So You Wanna Do A Crime? Here Are Five Heist RPGs Ready To Go
Looking to run a heist around your tabletop? Here are five Heist RPGS that will have you doing crime in absolutely no time.
Crime pays, contrary to what your elementary school assembly may have told you. It’s just, you have to do a big enough crime that even when they catch you, they don’t stay mad.
For example, people keep doing the kind of fraud where you pretend to be rich to get people to give you their money. And it keeps working. People keep falling for it, even if in hindsight they say they don’t.
But those kinds of crimes aren’t necessarily the fun kind of crime to do in a tabletop RPG. For that sort of thing, you want the drama and action of a good heist. Unfortunately, it can be a lot of work to set one of those up in just any game. Fortunately, there are plenty of RPGs that make it easy and fun to run or carry out a heist. Here’s a look at five great heist RPGs!
Blades in the Dark
Blades in the Dark is one of the better options out there. If you want to run a fantasy heist, it doesn’t get much better than this. You play as a crew of criminals in a gaslamp fantasy city known as Doskvol.
There you tangle with the bluecoats and rival gangs as you pull heist after heist. This system gets you right into the action with its simple but creative approach to character creation. You pick a playbook, make some choices, and immediately can jump to actually doing your first heist.
The rules are easy to pick up, though there’s some nuance needed (players always decide what to roll, the GM determines the effects, for instance). Blades‘ approach to and focus on living out the fun tropes of the criminal/heist genre means you don’t worry about planning the heist, you simply can flashback to the planning phase and talk about what your characters had prepared to get through the obstacles in your path.
And if fantasy heists aren’t your cup of tea, there’s a ton of Forged-in-the-Dark settings out there that will tickle your fancy.
Honey Heist
Honey Heist is a quick, one-page RPG. It’s extremely straightforward. You have two stats: Bear and Criminal. Over the course of Honeycon, you’re going to undertake the greatest heist the world has ever seen.
It is absolutely as fun as it sounds. You can even roll on the special bonus hat table to decide what kind of hat your bear is wearing And all you have to do is pull the heist off without a hitch. The other side of the handout makes it easy for the GM to run the honey heist. It’s a great game to play as a one shot to get a feel for how a heist should go.
Leverage: The Roleplaying Game
Have you seen Leverage? If you haven’t, what are you doing? Go watch it right now.
Leverage: The Roleplaying Game puts you in the middle of a dysfunctional but highly-competent team of criminals. It’s specially designed for getting out there and stealing things back from the rich and powerful. You aren’t necessarily out to Robin Hood, but you are there to make a rich a-hole have a bad day by doing an extremely technical and impressive crime.
This is probably the best game for learning the structure of a heist. It has the absolute best way to handle planning a heist and how to get players into it. It even tells you how to build a plot twist into your session!
It can be hard to find this one, since they stopped selling it owing to a licensing issue, but look hard enough me hearties, and you’ll prevail.
Fiasco
This is a wilder one. If you’re used to the traditional method of an RPG run by a GM where you build a character with a class or something like it, you won’t find that here. You won’t even have special abilities.
Fiasco is a GM-less game that helps players run through a story that feels astoundingly like a good Coen Brothers’ film. It’s a game of terrible people making worse decisions, and if you and your party can get into it, it’s some of the most fun you’ll have of an afternoon.
It’s real easy to play, you set up a web of relationships as you start to tell cinematic tales of small time capers gone disastrously awry. Fiasco will tap into a different part of your creativity, but if you like putting the emphasis on roleplaying in an RPG, it’s exactly what you’re looking for.
One Last Job
Finally, there’s One Last Job, a rules-lite, flexible collaborative storytelling RPG. You play as a crew taking on that one last job that should hopefully set you up for life.
What makes this one especially fun is that you don’t create your character traditionally. Your teammates do. The other players will use jokes, insults, and improvised shared histories to flesh out your character as you play through it.
It’s a one-shot worth playing if you want to feel like an old, experienced crew with very little prep.
What’s your favorite heist RPG?
