Caper Games
When I watched Ocean’s 11, my first thought (as it often is when I watch something cool, or read something cool) was ‘I’d love to be able to run a roleplaying game like this!’ It seems like the perfect setup — a team of highly competent career criminals executing a clever and daring plan. You can almost hear the dice rolling as they use their various unique skills to solve problems.
When you try to implement this kind of thing as a game, though, you get what I call the ‘cyberpunk syndrome’. Anyone who’s played in any of the cyberpunk genre games will probably know what I’m talking about. The players sit around making a plan to break into the high-tech high-security compound. They plan. And they plan. And they plan. Six hours later, as most of them have one by one wandered off to watch TV or take a nap, the last couple of die-hards are still arguing about whether they should cut the camera in the hall, or feed a looped tape into the security system.
It’s boring. Everyone knows it’s boring. It’s not surprising that most Cyberpunk and Shadowrun games inevitably devolve into ‘who’s got the biggest guns?’ — at least when you’re presented with some bad guys and told to shoot them, you get to do something.
And yet, the lure of Ocean’s 11 is still there. It feels like it should be the perfect game.
This led me to come up with a solution for caper games. The first thing to realize is that players are not authors. They don’t control the environment as well as the protagonists. They can’t make convenient holes in the security system, or adapt a situation to work out for them. They’re going to assume there is a correct solution, and they’re going to try to find it. In non-interactive formats, the author just creates that solution, and causes his characters to find it.
The second thing to realize is that players will appreciate a clever plan as long as they get to participate in it. They don’t have to construct it to like it. Players enjoy executing each others’ plans as much as they enjoy creating the plan themselves.
My proposed solution is: The role of Danny Ocean is played by an NPC.
That is, the GM constructs both the problem and the solution. The players are given specific tasks to accomplish, and leeway to accomplish them in the way they see fit. For instance, a player might be told his role is to cut the power to the building at precisely 9:00 PM. He might do this in a number of ways (see Ocean’s 11 for some thoughts on how to do it); he’s free to figure that out himself, to come up with his own section of the plan. What he doesn’t get to do is say, ‘Wait, why are we cutting the power? Do we need to do this?’
As each element of the plan is executed, the plan proceeds forward. The consequences of failure at each step are pushing more danger, conflict, and tension onto the next step of the plan. For instance, failure to knock out the guards at the door of the vault means that the break-in team will have to fight or talk their way past the guards. Failure to take out the power means that the acrobat will have to avoid the automated laser sentries as well as climb the wall and dodge the razorwire.
The other nice side-effect is that you can hide the plan in its entirety from the players. That critical last twist that made both Ocean’s 11 and Ocean’s 12 so interesting can be obscured. In fact, you can hold back each task until it’s time to execute it. So the player knows he has to shut off the power, but doesn’t know why — because the breakin team hasn’t been told yet. The plot unfolds just as it would in a caper movie, with the viewers boggling at the complexity of the plan and its masterful execution.
For more work, you can create multiple plans, or multiple plan-segments, and offer them to the players to choose between. This way they still have plan input, without the six hour trauma of constructing the plan themselves.
Your mileage may vary, of course. Maybe your group loves those marathon planning sessions. As someone who’s been the bored GM in those situations, I know that I don’t, and that I’d given up on caper gaming until this idea struck me.
January 10th, 2005 at 6:33 pm
Heh. Funny, I thought the same thing during Ocean’s 11 (and its sequel). Same with National Treasure, actually — it felt like something I’d (try to) run in Ars, brought up to the current day. I never really thought about making The Guy With The Plan an NPC, though; it just might work.
… though I certainly won’t have the time (or the group) to run it. let me know how that turns out, eh?