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View Full Version : DM Help To steal a princess; the heist movie



DMfromTheAbyss
2015-01-09, 04:17 AM
Ok so the title looks like it is going down in my campaign. I'm just looking for general ideas, and or anything I might be missing that could be cool becouse the genre of the heist "movie" done with magic, stempunk style magitech and a bit of panache sounds like an opportunity I'd hate to waste.

So For starters some background

So the PC's in the course of adventuring, encountered an NPC king, who happens to be a lower level (spoony) bard romantic. In the course of events the party wizard semi hooks up with him and in a fit of uncertainty does a bit of divination to see if there's any "Princesses" out there with his name on them. To their surprise there is. The wizard and king/spoony bard hook up despite this, but felt bad enough about the princess apparently being held in a bad trope to see about rescueing her anyway.. besides it sounds interesting/loot and xp.

So they set out, find the Kingdom has fallen to a group of Demon/Devil things (actually mortals with demonic grafts and morgaged to the hilt on dark pacts and evil magic) and the princess is archtypically held in the highest tower of the royal palace in the center of the city.

They also find out she's been held there for some 3 years or so, and the Fiendish leader of the bad guys has been using her as a lure to trap and kill/loot various rebel groups/adventurers that have been trying to rescue her.

The party, seeing as this is the case set out to do some more "legwork" and see if there is some way to steal the princess instead of fighting their way into a heavily warded death trap. The words "D&D Oceans 11" were used, and I as a DM felt this should not only be an option, I was encouraged to make this thread to share with them with your ideas, and also if neccessary change up how the defences to this princesses prison are set up for maximum use of heist tropes.

The party has just gotten to the moderately ruined but still habitable capital city, established a base of operations(by killing one of the demonic style overlords of the dock area), and thats about where the session ended.

So the system is a homebrew D&D, little bit of all the editions. I'm the DM obviously, I have not gotten overly detailed with the specifics of the scenario, so there's still wiggle room.

The PC's are high in level and consist of
1) Swashbucling thief with flashy distraction light magic, technically a thief but aside from stealth not much on skills
2)Thief cursed"?" into being a 1/2 Shadow Dragon, not much for combat but a good all round thief skill style thief
3) Fighter leader of men type, nasty in any kind of fight, has a literal boat load of followers, knights etc.
4) Wizard Generally competant but with a highly contingent orbital nuke.

5-7 possibly to be arranged next session from a pool of possible characters depending on who can make it from a bunch of semi-regulars

NPC young bard King of a nation with no real resources to bring to this fight millitarily or monitary. He is about 2/3rds the party level but with some interesting teleportation abilities, fairly brave and bookish but garbage in a fight. (so getting him to the princess room with all involved would make a good win condition, as basically he can act as a ride out even through the teleport warded out the who-ha palace, he just can't get in through said wards. And yes the teleportation involves singing.. so not particularly stealthy.

The setting is a high magic fantasy, with the current area being Steam punk inspired (not unlike a certain comic..;) The party is equiped with a fair assortment of magic items, but can't dependably get access to particular ones if needed (no reliable magic shops). The characters are not High op for the campaign, the demon enhanced baddies are a credible threat in numbers, though the big bad of the area may be a bit beyond them.

What the party has heard of the defences, indicates a combat slog through the palace, magical barriers against scrying, teleportation. Aerial defences built for anti airship/dragon/wizard of both the steampunk variety (quasi firearms/lightning guns/canons) high level aeriel opponents (looked like Balor types) and literal hellfire canons that can pierce any defences the party has.

The party is also good /neutral aligned. So swarming the defenders with undead would not be an option, nor is wholesale destruction in the city due to the downtrodden but still living human natives.

For reference all they know about the princess is she is actually there, and the demons let her sing out over the city from her captivity, both to entice people to try and rescue her and prove they still have her. As she has been slowly losing hope her songs have gotten more and more tragic, which the bad guys figure is further bad for the kingdom's morale (and kinda twisting the knife metaphorically-they are not very nice folks..)



TLDR Need ideas for a High fantasy steampunk heist, where the goal is to steal the princess from her tower.

Quirp
2015-01-09, 06:41 AM
Since I don't know the specifics of your system, the only thing I can give you is some general advice.
With the given party composition you are probably looking at a Scenario, where the party has to use the kings abilities to surprise the opponents.
The heist could be split into different acts/parts:
Act 1: Diversion
-the king declares his intention of rescuing the princess openly
-fighter guy and the king (+followers) start a mook march to attack the capital from the outside
-they never reach the capital, but need to smack the baddies around a bit before vanishing
-the two sneaky guys go into the palace (it is on high alert, but the guards are distracted by the king)
->result: baddies know the enemy is there and are nervous because they can't find them
->probable actions: enemies hole up in the capital after briefly swarming out to find the king

Act 2: Infiltration
-the king and the fighter appear in the groups hideout in the capital
-if possible the followers are replaced by some illusions by the wizard to protect their lives
-the hideout area is attacked by overwhelming force after a few probing attacks are slaughtered
-the king teleports into an area cleared of teleport protection by the sneaky types
-splitting of the group ends
->result: group is in the palace, baddies are trying to kill them in their hideout, baddies are on their way back

Act 3: Chaos
possible courses of action:
-race against time slaughtering the guards, followed by a last stand in the tower before teleporting out
-ambush on BBEG, teleport out, infighting ensues, come back later to save the princess
-if the cleared area is near the princess: silently take out the remaining guards, install an illusion of the princess, teleport out
-the followers create another distraction by attacking the capital or another important structure
-enemy has no time to think and rushes to the defence, group frees the princess an walks out
(the last one can be combined with the others)

I hope any of my ideas help you.

Beta Centauri
2015-01-09, 02:24 PM
What makes heist movies cool is how daring they are. They might be meticulously planned and carried out, but if someone on the outside decides to do something unexpected, the whole thing could be scotched. In heist movies like Ocean's 11, that either never happens or the heisters deal with the new situation, either adopting a new plan or changing the definition of success, or both. In short, the plot depends on everything going right, or the situation being recoverable or salvageable.

That can be the case in an RPG heist too, but if any of it depends on random rolls, the risk of failure doesn't have to be very high for failure eventually to occur. Even if everything has only an even chance of occurring, if there are even 4 rolls there's a pretty good chance the wrong thing is going to happen.

The most important thing you can do in your design is either prepare for that, or guarantee that it won't happen.

Preparing for it means that if someone rolls a failure that the consequences of that failure do not, themselves, bring the whole situation crashing down immediately. Being spotted by guards, and having to slaughter dozens of them isn't likely to leave anything about the plan that can plausibly be recovered. So, if someone is being sneaky, make sure that the stakes are something other than being spotted and the base going on alert.

This might require some abstraction, meaning that a roll might not stand for just a single small action (such as getting past an open guardroom door without being seen), but a larger compound action (such as getting past one entire ring of perimeter security without setting off the alarm). That way, failure is easier to think of in terms of non-catastrophe. If a guard sees or hears them trying to get past an open door, it's hard to see why the guard wouldn't just sound the alarm. But if they fail on the compound task they can still succeed well enough to continue with the heist, but in a way that makes things more complicated. The alarm hasn't been sounded, but the PCs slipped up just enough to throw off their tempo or the guard's routine. Uneasiness spreads through the compound, and there's some consequence or cost.

For instance, the heist, or that portion of the heist succeeds, and the PCs regroup at a safehouse but the guards have evidence of the PCs' involvement, and are on their way. This also will not end the heist, but there's a cost in time (laying low until the heat is off, stewing in custody until they beat the rap) or resources (having to torch the safehouse or pay/bribe someone to throw off the scent). None of that needs to be played out, unless you really want to. That's just the consequence of not doing as well as they could have. What isn't a consequence is that the heist gets wrecked.

Don't get me wrong: there's nothing wrong with the heist failing. I think there should definitely be a chance of that. But I doubt you want it to fail on the first flubbed roll, or that you want to scramble to figure out how to keep it viable.

When my players wanted to pull a heist, I had them plan the basics of it, and then told them that it went off without a hitch, right up to the last portion, where they reached the room with the item they were after. Then the players and I decided (at my suggestion) that, because the heist itself was only a small part of a larger adventure, that they'd actually fail to obtain the item, and that success consisted of finding out who actually did take it, with failure meaning some additional difficulty on the adventure going forward.

I could have had them roll multiple times to get into the building, roll multiple times to sneak through each floor, and roll multiple times to deal with other issues, but not only did that strike me as very time consuming and dull, but they probably would have failed on their fifth roll anyway, requiring us to entirely abandon a fun idea. I could just make the DCs lower, but that means they'd just fail on their 10th roll. I could make them so low that they might not fail even after 50 rolls, but at that point I might as just say they don't have to roll.

So, either plan for failure to be interesting, or take failure (at least until the very end) off the table. Or both, at different stages.

Good luck.