You In? Playing Through the Chaos with The Job
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #187. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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Wide but shallow.
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The appeal of a heist is twofold – first, there are few thrills that match punching up at a system explicitly built to keep us down, taking down Goliath, etc. – and second, getting the gang together, meticulously creating a plan and then executing it through all the inevitable surprises and fuckups. They payday is nice, but knowing you ruined a rich man’s day is priceless.
Not every plan goes according to plan, and let’s be honest, we get bored when they do. Thinking fast, whetting down our reflexes to the micron for peak performance is, as they say, the juice. We love to get away, but it’s so much sweeter when the cops or the boss have to watch us give the Dikembe “ah ah ah!” finger as we zoom away, hearts racing. Unless of course it’s all a bust, but you can’t win big if you don’t risk it all.
This and much more is what undergirds The Job, a narrative-driven heist RPG by Andre Novoa with help from Guilherme Gontijo, graphic design duo lina&nando at Games Omnivorous, and soon to be published in a deluxe boxed set edition by Exalted Funeral. As you may have heard in his interview on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Andre first published The Job as a book that caught on quick, and the box will include all that and more including all the tools you’d need for a killer score.
In a discussion with Andre, he described the core of a good heist: “Positive tension – I mean the thrilling, edge-of-your-seat kind. A good heist movie, just like a good heist game, keeps viewers and players in a constant state of anticipation.” The Job is heisting built around the narrative RPG systems that have been kicking around the past few years, but it’s all focused on a strict series of events: pick a score, gather your team, make a plan, and then try to keep the train on the tracks as the wheels spin off and everything goes ass up. Each job is a single session, and there’s no need to build a campaign – once you hit this payday, it’s smooth sailing from there.
Heist films are of course a big inspiration for the The Job, but this goes beyond the roles being played – each scenario is presented as a brief, and the book includes several examples fashioned around movie posters. These give you a title, the object, the budget and the complications; the rest is sussed out at the table. The boxed set gives many great examples, and these are a great way for the scene’s many wonderful designers to get in the mix, which Andre heartily encourages: “The Job is under a Creative Commons license, so people are encouraged to do with it whatever they will! There’s one creator, Chalkdown, who made an incredible supplement containing lots of new classes (or playbooks as they call them) and pre-made heists for MORK BÖRG, CY_BÖRG and Frontier Scum. It’s called Fortune Awaits, available at itch.io.”
Beyond the brief, there is the preparation, where the players all collaborate to outline the movie they’re all about to narrate in real time. For Andre, this is where The Job first came together for him: “For me personally, the moment it all clicked was when I came up with the Preparation Phase, in which the players have to plan the heist and come up with a sequence of scenes, just like they were writing a movie script! In a way they are invited to design their own gaming session, and I think this perfectly simulates the idea of planning a heist. It’s something original – something I have never seen before – and that makes perfect sense (at least to me!) for a heist game. It’s a bit meta, but in the best way: you plan a heist by planning the game, and that blurs the line between fiction and play.”
Of course, the best laid plans of mice and men ain’t worth much if they can’t withstand the unknown variables that go down during the Action. Which leads us to another core innovation of The Job, the Dice Stack. These chaos blocks are a well-known source of surprise for most RPGs, but this system puts their physicality to greater use. The more risks the players take, the higher they have to stack the tower, which is where they pull dice from the tower, the more likely it is to fall. If the tower falls three times, the job fails, and the players along with the Referee must describe this glorious failure. As Andre describes the Dice Stack: “It is the core element in the Action Phase of the game. The Dice Stack is, essentially, a tension meter, obviously inspired by great games like Dread, which uses a Jenga tower. And this tension is represented by the fact that players can actually lose! Unlike in most other roleplaying games, there’s a winning condition: players either pull off the heist, or they go down trying.”
Tension is a driving force for these heists, but it isn’t everything. With The Job, Andre knows that creative chaos and memorable moments is a major part of what makes RPGs so fun. This is where the players shine, getting wild with imagination, seeing how far they can take their schemes: “One of the funniest, most absurd scenes I’ve seen was a player disguising as a celebrity chef – complete with a fake accent and a live cooking demonstration on the building’s internal broadcast system – to distract security during the heist. The rest of the crew was sneaking through the vents while he improvised a risotto recipe with a flamethrower. It was ridiculous. It made no sense. It was perfect.”
All of this and more goes down during the Action phase, where the scenes conceived by the players unfold while the Referee mitigates and adds to the complications. The collective creativity explodes at this point, with players adding on and one-upping each other as they get closer and closer to the score. Andre explains: “In this game, everything quickly turns into a stretch, and that is the objective! Players are encouraged to dive headfirst into the outlandish, the absurd and the wildly impractical. It’s way more fun to say that ‘my character is going to somersault out of a moving helicopter with a fire extinguisher, drop through a ventilation shaft into the kitchen, and put out a fire another player started as a distraction,’ than to say, ‘I pick the lock on the front door.’ In The Job, players are encouraged to put themselves in unnecessary, sometimes pointless trouble.”
Part of what gets in the players way is Setbacks, and they often deal with these surprises with their Inventory, both elements of The Job that came together during playtesting. “I received incredible comments from two playtesters in particular: Andre Tavares and Ema Acosta. They were responsible for significant changes to the game, including the inventory system and the setbacks mechanic. It was due to them that the inventory system became so streamlined: players start with basically nothing and can grab whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as they still have one of four slots available and enough budget to afford it. That’s it. It was also due to them that the rules for setbacks exist: when players make an average roll (between 7-9 with a 2d6 roll), instead of having a partial success (like in most games), they succeed but something will happen later on that works against them. This is really cool because it gives the Referee future material to tie back into the story, reflecting earlier choices and adding coherence to the narrative as a whole.”
Every heist must end, and there are only two choices: escape, with or without the prize, or getting caught. Either can happen in The Job; there are no assurances of success. If the players topple the Dice Tower three times, that’s it, game over and the crew is caught and the Ref tells the tale of the end they deserve. If that third fall doesn’t happen and all scenes are played out, then the players describe their escape, and the various ways the team spends their ill-gotten but well-earned gains, hiding out across the world. Ideally the game will run for two or three hours, the length of a solid film (if directed by Michael Mann), and no need for further campaigning. Just a good story played out between friends, full of laughs and gasps, surprises managed by professionals at work.
Though in reality, no good thief can lay low for long. Sooner or later, they all get the itch, and then either make or answer the call – you in? Of course you are.
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Back The Job through Backerkit and Exalted Funeral now!
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Levi Rubeck is a critic and poet currently living in the Boston area. Check his links at levirubeck.com.
