Stacking the Odds

The Job: A Game of Glorious Heists & Everything That Can Wrong In Them is a storytelling roleplaying game from an unexpected source—Games Omnivorous. The publisher is better known for its horror scenarios such as Cabin Risotto Fever and Eat the Rich, its systems neutral supplements such as Bottled Sea and its Old School Renaissance-style releases such as the Isle of Ixx and Frontier Scum: A Game About Wanted Outlaws Making Their Mark on a Lost Frontier. It is specifically designed for one-shot sessions in which the players take the role of a gang of expert thieves, who will plan and execute a heist or robbery, and overcome the obstacles that they as players build into the story as part of their characters’ planning for the ‘job’. This is a roleplaying game inspired not just by great films such as Ocean’s Eleven, The Italian Job, Logan Lucky, and Baby Driver, but also roleplaying games such as Leverage, Dread, and Fiasco. Perhaps the only entries missing from this bibliography are Reservoir Dogs and Rififi, but otherwise this is a solid bibliography and nice to see the author acknowledge his inspirations.

The Job: A Game of Glorious Heists & Everything That Can Wrong In Them is about stealing expensive jewels, priceless artworks, and world-famous artefacts and it is played in two parts, the Preparation Phase and the Action Phase, with between three and five players taking the roles of archetypes classic to the genre. To play, The Job requires a handful of six-sided dice and pen and paper. In the Preparation Phase, the players will plan the heist and set up scenes that they want to see played out in the Action Phase, stacking the heist against their characters as they add complications, describe locations, and build the world in which the heist is going to take place. In the Action Phase, the players will resolve the heist attempt, using their characters’ stunts to overcome complications, push the story forward, and to give each character time to shine. The Action Phase is played using a stack of six-sided dice which represents the pressure or tension in the heist attempt, with tension relieved by removing dice and ratcheted up by adding dice. When this stack falls, it is reset and thus the tension in the game begins again at zero, but after the first dice stack has fallen, more dice are added on the second and third rebuilds of the dice stack. If the third dice stack falls or is knocked over, the game ends as the heist fails and the Crewmembers suffer the consequences. If the third dice stack does not fall and the players complete all of the scenes they have created, the game ends with their characters being successful and getting away with the loot.

The start of The Job consists of the players picking an archetype, each one recognisable from the heist genre. These consist of the Animal Handler, Boss, Bruiser, Con Artist, Genius, Greaseman, Pickpocket, and Wheelman. A Crewmember does not have any stats in The Job, but the capacity to hold four items in his Inventory and four Stunts. Items are added to a Crewmember’s Inventory as necessary, but once a Crewmember has four items, he can carry no more and they cannot be changed. Which can mean that find himself in a situation where none of his equipment is going to help him. In general, Stunts give an Advantage for the character as well as special actions. For example, the Pickpocket has the Stunts of ‘Pickpocketing’, ‘Steal the Stack’, ‘Safecracking’, and ‘Magic Tricks’. ‘Pickpocketing’ gives him Advantage when stealing small objects and ‘Safecracking’ Advantage with delicate tasks such as picking locks, setting detonators, and the like. ‘Steal the Stack’ lets him steal a die from the dice Stack once during the Action Phase and ‘Magic Tricks’ actually gives him a magic trick, from close up magic to big stage events, and roll with Advantage. The four Inventory slots remain empty until the player decides he needs an item of equipment.

Once each player has decided upon the archetype he wants to play, the Referee presents them with the Brief. This gives the Crewmembers an object to steal, a budget to spend whilst conducting the heist, and six Complications. The Budget is spent during the Heist to equip a Crewmember with an item which will help him complete the Heist. The six Complications have to be added to the twelve Scenes that the players will create during the Preparation Phase. Depending on the Brief, they can be reinforced doors, laser sensors, guard dogs, and so on. The Complications are essentially the key points upon which the players will build and describe the scenes for their characters’ heists, their purpose being not to impede the heist or make it easier, but provide moments where the Crewmembers can shine as they do cool things to overcome the problem. All together these scenes will number exactly twelve—no more, no less, and consist of Infiltration, Deployment, Execution, and Escape scenes. When played out, they must be played in the order as written, and unlike other heist-themed roleplaying games, there are no flashbacks involved. What this means is that The Job is much more like a film heist rather than like that depicted on Leverage. The whole process for the Preparation Phase is collaborative, both between the players and between the players and the Referee, whose job it is make suggestions and adjudicate the players’ ideas in order to help fit the style of the heist. The Preparation Phase will appeal to players who like to plan.

The Action Phase begins with some set-up scenes. This is a chance for the players to narrate a pre-heist scene that establishes their character and gets them involved in the opening moves of the heist. This can include practicing manoeuvres and dummy runs, making a reconnaissance of the routine at the target of the heist, hacking into the building to make getting in later that much easier, getting hired as staff to get access to the building, and even stealing a particular item of equipment that will make the heist easier. None of this requires dice rolls, but it can generate Heat. For each set-up scene that generates Heat, the Referee adds a single die to the Dice Stack. This is a tower of dice, one on top of each other, which will be added to over the course of the Action Phase as the Crewmembers suffer setbacks, while certain Stunts can actually remove dice. For example, the Bruiser’s ‘Happy Birthday, Punk’ Stunt lets his player blow on the Dice Stack in an attempt to knock dice off.

Then the Action Phase proper begins. The Referee and the Referee work through the scenes one by one, resolving them in order. Whenever a Crewmember does anything risky, the Referee can call for a dice roll. Mechanically, The Job is very much like Powered by the Apocalypse. A player rolls two six-sided dice. If the result is six or less, the action fails, the player has to use an alternative method, and dice are added to the Dice Stack. On a result of seven or eight, the action is successful, but the player must either decide to add more dice to the Dice Stack or accept a Setback. A Setback is a complication which will come back to cause problems in subsequent scenes. If the result is ten or more, the action succeeds and the player gets to remove a die from the Dice Stack. If a Crewmember has an appropriate item of equipment or Stunt, his player can roll with Advantage, that is, roll three six-sided dice and ignore the worst result, but if the situation has adverse conditions or a Setback comes into play, the player rolls at a Disadvantage, that is, roll three six-sided dice and ignore the best result.

Play continues like this until either the third Dice Stack falls or all twelve Scenes are successfully narrated and roleplayed out. In the case of the latter, the Heist is successful and very player gets a final scene in which to narrate what happens to their Crewmember. However, if the third Dice Stack is knocked over, the Heist is unsuccessful, and the character of the player who knocked it over is caught. Everyone else is given one minute to write down what they do in response and which one of the other Crewmembers they involve. The notes are revealed and one player is designated to act as spokesman to narrate what happens based on the notes. If there are inconsistencies in the narration, the Referee can actually send a Crewmember to gaol! This, though, puts a lot of pressure on that one player not to screw the narration up and is at odds with the flow of the rest of the game where the players and their Crewmembers work together throughout both the Preparation Phase and the Action Phase.

To help her run The Job, it comes with an example Brief and its twelve Scenes all written out, an example play, solid advice for the Referee, and five sample Briefs, complete with Objects to steal and a Location to steal them from, as well as a Budget and a set of six complications. They include stealing cash from Madison Square Gardens, the Imperial State Crown from the Tower of London, a triceratops skull from the Natural History museum in London, Michelangelo’s David from a Scottish castle, and a prisoner from an unspecified high security prison. This in addition to the worked examples that the Referee can easily adapt to her own crew of players. Overall, these provide plenty of variety in terms of settings, objectives, and complications. There are notes too, on using The Job with other roleplaying games and even the Old School Renaissance.

Physically, The Job is incredibly eye-catching. The graphical style echoes that of Saul Bass and the film posters of the sixties and seventies, with use of stark blocks of colour and black and white images, giving the book a sense of energy and drama.

The Job: A Game of Glorious Heists & Everything That Can Wrong In Them is a neatly self-contained roleplaying game that is pleasingly portable, easy to learn, and engagingly familiar in its genre. It combines dramatic storytelling possibilities with the tension of a towering Dice Stack, but without going the full Jenga.

Mapping Your Heists

Given the origins of the roleplaying hobby—in wargaming and in the drawing of dungeons that the first player characters, and a great many since, explored and plundered—it should be no surprise just how important maps are to the hobby. They serve as a means to show a tactical situation when using miniatures or tokens and to track the progress of the player characters through the dungeon—by both the players and the Dungeon Master. And since the publication of Dungeon Geomorphs, Set One: Basic Dungeon by TSR, Inc. in 1976, the hobby has found different ways in which to provide us with maps. Games Workshop published several Dungeon Floor Sets in the 1980s, culminating in Dungeon Planner Set 1: Caverns of the Dead and Dungeon Planner Set 2: Nightmare in Blackmarsh; Dwarven Forge has supplied dungeon enthusiasts with highly detailed, three-dimensional modular terrain since 1996; and any number of publishers have sold maps as PDFs via Drivethrurpg.com. Loke BattleMats does something a little different with its maps. It publishes them as books.

A Loke BattleMats book comes as a spiral-bound book. Every page is a map and every page actually light card with a plastic covering. The fact that it is spiral-bound means that the book lies completely flat and because there is a map on every page, every map can be used on its own or combined with the map on the opposite page to work as one big, double-page spread map. The fact that the book is spiral bound means that it can be folded back on itself and thus just one map used with ease or the book unfolded to reveal the other half of the map as necessary. The fact that every page has a plastic covering means that every page can be drawn on using a write-on/wipe-off pen. It is a brilliantly simple concept which has already garnered the publisher the UK Games Expo 2019 People’s Choice Awards for Best Accessory for the Big Book of Battlemats and both the UK Games Expo 2019 Best Accessory and UK Games Expo 2019 People’s Choice Awards Best Accessory for Giant Book of Battle Mats.

The newest release from Loke Battle Mats is the Big Book of Battle Mats: Rooms, Vaults, & Chambers, which presents “Battle maps for Tabletop Roleplaying Ideal for Heists and Other Exciting Encounters!”, marked in either one-inch squares. Unlike other map books from Loke Battle Mats, the plain maps, simple floors without any detail or furnishings, are left until the end, so the volume gets straight to presenting interesting locations that a Game Master can add to her game. It starts with a tavern, all wood flooring and trestle tables on one page, but a stone-floored cellar, connected by a set of stairs on the opposite page. Next, there is some kind of office, which could be town hall or a minor guild hall, but next to that is a gaol with several cells, so together the two maps become a watch house or town guard station complete with its set of cells in which hold suspects or prisoners. Similarly, there are work desks and an office on the next map, but a room with shelves containing books or papers on the other, turning the location into a records office or a library, a plain series of tunnels snake around the map only to connect to room via a hole in the wall (either dug open or blown open with magic of even explosives), whilst an unremarkable work area is turned into something interesting—the backstage of a theatre—because it connects to a stage and auditorium on the opposite page, and an innocent-looking restaurant hides a gambling den complete with dueling room should satisfaction be demanded on the opposite page. Other maps depict warehouses and sections of a sewer system—the latter easy to line up with the sewer maps in other map volumes from the publisher, a sauna complex, a museum foyer complete with triceratops skeleton on display, an abandoned house complete with cobwebs, and even a banqueting hall and kitchen.

The maps are also nicely detailed in places. Food in particular features throughout, whether that is the lonely plate on the desk in the room backstage or sumptuous choice of dishes laid out on the banqueting table, but there are also numerous tools, weapons, and pieces of armour dotting the various locations as appropriate. Another feature is that the maps do not always specifically work for the fantasy genre. They will work in others too. For example, the inn and gambling den would be perfect for the nineteen twenties and thirties, the sauna complex feels very modern, and the museum foyer with its triceratops skeleton would work in numerous genres.

The main feature of the maps in the Big Book of Battle Mats: Rooms, Vaults, & Chambers is their capacity to tell stories. Want the Player Characters to tunnel into the vault of a bank? There is a tunnel and map with a broken wall for that, as well as vault on another map. Or, for a bank robbery, take the office and gaol and make the cells individual vaults. The gambling den is perfect for a raid by the police or a rival gang. The stage is ripe for an interrupted performance. All the Game Master or her players and their characters have to do is supply the details of the interruption. Essentially, depending upon the story being played out, the multiple maps can be used as the Player Characters move from one location to another as events unfold. In addition, because the maps in the Big Book of Battle Mats: Rooms, Vaults, & Chambers depict urban locations, they can often be used again and again, especially in a campaign which takes place in one town or city.

Physically, Big Book of Battle Mats: Rooms, Vaults, & Chambers is very nicely produced. The maps are clear, easy to use, fully painted, and vibrant with colour. One issue may well be with binding and the user might want to be a little careful folding the pages back and forth lest the pages crease or break around the spiral comb of the binding.

It is clear that a lot of thought of has been put into the design of the Big Book of Battle Mats: Rooms, Vaults, & Chambers. Although not every room or map in the collection is either exciting or inspirational, they can all be useful. The best of them are and many of the maps will inspire a gaming group to use them as locations and more, using them to help create the stories they roleplay. The Big Book of Battle Mats: Rooms, Vaults, & Chambers is a really useful sourcebook for city campaigns and its capacity to help tell stories is very nicely thought out.

The L Team

Now let state up front that I am not a fan of The A-Team. By the time it made it to these shores, I was too old for it, and what episodes I saw played up to its reputation for cartoon violence and formulaic storylines. I know enough about it to understand and spot the culture references when they are made, but the likelihood is that I will not be going to see the new movie. Nevertheless, what The A-Team provides for me is the template for putting together a team of archetype characters for roleplaying, each member of the team possessing a particular role within the team. These roles can be roughly defined as the leader, the brains, the tech, the face, and the wheels, to which can be added the brawn, the gun, and the thief, all depending upon the particular type of the game being played. Of course, just as the template applies to teams in roleplaying games, it also applies to teams on television.

One such team currently on television appears in Leverage, in which a former insurance fraud investigator, Nate Ford (played by Timothy Hutton), leads a team of scam artists pulling off stings against the greedy, primarily in corporations, but sometimes in the government or the criminal underworld. They do this on behalf of the ordinary citizen who has otherwise little recourse to justice. Essentially, this is a modern retelling of the Robin Hood legend, with the merry men replaced by a team of crooks who do good, and who consist of a mastermind, a con artist, a thief, a hacker, and a personal security expert. In the United Kingdom, the BBC shows a similar series called Hustle, which for the ladies stars Adrian Lester and Robert Vaughn. It is also filmed locally, including doing location work in the underground carpark of the building where I work. Conversely, Leverage is not filmed locally, so has never made use of the underground carpark of the building where I work, but it does star Gina Bellman.

So the point of this meandering is that Margaret Weis Productions, best known for publishing the Serenity Role Playing Game and Supernatural Roleplaying Game is to publish an RPG based on the series, Leverage and has released The Quickstart Job as a taster. It comes as an eighteen page, full colour, 9.7 Mb PDF file that contains a short introduction to the rules, write-ups for the series' five main characters, and a complete scenario with any extra rules are explained as and when they are needed.

What The Quickstart Job showcases is the game’s narrative structure, one that models what is seen in an episode of the television series. It opens with the set up, telling you who the mark is and what wrongs he has committed that need correcting. The Quickstart Job omits the planning session, but doubtless it will be detailed in the actual rulebook, and then we are into the action. This is done in a number of scenes that allow the characters in turn to shine, showing off his or her weaknesses. These scenes also build up to the episode’s twist and climax all before cutting to the wrap up scene. During this scene, each of the characters has to shine one more time as they star in their own little flashback scene that when all are combined explains how the scam was pulled off.

The target for the scam in The Quickstart Job is one Dennis Holland, who is using a series of shell companies to not only defraud a bank, but in the process also drive the occupants out of an old people’s home. In addition, he collects kitsch from the 1970s – and not the good stuff either. One of the occupants of the old people’s home, Helen Erdman, hires the Leverage team to help her and her fellow retirees out of their predicament. All the team have to do is grab the ownership papers of Holland’s holding company. Fortunately, Holland’s name is not on the papers, so whoever has the papers owns the company. Unfortunately, it looks like Holland is about to skip the country, though he is holding one last party at his office. This is where the scenario starts, in media res, with Hardison providing support from in the van outside, Parker ready to break into Holland’s safe, and everyone else casing the party. The aim in The Quickstart Job is simple enough – give Parker enough time to break into the safe, but of course, nothing goes quite to plan. It would hardly be entertaining if it did...

Since this is a game from Margaret Weis Productions, Leverage the Roleplaying Game uses the publisher’s house mechanics, CORTEX System Role Playing Game, which defines its attributes, skills, and traits – assets and complications (or advantages and disadvantages), for characters, monsters, and vehicles by die type: two, four, six, eight, ten, and twelve-sided dice, with a rating of d6 being considered as average. Attributes -- Agility, Strength, Vitality, Alertness, Intelligence, and Willpower; and Traits -- Assets and Complications such as “Rank and Privilege” and “Traumatic Flashbacks” are measured by just a single die type, whereas skills work slightly differently in that above a d6 rating a character must specialise and so gets a higher die type.

Leverage the Roleplaying Game uses the CORTEX System in a slightly easier, more streamlined way. The attributes are still there, but instead of skills, each character is rated by die type in five Roles, each Role being what the character does in the series. The five are Grifter, Hacker, Hitter, Mastermind, and Thief, again each defined by die type and each corresponding to one of the characters on the television series, who will have the highest die type in his or her Role. This is a d10 for each character, so Parker has a d10 in Thief, Hardison a d10 in Hacker, Nate a d10 in Mastermind, Eliot a d10 in Hitter, and Sophie a d10 in Grifter. Each character is also rated in the other Roles, a d8 in his next best Role, a d6 in the next, and lastly a d4 in his two worst Roles.

A character also possesses three Traits and three Talents. When brought into play, the Traits can act in a positive or a negative fashion. If positive, the character gets an extra d8 to roll. If negative, he only gets a d4, but he also is given a Plot Point. Talents are positive rather than negative and add a bonus to the play in some way. Let us look at Hardison, the show’s tech as an example – I would have suggested taking a look at Gina Bellman’s character, Sophie, but let us not go there... He has the Traits of Cocky, Computer, and Geek – none of which are described meaning that are open to interpretation by both player and GM – and the Talents of “Do You Have That Thing I Gave You?” and “Opportunist.” With the first Talent, Hardison can spend a Plot Point to pass another team member an extra d8 by reminding them of a handy device he gave to them earlier. Better still, if it can be done via a flashback, the extra die improves to a d10! The second Talent lets Hardison turns setbacks when rolling his Hacker Role in potential opportunities.

What is interesting in terms of character design in Leverage the Roleplaying Game is that while the Roles define what a character does and can do, and his primary task within the team, that primary task being what the character is, they do all this is with just five Roles, almost like a piece of Indie game design. The Talents also define what a character can do, but the simplifying of the skills into the five Roles does one more thing. It moves the emphasis of who a character is onto the Traits.

The other difference between the mechanic used in the Leverage the Roleplaying Game and the standard CORTEX System is the player’s roll, as usual a combination of a character’s attribute plus an appropriate Role. So most of the time Hardison will roll 1d10 for his Intelligence and 1d10 for his Hacker Role, combining the results. In most CORTEX System games, this roll is made against a standard target that varies according to the difficulty of the task. Here the roll is made against a target determined by the GM or Guide rolling two dice. A character can sometimes roll more than the two dice, either because he spent a Plot Point to add another, or from another character – as in Hardison’s “Do You Have That Thing I Gave You?” Talent. Whatever the source of the extra die, only the two highest dice count towards the end result. The mechanics are all relatively straightforward, with the effects of failed rolls adding only a little more in terms of complexity.

All right, so I have spent an awfully long time writing about the introduction package for a game that is not even out yet, and will not be out for over a month, so it is time to tell you what I think about Leverage the Roleplaying Game and The Quickstart Job. Of the former, I wonder how big an audience it will find outside of the USA, if only in the U.K. where the series is not shown on one of the major channels, but I am hoping that it will do a good job of helping to guide a GM and his players through the set up and the running of the scam. After all, it is the sort of task that happens often enough in RPGs, but rarely receives much in the way of an explanation. Plus the television format, which when adapted to the roleplaying game will encourage the creative participation upon the part of the players, usually in turn and usually through the format’s heavy use of flashbacks.

The Quickstart Job showcases all of that, and does so in handy little package. It probably does not have quite enough information in it to make easy to run if you are not an experienced GM, and if you are not fully conversant with the television series, then a little background might have been helpful, both for the series and each of the characters. Other than that, The Quickstart Job provides a solid taster for the forthcoming RPG and a couple of hour’s worth of entertaining play.