for the first time. So it's dramatic and tense. And if things go wrong, the audience haven't sat through a long series of planning sessions that now turn out to have been wasted. I think this effect can be gotten in an RPG, but actually having the players make plans is not usually the best way to do so.
If you spend a lot of time on planning, and the plan comes off, then it's going to be an anticlimax, over and over. If the plan doesn't come off, there's going to be a lot of frustration at the time that was spent working out ideas that didn't work. Either way, many players won't find it fun.