HEIST: a simple little game in progress

[Crackerjacker]

HEIST

What you need:
Three or more players. One player is the Ringleader. The rest of the players are the Crew.

The Hire: (IC RP) The Ringleader presents the heist and organizes the Crew.

The Job: (OOC RP) The Ringleader and the Crew hammer out the plan for the Heist.

The Getaway: (OOC/IC) The Ringleader and Crew each draw a hand (5) of cards from the deck describing what happened to them after the job and they each get a chance to tell their side of what happened and what went wrong. They all roll a die to determine order and then take turns in that order describing the events pertaining to one card in their hand at a time, until all the cards in each of their hands have been played and the story of the heist is over.

Cards would be things like Prison, Dead, Cop, and so forth, which variable meanings but a definite theme or idea behind them. The general idea is that by taking turns describing the events pertaining to each card in their hand one by one, they will tell the full story of the heist from an after the fact point of veiw, even if in a fractured order like Pulp Fiction, where the events are described out of order. Don't be afraid to describe yourself as dead or in prison, even with your first card, because you still get to continue to tell your story until your out of cards.

An Optional Rule or idea I'm not sure wether to implement or not: Having to describe the cards in the order you drew them into your hand (at the start of the final phase each person draws five cards all at once).

I'll consider the P19 and so forth in a bit.

I fabricated this in less than five minutes, and its mainly just an excercise in structured freeforming, which is a topic that I'm extremely interested in exploring the different narrative uses for.

[Graham W]

Hi Crackerjacker,

I like this sort of game. It's a simple storytelling game, stripped down to the essentials. It reminds me of an improvisation game we did, where one player thought of random words and the other had to incorporate them into a running story.

One problem with this sort of game, I think, is it relies on the abilities of the players to build the story to a conclusion. Otherwise, you get a situation where the last player just plays a card and says "OK, and then we kill a cop. [Awkward pause] Right, last card, that's the end of the game.".

In other words, I think it might be a good idea to build some sort of structure into the story. (But then others will disagree about that, probably)

By the way, the reason this thread caught my attention is because I'm also writing a game called "Heist". Have a look at [Heist] Stake-setting and sharing narration, where there's some comments on the genre which might be useful.

Graham