A Routine Operation --- GC Eyes Only

[Golden Dragon]

My players finished Scene 3 of A Routine Operation this past Monday.

They cooked up a scheme to get into the office, during daylight, by posing as GSA agents doing an audit, and blustered their way in. It was a good enough idea, and they blustered enough at me, that I basically let them walk through it without complication. They had spent an hour planning it.

My question to the veteran GCs out there: should I have let them walk through? What complications should (or could) I have thrown at them?

[Psion]

Well, depends on your style, but I'm sort of the mind: if it's fun, let it work. If it sounds tough, set the DCs high enough they need some combination of action dice and special abilities.

The most obvious complication would be: an agent "in the know" of DGI's illegal activities arrives and makes trouble for the agents, and the non-hacker has to run interference while the hacker gets the work done.

[Desertpuma]

Every time I've run this, the team decided to do the job at night. Depending upon the time left in the slot, I sometimes did a streamlined infil on it or they got to play it out. Rarely did it devolve into heavy violence. The most violent it really got was the raid at dusk involving flashbang grenades, tear gas, and lots of tasers.

[MDL]

Seen this run three times, once on the players side of the table.

Every time, this wound up with significant time spent planning and preparing, with a slightly more complex than normal and non-violent solution.

In my personal experience with running various Living Spycraft mods, opportunities to execute plans like that aren't entirely common.  Most mods fall into one of two categories.  Either the information provided by the Control is too minimal to formulate such a plan, and the timetable too short for the players to do the research themselves, or it's designed so that there are significant oversights in the information from Control or similar monkey wrenches designed to screw the players up.  Note, there are some excpetions to this rule, but from what I've seen, situations that players can tackle like this are not too common.

It's a nice change of pace.  Overall, I like this mod as both player and GC because the contrast of the inevitable monkey wrench in the first scene, and the opportunity to execute a well thought out and plotted ploy in the last gives it more breadth, and leaves the players exiting on a high note(and one that doesn't involve combat, at that!).

Suffice it to say, I definitely would err on the side of letting them pull off their plan without throwing additional complications at them(assuming the plan is fairly solid, and they don't flub details on it...)

[Gentry]

Absolutely reward planning.  If they plan for an hour, and the plan is solid, it deserves to go down by the numbers.  The best times I had in any and all LSpy missions were times where the group spent an hour planning something out of Ocean's 14, and then ran a flawless con job that often wandered well outside the mission's parameters. 

The fastest way to hook players into any game is to let them be smart, and have their smartness matter.

As an aside, the biggest stumbling block to letting a group's plan carry forward is arguably the notion that you're just letting them cakewalk it, and you're not sufficiently challenging the group.  I say bollocks.  If you've created a situation they're digging enough that they're willing to plan for an hour to figure a way through it, you've challenged them plenty.   

[Black Cheese]

My question to the veteran GCs out there: should I have let them walk through? What complications should (or could) I have thrown at them?

1. No. As it's the last scene, it should involve more than, "You succeed! Good job. Let's go get some brews." There should absolutely be more to it than that.

2. There was nothing to throw at us for this mission when I went through it a few years ago: there was no one on the team (3 of us) with the Electronics (now Security) skill, so getting in at all was half the battle. We just zapped and beat our way through it. And then no one had the Computers skill. We had a running gun battle with one dude carrying the computer in arms the whole way out to the getaway vehicle ("It's in the computer," a la Zoolander)

That's gamer-speak for, "What kinds of characters were involved?" and, "Did you force die rolls on them for appropriate blustering?" and, "While they were planning, were you contemplating what could go wrong?"

My default mode as GC is always, "What's the coolest thing that could happen?" Confronted with this strategem, I would probably have had a real inspection team show up 10 min. in to the PCs blustering. Alternately, another rival group shows up with an equal and opposite strategem (e.g. PCs are going beauty, the baddies go brains or brawn) and use the PCs as distractions or ersatz allies.

Anyway, an hour of planning = 10 min. of success. That's like real life and junk.

[Gentry]

It important, though to note the fine line between "What's the coolest thing that could happen?" and "what can be made to go wrong with this plan?"  The first is cool for everybody.  The second runs a high risk of creating an adversarial environment at the table, and may lead to reductions in future planning ("Why bother planning?  Something always goes wrong anyway.  Let's just bust in and wave guns.") which is precisely the way you don't want your games to go. 

[Black Cheese]

It important, though to note the fine line between "What's the coolest thing that could happen?" and "what can be made to go wrong with this plan?"  The first is cool for everybody.  The second runs a high risk of creating an adversarial environment at the table, and may lead to reductions in future planning ("Why bother planning?  Something always goes wrong anyway.  Let's just bust in and wave guns.") which is precisely the way you don't want your games to go.

Of course the key is keeping it reasonable: the coolest thing that could happen is a bunch of Vikings in tricked-out race cars come blazing in and kill everyone but the PCs--however, that stretches versimilitude to its limits.

This is opposed to the idea that the PCs decide to impersonate an inspection team. And they get away with it for a handful of minutes ("We'll need to take this computer to headquarters for evaluation") when the real inspection team shows up. Then you end up with a The Killer-like 3-way Mexican stand-off with everyone shouting at once to kill the other guy. That's cool.

Saying, "Dude, you so get away with it," and wrapping up the adventure? Not so cool.

Things are supposed to go wrong. I mean, holy crap, the adventure's called "A Routine Operation" out of irony! If things didn't go wrong, it'd be pointless. That's not adversarial--that's adventure!