Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S3|15: I Love It When a Plan Comes Together.

I’m actually going to start out of order, and talk about the vest a little bit.

I wasn’t trying to be obnoxious or control the session, but here’s the thing. The curse on the vest indicates that “you feel driven to recollect the vest at any cost until the curse is removed”. The emphasis on “at any cost” is mine: I read that to mean Basil should be as/more interested in finding the vest as in finding the bomb. In my mind, if Steve wanted to ditch the vest subplot, he’d make that clear and give me an off-ramp. And actually, I don’t remember if it was after we went off the air in this session, or as we start next session, but Steve basically says “we’re going to handwave removing the curse” because it’s not really relevant to the main story. But until he did that, I was prepared to roleplay it as Basil’s primary concern.

But back to how we got to that point in the first place, I suppose.

We pick up as we’re finalizing our plan to get a look at the casino’s employment records. Basically, we’re going to have Lo Mang come in the office and put himself in position to access the records, and then have Gomez throw an “entitled customer” fit to distract the security chief’s attention while Lo Mang does his thing. And up to a point, it goes reasonably well, though I grimaced a little when Seth mentioned “I have a box downstairs” – the last thing we need is to draw attention to the vault. But the good news is we come out of it with a name: Franca Laurentz, a security guard who’s only been with the casino for about a month.

There’s some follow-up questions regarding her motives – is she with one of the gang leaders, the Twilight Four, or an independent who just happened to luck onto the device? But we’re not going to find those answers here, so file it away for later.

Next up: returning the key. We know Gage is going to be in the VIP box, so we make our approach, and again… things actually go pretty well. Though ALSO again, I was gritting my teeth when Dougie suggested just dumping the fake key in a place where we’d be the prime suspects if it was discovered. But at this point, we’ve accomplished every objective that could be accomplished: we don’t have the device itself, but that’s not our fault now, is it?

And that’s when the adventure had one last wrinkle to throw our way, as the wizard manages to get into Gage’s private box and hold him at knifepoint in exchange for the vest. And I have to admit I was a little surprised at Seth’s inaction here. Talking the wizard out of killing Carlyle is very much a “face of the party” move, so I was expecting another blitz of roleplay, but he kinda just kicked back and left it to me to decide whether to give him the vest or not.

Now, I didn’t really want to do it. A LITTLE bit because of the curse, but mainly because I wasn’t seeing ANY plausible explanation of how we’d have the vest in our possession. The most likely outcome is that we give the wizard the vest, he leaves, and then Gage summons an army of security guards and escorts us down to the vault to verify our story. At which point we’re discovered either way; the remaining choice is whether to try and fight our way out of it, or just fess up and hope Gage’s civic duty kicks in.

In fact, that was the motivation I had behind giving my little speech about appreciating pain. I was trying to send the wizard a hint that we know what your vest is and what it could do, and maybe he would be smart enough to approach the problem some other way. But either Steve didn’t get that as GM, or the wizard didn’t get that because the story required us to make a choice. Either way, it was decision time. Even then, at first, when Gage was acting all nonchalant, I was content to let things ride because maybe Gage had some backup security system we don’t know about. But once the wizard started talking about eating his soul and Carlyle started to look worried… I just felt like we had to act. Everything we know about Carlyle suggests he’s a reputable businessman, and I figured if we have to blow our cover to keep him alive, we’ll just have to console ourselves with the fact that we got what we need to continue our mission regardless.

So I give up the vest, and fortunately, Seth springs back into action and connects the alibi dots I can’t; not only that, he even manages to connect dots that were unconnected by tying Franca into our alibi. Franca stole the vest, sold it to us, and we were trying to find a discreet opportunity to give it back to Gage. And OK, when John first mentioned the key, I was worried, but it actually worked in our favor and lent a little more authenticity to our story: “how can we have been a part of this if you still have your key?”.

Now, I’m sure there’s still ALL SORTS of holes in that story if you look too closely, but it’s JUST enough to give us a chance of talking our way through it. And I think Steve roleplayed this outcome pretty well… Gage clearly knows there’s something off about our story, but he can’t pinpoint it enough to call shenanigans, and there’s also the fact that we did save his life. Beyond that, appearances must be maintained: Gage still needs to finish hosting the gala, and it’s probably in the best interests of his business reputation to NOT have it out there that someone broke into his vault. So, rather than cause a huge disturbance, he takes the minor L – remember that he was only holding the vest as collateral on a loan – and lets us leave. With a warning to not return for a while, of course.

So where does that leave us? We largely succeeded in our mission, even if it was awkward at times. We know Franca Laurentz is our next link in the chain, but we don’t know where she is or what her motives were. Some of that will be left to the infamous Other Members Of The Force; meanwhile, we get to rest up and read about our exploits in the paper.

And it is true that we all played a part in the victory, which was the real redeeming feature of the whole thing. Dougie’s single biggest contribution was switching the keys, though his gambling wins also put us on Gage’s radar. Lo Mang got us through the cage and down to the vault, and also got Franca’s name from the files. I got us past the pain daemon without fighting, and also followed the scent of the missing device. Gomez handled all the social “face of party” type interactions, including most of our direct interaction with Carlyle. Despite our complete lack of a plan, it really did come together pretty well.

Also, Police Squad! was the reference I was going for. The precursor to the Naked Gun movies was a TV show called Police Squad!, that also featured the Frank Drebin character. One of the recurring gags was that at the end of each episode, the characters would all freeze (as was common for 70s TV shows), but rather than freezing the frame, the main characters would just hold a pose while other action continued around them: the coffee that was being poured would overflow, a random person would walk through the shot, they even had one where a criminal in the process of being arrested just unlocked his handcuffs and left because all the police officers were “frozen”. If it’s streaming anywhere, I’d recommend it, and not just because O.J. Simpson wasn’t in it at that point.

Well, next week, back to the chase. As always, feel free to drop by our Discord channel or other social media and let us know what you think of the show. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S3|14: And Now for Something Completely Different.

It’s always the quiet ones, isn’t it?

I have to admit I’d been waiting for this episode to finally release. I don’t know what came over me, and I’m not sure I could ever do it again, but for one brief shining moment, I was in a roleplaying zone, and I have to admit it was a lot of fun. And based on some of the reactions on the Discord channel, it seems like it was well-received by you guys too.

Before I get to that, believe it or not, I want to start with a brief comment on Steve’s love of the Ocean’s X movies. And I’m actually going to lightly “rip” on the cast, though not in the way other people have done.

Here’s my take: part of the allure of the Ocean’s movies was the real-life friendship between George Clooney, Matt Damon, and Brad Pitt, which mirrored the friendship between the members of the original Rat Pack. The Ocean’s movies had a spirit of a bunch of buddies screwing around in their spare time, and they decided to go ahead and turn that into a movie. (Wait a second… who does that sound like?) And maybe one even overlooks some of those movies’ flaws BECAUSE there was a sense they were a labor of love for the key actors.

You just didn’t have that dynamic in Ocean’s 8. There’s no sense that Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, and Sandra Bullock are hanging out together in real life; the studio just grabbed some equivalently-famous actresses for a sequel driven by suits rather than demand. It wasn’t like movie-goers were demanding an Ocean’s 14 with the original cast, either (except maybe Steve, apparently); why would they flood cinemas for a reset with a new cast that didn’t have that same real-world rapport?

OK, movie critic hat off. Soapbox stored in the upright and locked position. On to the show.

First things first, her relationship with the wizard was a little unclear. When we first arrived on the scene, the natural assumption was that this was the wizard’s Plan B: his svartalfars create a distraction upstairs to keep the guards occupied while his heavy hitter goes straight for the vault. But then she basically gave away the very thing she was retrieving, which doesn’t fit the scenario at all, unless she’s just really whimsical and prone to break whatever contract she had with the wizard. It’s so hard to find good help these days…

I also find myself wondering: if we had shown up earlier, would we have fought the djinn instead? Is this a branching tree of outcomes, depending on when you eventually make it down to the vault? Or was this always going to be the set-piece, regardless of when you showed up? That’s mostly just my own curiosity – doesn’t impact the game at all – but I found it interesting to speculate.

Now, you’ll notice I started this episode really quiet, but it wasn’t that I was disinterested. Quite the opposite: I was very much feeling that things were just starting to get good. However, I had said Basil was watching the corridor to see if the fight had attracted reinforcements, so I didn’t think it would be proper for me to start jumping in to comment on events my character wasn’t in the room for. When the conversation was out-of-character, I felt like I had a right to speak, but while it was in character… I wasn’t there, so I should let them lead the action.

Believe me, I WANTED to jump in. I always hesitate to be too aggressive toward the choices other players make, but I felt like Steve was dropping some pretty strong hints that we didn’t want to turn this into a fight, and I didn’t really like the directions both Seth and John wanted to take things. Seth had kind of resigned us to the fight and… OK… we might have won, but I feel like it would’ve taken a LOT out of us. John was willing to avoid the fight, but his idea to give the pain demon the poison bomb just seemed like a recipe for disaster. Yeah, she COULD take it back to her home plane. But she could also just take it up one flight of stairs and detonate it in the gala full of Absalom’s movers and shakers. So that didn’t seem like a good move to me either.

Now what happened next was very spontaneous, but I assure you there were a lot of really quick calculations going on behind the scenes. When I first picked the star-knife, as a gift, there was this ever-present math in my head of what weapon could I afford to give away while not ruining my character for future fights. When damaging myself, there was a calculation of how far I could take it, just in case things went off the rails and we had to fight her anyway. Loosely, I had settled on the value of a badge use – if it went over 30 or so points, that might be the point where either someone else would have to join in, or we’d just have to fight her and I’d immediately badge. So behind the scenes the wheels are definitely turning.

The real jumping-off point was when John giving her the caltrops didn’t seem to move the needle as much as the initial gift of the star-knife did. That was the point where I started to feel like just giving her items was going to become an exercise in diminishing returns. So if what she really wanted was pain, better to give her a controlled display of pain, rather than letting her just start beating on us.

So round one of that was just me stabbing myself (though I had completely forgotten about the wounding rune on my weapon… oops), and then she gives me the vest. Fortunately Basil can inspect the item quickly and learns both good and bad news. The good news is it’s got a cast of spiritual weapon as a daily power, specifically a spiked chain. The bad news is the cost of summoning it is that spikes on the inside of the vest stab the user for a die of damage. And… there’s also a curse on the item. I’ll leave that for a future episode – it doesn’t impact combat readiness in the here and now, but it could create complications down the road.

Even striking her with the spiritual weapon had an element of calculation to it. Yeah I was kind of winging it and going where the roleplay took me, but it also felt like making a statement that we weren’t afraid of her. Up to that point, I’m just stabbing myself and debasing myself to get out of a fight. It felt like it inherently acknowledged her superiority. I felt like if I took that swing at her, it felt like saying “ohbytheway we’ll still kick your ass if you want to start something”.

And sure enough… it worked, and she left. And I even got a ring of wizardry for my troubles. Which is actually pretty great because getting additional spell slots in this game is just SO key. Doubly so for an archetype caster rather than one who’s a caster by their core class.

So with the situation resolved and the vault empty, we get to claim our… wait, what?

The bomb is gone?

Oh that’s bad.

The silver lining is there’s a trail of chemical smell (same substance we were dealing with back at the zoo) that we hadn’t noticed before, but now that we know what to sniff for, we can follow. The trail leads back down the hall to the guards’ break room. Lo Mang – as the person who actually fits in down here – sneaks in and finds an empty locker with an “I quit!” note from someone identified only as “F”. So OK…”F” quit and stole the bomb on their way out the door.

There are new long-term questions raised by this. Does “F” work for one of the gang leaders, or the Twilight Four? Or was this just a random disgruntled employee who wanted to grab some severance pay and assumed the lockbox owned by the gang leaders was a lucrative target? That’s all for down the road. For now, we have to work out who F is, as well as returning the key.

As far as F’s identity… it seems like MAYBE relying on gossip would work… but “hey do you know a random employee whose name starts with F who was disgruntled and stopped showing up for work?” seems like it could also put people on guard… especially coming from random party guests. So the new plan is to break into the records room, except that’s also the office for the head of security. You know… the dwarf with the really big hammer who already started giving Gomez the stink-eye earlier.

And that’s basically where we’ll leave it for next week. Will we be able to figure out who F is? Will we be able to return the key without being detected? Will ALL of this happen before someone visits the vault and finds out it’s been broken into? Find out next week. In the meantime, feel free to drop by our Discord channel and let us know what you think of the show. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S3|13: Fanny Pack Of Holding.

Despite not really having much of a plan, we finally made it to the vault this week. Pass-fail, we’re actually getting it done so far. It just FEELS like we’re teetering on the edge of failure the entire time.

First up, we reuse an old Extinction Curse standby and shove the party into a bag of holding to get through the “cage” area of the casino. Now, I don’t want to be pedantic, and we’ve had THREE people who know the rules a lot better than me weigh in (Steve, Vanessa, and Loren), but this still feels a little bit sketchy to me. I realize the ruling has already been given… each person gets their own extra-dimensional space… but it still just feels weird that three people and their gear could be tucked into a bag that’s specced for 25 bulk.

And OK, there’s also a general inconsistency with the bulk system. The general rule of thumb says that a unit of bulk is 5 or 10 pounds, which would make an adult human something like 15-25 bulk (even using the 10-pound figure). But the table for creatures says a medium creature is only 6 bulk. So… even without the ruling about each creature having its own space, this whole thing is a little bit muddled. But hey, the Extinction Curse crew already argued their way through this, so we’re just gonna piggyback on their win, and into the bag we go.

So we get past the first round of guards, and I’m realizing we don’t really have a lot of stealth tools at our disposal. Silence, darkness… other than my one cast of invisibility sphere, we can’t really disguise our presence and pretty much have to hit them head on. Last week, I was also lamenting the fact that we didn’t think to bring a sleep potion and just have Lo Mang give them the mickey, but I’m not feeling so bad about that after doing more research. Looking at potions that inflict sleep, Level 4 Stupor Poison only has a DC 20 save, and the next one after that is Level 12 Slumber Wine which costs 325 gp per dose. (And OK, guards might be willing to drink COFFEE on duty, but getting them to drink wine might’ve been a tough sell anyway.)

And this brings me to one of those other little weaknesses with the whole “heist movie” genre: the protagonists in those movies can pretty much get whatever they need, equipment-wise. A high-end laptop that can hack the mainframe? Fire engine and firefighting gear? Poison that gives the guy with the vault codes explosive diarrhea? They just HAVE it, somehow, because they’re cool enough to have connections. It’s a little harder to plan one of these when you’re gold-limited.

So, I guess we’re fighting then. Not how I wanted it to go down, but if we hit ‘em quick, maybe we can concuss them and they’ll have trouble identifying us. Before we do that, Dougie does the best he can to sabotage the doors to the other areas so if there ARE going to be reinforcements, it might slow them down a bit. And then it’s time to fight.

The fight actually starts off pretty rough, as we miss most of our attacks in the first round. We had ourselves the equivalent of a perfectly good surprise round, and then we go and waste it with garbage rolls. Luckily though, one of the two guards loses his turn entirely, and the other mostly whiffs on his attacks, so the bad luck is contagious. Round 2, on the other hand, goes a LOT better, as we land some crits and put the guards on the defensive. By round three, one guy is out entirely, and the other is trying to run for it, but to no avail thanks to Lo Mang’s ability to chase runners down as a reaction.

In the midst of all this, I noticed a few small things. The first is a general quibble: if Lo Mang’s Heaven’s Thunder ability does sonic damage, did Steve miss that, or does that imply that the walls are thick enough nobody noticed? I didn’t particularly notice it during the initial playthrough, but on re-listen, that kind of stuck in my brain. I assume an attack that’s loud enough to do damage would be loud enough to be heard. But between the walls being thick down here, a party going on upstairs, and the doors to other nearby areas being sabotaged, maybe we’re still OK.

The other is a personal milestone, as I finally get to use my Enchanting Arrow ability for the first time. Just as a reminder, Enchanting Arrow bumps my attack up to 2 actions, but adds 2d6 of mental damage on top (keep in mind that’s on top of base damage, precision damage from Devise a Stratagem, and possibly deadly damage in the case of a crit). So in terms of strategy, the goal here should be to use it at the ends of the spectrum. What I mean is that it’s best to use it either on likely/known crits where it will get doubled, or (at the opposite end) enemies that have a high enough AC that the first attack is probably my only chance to hit. In this case, I guessed wrong: I thought 35 might be enough to crit, but it turned out to not be so. Only 5 extra points of damage.

So rocky start aside, we’re past the guards. The general plan now will be to go into the vault, get the contents of the box, leave the guards in the vault so they won’t be discovered until later, and get out of Dodge. OF COURSE it’s not that easy though.

Remember how Gage Carlyle didn’t let me go all the way into the vault when I opened an account? Well, the vault was kind of L-shaped, and it turns out there’s a demon-lady in the part of the vault that I didn’t get a look at. She’s too much of a psycho to be working for the casino, so I’m going into this whole encounter assuming she works for the wizard. It always felt like the attack upstairs was a little wimpy; maybe it was all cover for this lady to get down here during the confusion.

The good news is that maybe that opens a window to negotiate since as far as we know, we’re there after different things. “You can attack us, and one of us will go raise the alarm and neither of us gets what we want.” The bad news is a creature that loves pain and is talking about “enhancing” us probably isn’t going to be in much of a talking mood.

But I guess we’ll find out next week. Can we talk this out, or are we going to have to fight our way through? As always, feel free to drop by our Discord channel or other social media and let us know what you think of the show. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S3|12: I’m Just the Cook.

Last week’s episode was the first episode of the infiltration, but it almost felt more like an extension of the prep phase: basically, we just got into the building and got a chance to verify how well our prep-phase intel lined up with the situation in the casino during the gala. This week, the action starts to happen and we have to start making real choices about how to do this thing. And the big one right off the bat is an attack by a group of svartalfar.

As an aside, yes, svartalfar and drow both exist in the Second Edition world. Now, it’s a little weird in the original Norse mythology because the word “svartalfar” is a reference to “black elves” which makes them sound like the same thing. But the Pathfinder distinction is that drow are elves, while svartalfar are fey creatures that were banished to the Shadow Plane for committing evil acts. The General Zods of the fey, if you will.

So… we’re assuming these guys were sent by the wizard. I mean… they’re yelling about “give back what you’ve taken” and they’re making a beeline for Gage Carlyle and mostly ignoring the rest of the casino, so that’s the logical conclusion, right? On the other hand, the wizard himself isn’t here. So is this the whole attack, or is this just one part of a larger plan?

For us, the decision is how to respond. For OUR purposes, this attack represents a distraction, which we sorely need for our plan to work. So the real question is how much can we get done during that distraction. Obviously, we suss out quickly that it’s a prime opportunity to swap the keys, but Gomez wants to take it a step further and use it as a chance to infiltrate the vault.

But then we have the other angle, which is that we’re still officers of the law, and Carlyle – based on everything we know – is an innocent (and by all appearances, unarmed) civilian. So even though we have ulterior motives for being here, how do we feel about leaving him and his security to fend for themselves? And if we CAN’T do the whole infiltration in one go, helping defend the casino from the attack might be a way to get in Carlyle’s good graces for the rest of the evening. So there’s positives to helping defend against the attack. But back on the negative side, being too aggressive in our defense might ruin our cover stories and draw attention to ourselves. I mean… Dougie is the only one whose cover story makes him a plausible combatant. “What are two society fops and a waiter doing kicking so much ass?” becomes an obvious question if go in too hard.

So here’s where we see the consequences of not having more of a plan going in. I’ll give Dougie a pass because he had a specific task; get the key. If we don’t do that, nothing else matters. But we have Gomez going all-in on trying to draw guards away from the vaults, so he leaves the combat entirely. Lo Mang forgets he’s a waiter and just starts pummeling dudes and releasing his full move set. I tried to walk a middle line here: I figured that Carlyle and his guards make us a party of seven, so we’ll probably win, so the goal here should be to offer the right amount of resistance a brave (possibly alcohol-assisted bravery) party guest would be willing to offer. That’s why I largely let the svartalfar come to me, as well as why I left the sheath on my sword cane. Basically, I’m going for the amount of help Batman could offer if someone attacks a party while he’s attending as Bruce Wayne – more than zero, not enough for people to start drawing bat ears on photos of him.

And indeed, the attack fizzles after two or three rounds, but thanks to some timely rolls, that’s all the time Dougie needs to get the key. In retrospect, we really hitched our wagon to a shaky outcome. If you run the numbers and pretend it’s a 50-50 chance (DC 30 or 31?), succeeding on three checks is a 12.5% chance of actually succeeding. Even if you Edge Point one of those rolls away (as Dougie was forced to do), it’s still only a 25% chance. And again, that’s assuming 50-50… if it’s harder than a DC30(ish) check, the odds go down even further. So we REALLY got luckier than I think we were planning.

Meanwhile, Gomez’s efforts come up empty, as the path to the vault is arguably guarded better than Carlyle is. So it looks like this fight will be a chance to get the key and that’s it.

There is one thing that amuses me in all of this. I don’t intend this as criticism of John because his job was to get the key and he had to do what he had to do. But the visuals to Carlyle or some other outsider would be Dougie abandoning the two people he was supposedly brought there to protect, so he can protect the guy who’s already got his own bodyguards. Clearly Gomez and I are going to have to fire Dougie for insubordination when all of this is over.

So the fight is over, the dust settles, and now we’re on Carlyle’s radar in a positive way. Since we helped defend against the attack, we’re invited to watch the main show (Celine Dion? The Blue Man Group?) in the VIP area. So that’s got us new paths to Carlyle and access to new parts of the building. But time still favors trying to get to the vault before Carlyle notices the key has been swapped (or even just gets an impulse to check the vault.) So after some back-and-forth we decide we’re going to go ahead and get the key now, and use the VIP room as a way to swap the keys back.

There are two main hurdles ahead of us at this point.

The first hurdle is how we get down there, but we actually have tools for that: Plan A is that we can stash ourselves in a bag of holding and Lo Mang… I mean, Mang Lo… can take refreshments down through the cage. Plan B is that I can use my one cast of invisibility sphere and we can slowly navigate the party through the cage.

The slightly tougher question is how we deal with the guards that are likely to still be down there. The ideal would be to either avoid combat entirely, or at least take them out in a way that they don’t see us, at which point, most reasonable people would just chalk it up to the svartalfar. “Oh, they had a second-team that infiltrated the vault while the diversionary force attacked the casino floor”. Failing that, we’re just going to have to attack them: 4-on-2 probably isn’t a huge concern as far as winning or losing, but it does disrupt the possibilities for doing this undetected. Even with disguises, how many groups with a tiefling orc, a goblin, a tengu, and a chunky human is Carlyle likely to know? We can buy time by locking them in the vault, and maybe they get discovered the next day, but Carlyle will still ultimately know it was us. Frankly, I’m kind of kicking myself for not including some sort of sleeping potion so we could just have Lo Mang spike their drinks.

But… we are where we are. We don’t have a sleeping potion and the guards would probably get suspicious if Lo Mang offered them Triple Woodies while on duty, so we’re probably just going to have to make the best of the situation and attack. Maybe they won’t get a good look at us or something. Or maybe they’ll still attribute it to the wizard and just think we were his paid goons and not the Edgewatch. Either way, we’re at “hope for the best” time.

Lastly… one of our listeners pointed this out on the Discord, but I have to agree: Under Siege? Obscure? It was probably the high-water mark of Stephen Segal’s popularity, Erika Eleniak was easy on the eyes, and it was also in heavy rotation on HBO right around the time Tommy Lee Jones’ appearance in The Fugitive changed the arc of his career. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying it was GOOD. But it was certainly omnipresent for a while. A disciplinary report will be filed against John with the Chair of Pop Culture References.

And that’s where we pick it up next week… down in the Lucky Nimbus vault. As always, please feel free to drop by our Discord channel or other social media and let us know what you think of the show. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S3|11: Never Tell Me the Odds!

The prep is over, it’s time to start heisting.

Before we get into the action, I did want to circle back to Steve’s show notes briefly. I did talk about this last week, so I don’t want to get into this endless loop of me agreeing with Steve agreeing with me, and then we’re still talking about the casino heist in 2027. But I did have a few more thoughts on the subject before we get going.

Let’s examine the heist genre. You have a central protagonist who’s smart and talented and can see the whole chessboard laid out in front of them. That’s your Ethan Hunt, your Danny Ocean. The problem is almost always clearly laid out because the protagonist is smart enough to understand (almost) all the dangers going in and has been thinking about how to do this for a while. The protagonist is, quite literally, The Man (Person) With The Plan.

But the protagonist is just one person and can’t do everything on their own, so they have to recruit a team of specialists (usually quirky misfits) to do the things they can’t do themselves. So the real allure of the heist genre is revealing what the specialists can do and how they use their skills to solve the problem. And of course, there are going to be one or two unexpected developments that force the protagonist to adjust the plan on the fly, whether it’s the antagonist starting to realize something is up halfway through, a double-cross within the team, random dumb luck… whatever.

Now, bless Paizo’s collective heart for trying, but it’s TOUGH to fit that into the structure of a tabletop roleplaying game.

The first, and biggest problem, is leaving room for player agency. The best way to REALLY do a heist-genre plot would be for the GM to completely lay out the plan – in the context of this game, have Sergeant Ollo create the plan for us – and then the players execute it. But then the players aren’t Danny Ocean anymore, we’re the quirky supporting characters, and we’re spending the next 3-6 episodes just doing what the pre-planned plot has told us to do. On the other hand, the more room you leave for players to make decisions, the less tight and heist-like the story gets, and it even increases the chance that the players will just come up with something that can’t possibly work and the entire scenario face-plants. So where does one set the balance there?

The other thing is those “supporting skills” that help the heist succeed… what do you do if the party doesn’t have those skills? If you started at Day One knowing you were going to be doing a heist, yeah, maybe you include a rogue for thievery and a bard for the social situations, and a brains class who has a lot of knowledge skills, and go light on classes that don’t offer as much in an infiltration. But for a heist that falls near the middle of a six-book adventure path, you’re “stuck” with whatever characters have been brought into the situation and they might not have the skills the plan requires. We even see a little of that within our team where Lo Mang hasn’t had NEARLY as much to do in the prep phase as the other three of us have.

And I think that’s where (bringing it full circle) I agree with Steve’s point that maybe this all needed a LITTLE more guidance. It was maybe a little too free-form and we spent a lot of time just wrestling with the basic “what are we even supposed to be doing?” question. (Keep in mind, as Steve mentions, our “paralysis by analysis” was actually WORSE than what you’re hearing here; he made some cuts to get us down to listenable episodes.)

Nevertheless, into the fray we go. We’re dressed up (except for Lo Mang, who’s working in the kitchen), we’ve got our cover stories, and it’s time to mingle with high society.

Annnnnd… we immediately stumble out of the gate and burn through one-third of the edge points we thought we had.

First, it turns out the edge point for the forged documents (I’m ashamed to admit that was my work) was a fake. So instead of six, we really only had five to begin with. But then that means we have to burn another edge point to get Basil into the door, and now we’ve got four left for the entire rest of the heist. And MAYBE we’ve added some awareness points, though it’s a little unclear whether using an edge point negates the failure entirely (i.e. also no awareness bump) or whether it gets you in and allows the scenario to progress but still generates awareness. That’s for Steve to know and us to find out, I guess.

And then things go from bad to worse as Dougie’s attempts at entry turn into a complete train wreck. Dougie fails his check. Fires off a hero point… that also fails. Gomez tries to jump in and salvage the situation with his goblin charms and ALSO fails. So three strikes and Dougie is both literally and metaphorically out. And now we’ve DEFINITELY got some awareness on us.

Now… I’ve got a minor quibble here. I am not a Very Rich Person, but I wouldn’t think a Very Rich Person would need a separate invitation for their servant/bodyguard. I would assume such a person would be included in the employer’s invite if they were allowed in at all. But I wasn’t going to argue it too strenuously because that cuts both ways: the casino’s policy could’ve been “the casino has its own security so your guy has to wait in a servants’ waiting area during the gala”.

So… Dougie’s out on the street, but he soon gets better luck on the dice and is able to sneak onto the floor through the kitchen, and we’re back in business. And in some ways, that signifies a shift in our luck, as our rolls start to get better. I’m able to get a good bid in the auction that won’t stick me with a 500 gp pipe, and Dougie’s able to just flat-out steal himself a ribbon.

Next up is figuring out where Gage Carlyle is because nothing else really happens until we can get the key from him. We find him, but decide that observing him for a while is better than IMMEDIATELY trying to get close to him, and that turns out to be the right call, as his security detail is aggressively brushing people away. Looks like if we’d gone straight at him, it would’ve generated some awareness. So OK, one bullet dodged.

Our next attempt to gain Carlyle’s attention is to win big at the tables. It does feel like we’re getting a little loose with the definition of Dougie’s “disguise” because it’s a little weird that two Very Rich People would let their bodyguard gamble while on duty. But I’m chalking it up as a necessary evil of game mechanics: if we want to do this right (and fast), we may need to cheat, and that means Theivery is involved, and Dougie is a little better at that than I am. (Not sure about Gomez… I just remember back in the murder hotel, John and I were both unlocking doors and disabling traps, and his was a little higher.)

Of course, an out-of-character shame is that Lo Mang was stuck in the kitchen, because in real life, Chris is the casino/table-games aficionado of the party. Then again, if Chris HAD been able to play, he might have wanted to play each game individually, and then we’d have a 2-3 episode interlude while Lo Mang gambled. So maybe it was for the greater good that he was in the kitchen.

So John is able to cheat his way to a big windfall (1500 gp), and that’s got a good-news/bad-news component to it: Gage Carlyle has now actually taken interest in us… but so has the obnoxious loudmouth guy he tends to avoid. So basically we have to shed the loudmouth (so Gage would be willing to interact with us) in a way that doesn’t seem overly hostile or draw undue attention. Fortunately, Lo Mang’s ties in the kitchen finally pay their first dividends, as he’s able to slip the guy an extra-potent drink that knocks him out. (Which seems like a not-uncommon occurrence with this person, based on the staff’s reactions.)

So finally, we’re making progress. We’re on Gage’s radar, we’re climbing the social ladder… and it’s distraction time! The casino doors bust open and here comes trouble. Is it the renegade wizard? Is it the Twilight Four or one of the gang leaders trying to get their device back? Guess we’ll find out the answers after we kick some asses… next week. As always, feel free to drop by our Discord channel or other social media and let us know what you think of the show. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.