Is there a good article/post on story ideas that work in RPGs versus film/literature

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

One is to have an abstract preparation system (of which there are two in Pyramid #3/53) which lets players retroactively have prepared for the unexpected. Which can break role-playing a bit.

Yup. My suggested solution is similar to that, except that instead of it being via extremley purpose-specific traits that some characters just happen to have, without us knowing why they have them, the party (or squad, or fellowship) uses more general-purpose learnable Skills to generate Plant Points.

These Plan Points are then used during the long con, or the heist, to retroactvely have anticipated or otherwise prepared for the encountered challenges.

And since the Plan: Long Con or Plan: Heist skill roll is usually done against an extremely high Roll Difficulty, the characters will have to scout out the target first, spy on him, engage in social engineering, dumpster diving, and that isn't meant to be abstracted. Instead it is played out in detail, and each such preparatory action reduces the Roll Difficulty, based on how much was accomplished.