Capers, Crimes, and Heists - Adding Cinematic Excitement

In my current 5e Campaign, my players wanted to break into a building. Referred to as a “Reformation Center” this place was where powerful magics “re-educated” unruly members of society similar to Ba-Sing-Sae in Avatar: the Last Airbender. The party wanted to break in, rescue some prisoners, and escape without alerting too many of the guards. A pretty straight-forward encounter.

I had a few options on setting up this encounter. I could map this out as a standard dungeon style encounter, with maps, combat encounters, and areas to explore slowly. My party would enter the center and crawl through it like any normal dungeon, avoiding detection at any chance possible. It would serve the purpose, but the slow, methodical approach did not feel correct. I wanted something faster that the party would move through more swiftly, and rely heavily on character skill and planning. Luckily, I have other ways of running this encounter. Ways that could take this encounter and remake it into a style reminiscent of some of my favorite movies. I am talking about heists.

WHAT IS A HEIST?

Heists have been made popular with movies such as the Ocean’s Series and the Italian Job. If you are not familiar with the genre, the plot typically revolves around a group of people trying to steal something. It could be of great monetary value, such as a rare gem or a priceless piece of art. The group could want to gain information, some secret intel that one side needs or needs to make disappear. Whatever the goal, a group of individuals with specific skill sets come together, using their expertise and some creativity to make the heist work.

The heist itself can play out in real time, but will often use a particular framing method to tell the story. In the Ocean’s movies, for example, the heist will take place simultaneously as the characters plan out their actions. So the characters might talk about how they plan on getting into the bank vault and immediately show them getting into the bank vault afterwards. This method keeps the action fast. Sometimes they will run into an obstacle, something potentially unforeseen, but immediately jump back to planning, and talk about how they had prepared for such an obvious potential complication. The scene then returns to the action to show the plan continues onwards. Disaster averted.

With all that said, I came up with a general idea of what I would define as a heist. For me a heist:

Comprises a series of encounters, challenges that the party will need to overcome.
These challenges will occur somewhat swiftly, where failure can cause complications that need to be dealt with
The party will need to use all their tools to overcome these challenges, and can prepare themselves with some pre-planning

Using Heists

Now that I have a definition of what I would consider defines a heist, I want to decide when it makes sense to run one in a game. When running a game, leaning into the Heist format makes sense under a few circumstances. First, an encounter requiring speed can favor a heist style set up. A dungeon crawl can feel slow and methodical. This works for many encounters, but sometimes time is of the essence for a group of adventurers. When the party has the time and interest in preparing for an encounter, a heist also makes sense. Often-times when moving through a dungeon, the party receives their information in the real-time, sometimes having information ahead of time. If, however, they have the time and resources to do recon, it's useful to allow that to be rewarded. In my example of the Reformation Center, the party had a bit of time in the game before they entered the building, using a festival to cover their actions. With a day to prepare, I wanted to have some way to reward them for their time and creativity.

Deciding When

Switching to a heist format does not take the place of standard dungeon diving, however. While the fast-paced, action-focused format of a heist could move through a situation quickly, it reduces the number of potential choices available. If the party is moving in without a solid set of choices on how to proceed, it can feel a little like you are controlling the narrative of the situation. The slim and quick approach to the encounter can also reduce the amount of resource-draining encounters that a normal dungeon might provide. As I talked about in my two-Part Series on Resource Pools, we identified that slowly draining your party’s resources can have a powerful effect on the narrative, and even affect how the party approaches a challenge. In a normally run encounter, you have more opportunities to drain the party down through combat and other encounters. A faster narrative will reduce those opportunities, and make it a bit more difficult, although in this case we can present some options on how to do so.

It is important to determine whether you can use a heist, and you can usually boil it down to a few questions:

Is this action going to be fast-paced, or will the party have time to be methodical?
Will the party have time to plan, or are they going in blind?
Do you have a lot of potential outcomes, or does it boil down to just a few?

Options for Simulating Faster Gameplay

Once you have decided that you want to go for a heist format and simulate quick with a reward for prep work, you will have a few options at your disposal. Each unique method has its own benefits and drawbacks, so it will ultimately come down to preference and the specific situation. Some options involve much more prep work, and teaching from the DM to the party, or might rely on spontaneous improvisation. I have moved through all these options, and ultimately settled on a method that works for me.

Skill Challenges

A stable in 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons, Skill Challenges represents a fast way to play through an encounter. This mechanic, in its simplest form, allows the players to use their teamwork and abilities together to overcome an obstacle in a relatively short amount of time.

In order to set up a skill challenge, you will want to determine the amount of success needed prior to a failure. In the example of breaking into our Reformation Center, we can say the party needs 5 successes before they reach 3 failures. After mapping out what those challenges could be, you can then determine a range of DC depending on how the party approaches the challenge. At the start of the encounter, the party needs to find a way into the building, and they have multiple points of entry. Scaling the walls of a multiple story building will have a different difficulty than picking the lock on a door. Once you have a general layout for the skill challenge, you can ‌run your table through it.

As your party moves through the Skill Challenge, players will need to use all the resources at their disposal to overcome challenges. A player could choose stealth in order to sneak past a patrolling guard, use a distraction, or even spend a spell slot in order to cast Sleep to eliminate the problem. Depending on how they choose to interact, it will call for a certain role, allowing a bonus, advantage, or even auto success depending on the value of the resource the party spent. Duplicate uses of the same skill or resource will incur penalties, making it harder to achieve success without variety and a little creativity.

The skill challenges can end in one of two ways, either by reaching needed successes or by accumulating the maximum amount of failures. The outcome then will be determined by looking at the total of the rolls. A Skill Challenge result with few failures might not have any complications, while a narrow victory might bring a complication to the victory that comes into play in the future.

I absolutely love to run skill challenges. They foster teamwork and creativity at the table, but have some drawbacks. First, this 4e mechanic can feel unusual and alien to your party when you start. It might take some out of session or in session time to explain the basics of a skill challenge so that the party understands it. The fast-paced improvisation can seem intimidating to some players and DMs alike, and cause a moment of pause while the player figures out what their character would do to overcome this obstacle. In order to resolve this, I recommend having a few recommended actions in mind when you run your Skill Challenges. If you run into a case where a player cannot decide what to do, you can offer a few suggestions in order to foster that thinking and keep the game moving. This becomes smoother with every use, but sometimes the shift into this play style can feel like a sudden change in play. I knew 4th Edition had a reputation for taking a more “video game” style approach, and a skill challenge can certainly feel that way. When you start one out, it can almost feel like a sudden shift, like in Pokemon, when a wild monster attacks. This, too, will diminish through practice.

There are many resources that go into the aspects of running a skill challenge, helping you learn, teach, and run them at your table. I have used a few over my time as a DM and have found a few very useful resources that I like to reference. I will link these at the end of the article.

Borrowing from Other Systems

While Skill Challenges simulate fast action well, they do not full encompass what I look for in simulating a heist. Yes, a Skill Challenge creates a montage of action and a focus on teamwork. It also provides complications that the group will have to overcome. But tying in prep work done ahead of time to prepare for potential challenges does not get represented well. A Skill Challenge focuses on what the player has available immediately, and does not have a solid mechanic to reward prep. I feel that 5e as a system does not have what I am looking for and in order to better simulate how I want, I may look outside of DnD. I need to borrow from other systems, such as Blades in the Dark.

Blades in the Dark has the party taking up the role of a crew of scoundrels seeking fortune and fame in a fantasy setting. These groups get together in order to pull off jobs that, while dangerous, will have a potential reward that makes the risks worthwhile. Simply put, this game exists to run heists in it, and has mechanics to make that happen. The Flashback Mechanic is one of those mechanics which draws me to the system.The ability to have the solution prepared retroactively for a challenge that arises during the heist feels instrumental in capturing the essence of a heist style encounter. In Blades in the Dark, the players perform a Flashback, paying for it in some sort of resource. Once paid, the player has time to explain how they predicted and prepared for the challenge that has occurred. The party got through the front door, but failed to sneak past the guards.

In our example, a character can use a Flashback, explaining how, days before, they intercepted the supply of ale headed to the guardhouse and added a sleeping draught. This preparation allows the character to retry or even negate the obstacle they might have otherwise failed. This, along with some of the other elements of Blades, makes this the perfect way to recreate the quick, fast-paced action of a heist as well as have a mechanical benefit of planning that ties into the general Heist theme.

While a powerful tool, one of the largest downsides comes from Blades existing as an entire system separate of DnD. You can pull bits and pieces from it, but ultimately you are taking a non-DnD game and attaching it to 5e. This can have mixed results, adding an element that needs to be learned by DM and player alike before deploying into your game. You can teach the system ahead of time, or over a one shot on an off day, but it still puts more work on your plate for session prep. Luckily, a few creators have already done some of the work in merging the two systems together, and guides are available. I will link them at the bottom, as I have found it really helps the process.

Best of Both Worlds

For me, my methods ultimately came down to using both previous methods, and coming up with my own way to run these heist style encounters with a blend of both. After learning and becoming familiar with both Skill Challenges and the concept behind Blades in the Dark’s Flashbacks, I found elements in each that I wanted to use in order to simulate my encounters. Through some trial and error, I found the right balance of each for me that made a system that I wanted.

In Skill Challenges, I found that the improvisation and teamwork mechanics made for a fast and fun encounter. A player could look at their character’s sheet and try to find creative ways to incorporate skills, abilities, and other resources in order to overcome the challenges set before them. This rewarded creative problem solving, and helped dissuade using the same methods repeatedly through the penalties. Skill Challenges also provided a way to take finite resources and use them to gain an edge which motivated Resource Pool drain outside of just combat.

As I mentioned prior to my article on Resource Pools, providing methods to drain the party of their resources can help you push your narrative. When the players have less at their disposal, you find they push to be more creative. The rules that I found for Skill Challenges gave a concrete benefit to both spending these resources (specifically spells and abilities) as well as higher rewards for the more limited resources. Tied into this exciting and action-packed mechanic, it gave a need and reward for spending those resources.

The Blades System provided the thematic elements that I desperately wanted to represent in my game. The Flashback mechanic took my encounters and made them feel like the party was acting out a high-stakes caper, planning in order to have all the angles covered for potential obstacles, but also providing a way to explain their plans retroactively . I will always remember the first time a flashback got used to my table, and the levels of excitement I saw from everyone at the table, myself included.

This method, mixing both systems together, will take the most time and training in order for both you and the party to understand. It takes the strength of both systems, remaining swift and rewarding prep time, but it will take the most time to get up and running and “perfect”.

Final Thoughts

Many options exist at the table when we want to simulate a heist. Identifying the key elements of a heist, we can define what elements truly represent the style. The teamwork and quick, in the moment action and an emphasis on rewarding the planning that comes prior to the actual event. In order to do this, we have a few options at our disposal. We can refer to older Dungeons and Dragons editions, calling up the Skill Challenges of 4e. These swift displays of improv and teamwork reward quick thinking. We can also touch on other systems entirely, looking for games that make heists a deep focus of their game. Looking at Blades in the Dark we can find a ton of inspiration for running heists, many elements which we can extract and work into 5e. Ultimately, the best, although most time-consuming, option is to learn both methods and blend various elements together into a system that fits both you and your table. Taking the best of both systems can take the most time and effort, but ultimately has the most rewards.

While I specifically looked at heists to run elements as seen in movies such as Ocean’s 11, this kind of framework can easily be expanded and adjusted to fit a variety of situations at the table. Both methods can apply to a variety of situations as long as you want to simulate fast action and provide a bonus for preparation. Your party can break out some prisoners from a Reformation Center, or they can enter a guarded temple to steal an artifact. They can race against time to escape a crumbling dungeon, or they can even look to manipulate an NPC into getting what they want. The possibilities are endless, and once you understand the system, you can implement it in all elements of your game.

Do you simulate heists in your games? How do you approach the rules?Do you use these, or something else? I would love to hear below!Further Information on Skill Challenges: