One of the most complicated yet rewarding genres of role-playing are heists. InDungeons & Dragons, heists are opportunities to give your players valuable loot and plenty of bragging rights while usually taking only one or two sessions to complete.
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Although heists are fun for players, they can be nightmarish for DMs to design and implement, especially if you want something as cinematic and extensive as Ocean’s Eleven or Mission: Impossible. While there isn’t pressure to be on the same skill level as an award-winning film director, there are a few important details you will want to make sure you get right when designing a heist for your campaign.
8Decide On The Object Of The Heist
The most important part of the heist, other than the friends you make along the way, is the object, information, or person that is the object of the heist. If you are including a heist as a part of a longer campaign, consider making the target important to the larger story or vital to your player’s adventuring.
The object should also be something that has inherent value, other than just to your players, otherwise someone wouldn’t go through the trouble of locking it up tight. Since the item’s value is more or less proportional to the security it is kept under, a king’s crown will not be kept in the storage room of a guard’s barracks.
7Make A Detailed Map
While improvisation is a useful skill as a DM, you will want to have more than a general idea of the heist location. You don’t need the exact dimensions of every room, but you will need alayout of the areaand where everything, including potential entrances and traps, is located.
Use this opportunity to more heavily consider the location of the heist. A museum will have areas for storage and preservation work, zoos have backstage areas that allow workers to travel more efficiently, and vaults usually contain ventilation to circulate air to heavily secured areas.
6Don’t Skip The Planning Phase
In one-shots and shorter campaign sessions, you might be tempted to skip the part where your players gather information and meet with contacts to plan the heist. If you start the session with, “You meet outside the museum, gear in tow,” then you will end up with frustrated players that make mistakes they didn’t plan for.
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This part of the heist can be as long as your players want it to be, from a ten-minute meeting in front of a corkboard covered in red string to a week-long montage of prep. Let your players decide when they feel ready enough to begin the heist, and make sure to provide them the opportunity to obtain the information and tools they need, within reason.
5Include Unexpected Obstacles
With enough planning and good luck, your players can obtain the treasure and skedaddle without so much as raising an alarm. While this is highly convenient for your player’s characters it isn’t very fun for your players.
Unplanned obstacles force your players to improvise solutions and are an excuse for them to use their class abilities and features. These can be an unexpected visit from the captain of the guard or even arival heist crew.
Whatever you include, make sure it doesn’t completely throw away any plans your players have made so far.
4Provide Your Players With Allies
When there is something worth stealing, a lot of people will want a piece of the pie. Since it is likely that not all of your players will be totally equipped with the right tools and knowledge to pull off a heist, consider including allies that will provide them with such, as long as they get a cut.
An ally can be anyone that directly helps them, from a simple custodian who is bribed to leave a door unlocked, to a master thief who will provide them with a detailed map of the interior. In your long-form campaigns, use this as an opportunity to include recurring NPCs or even villains with something to gain.
3Prepare For Unexpected Choices
During your planning phase, you might include secret entrances, helpful magic items, and clues for your players to find and succeed in their mission. At least once throughout the session one of your players will make a choice way out of left field that might break the heist.
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If the choice is creative, and not entirely impossible to pull off, consider improvising a way for it to work and allow the dice to determine whether itsucceeds or fails. You don’t want to punish your players for being creative, especially when they have much less information to work with than you do.
2Don’t Make It Too Difficult
In reality, most things that are locked up are very nearly impossible to steal. In heist movies, there is a frequent bending of rules, expectations, and even physics to ensure that the plan succeeds.
In a world of magic and fantasy, you will have to inject a few design flaws in the security for your players to exploit for it to be possible within the game’s mechanics.
This can be a lazy guard who doesn’t lock the windows on the upper floor or a period of time when the item of interest is left unguarded. To determine which security flaw is best for your heist, design a foolproof system and work backward from there.
1Use Existing Books
Much of the work you would otherwise have to do yourself can be found in 5th-edition adventure books like Waterdeep Dragon Heist and Keys From the Golden Vault. While these adventures don’t always fit precisely in your homebrew setting as you might hope, there is plenty of inspiration to draw from when designing your own.
In Keys From The Golden Vault, there are useful tables to quickly draw up guard descriptions and rival heist crews. Waterdeep Dragon Heist is a much lengthier adventure but also contains unique magic items and stat blocks for over a dozen humanoid NPCs useful as either allies or obstacles.
Both have traps, both mundane and magical, that are perfectly suited for heists.
