Isn't that like basically every Shadowrun game?

It's not too hard anyway. You've got a crew, they have a fixer. The fixer finds jobs for them to do. All you need to do as a GM is have a few interesting possibilities on the table at any one time; then at the end of a session, get them to decide which job they want to take next. Then you prep that for your next game. Throw in some wankery about how much evidence they leave behind and how much the authorities are after them and you're sorted.

>>44458872
Don't plan for the heist itself. Plan for the planning. Stealing getaway vehicles, casing the joint, dealing with an investigator who's onto them but doesn't have the evidence they need yet, and so on. Let the PCs decide how the heist goes down and plan for their plans.

>>44458872
You need a target, a location, and security. The target can be a person to kidnap, a safe to open, an item to take, or anything else that works as your heist's macguffin. The location can be virtually anything or anywhere, but you must describe EVERYTHING about it, even if not right away. The thieves must have a lot of options at their disposal to go through the location towards their target and out again. Security needs to match the location and the target and must have weaknesses to exploit. People, robots, golems, turrets, laser wires, alarms, search lights, etc. Anything, but it cannot be impenetrable or unavoidable. Through rolls or cunning, the thieves must be able to get past any barrier and through any defense to their target if they figure it out properly.

Just play a lot of old Thief and Sly Cooper games and you'll be fine.

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>>44458952
I've never played Shadowrun

I was thinking more Heat than cyberpunk.

>>44458872
Episodal
Mission centered
Start mid action
Keep the pace up
Trope salad
Underlying conspiracy

>>44458990

Yeah, Heat is basically Shadowrun minus the tech and wizardry. It plays out with virtually the same tone.

>>44458872
Build a bunch of open-ended environments with a set of variables placed through out it, which the party must work to discover so they can begin planning their heist. Open-ended environments is really all you need for a heisting campaign. Of course, the players need a reason to not stop after the first succesful caper. So maybe you plan a series of heists leading up to the big one, or they are in the pocket of someone more powerful.

But the best part of heisting is rewarding original thinking and the excitement of clutch moments working out well. Of course, there needs to be a failure condition, which is probably the hardest to deal with.

Reminds me of when we played a Time Bandits game.

>>44458872
Check out Shoggy's Great Drone Heist for an amusing shadowrun tale:
https://09cd64678bddc0198cca7fef0df8ce7b359fff2d.googledrive.com/host/0B3Z9sXPTD9rpN2owNGdVWmdFWXM/images/stories/drone%20heist.png

>>44458872
The place to start is figuring out who the other crooks in the area is. Because, of course, there should be other crooks. It's one thing to plan a heist, but it's another thing to get away with it all.

There's a thread way back when about using a plot generator to piece together Crime Story plots: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/9165731/

After setting up the outfits and criminals in the area, remember that your group are the new guys in town and that if you pull off some big job, you'll need permission or the gangs will come after the players themselves for attracting police attention. The getting known with the crime outfits around town could lead to bigger better jobs and such. A prison break for a drug lord could pay as much as a bank job, after all, especially if there's an upcoming gang war.

>>44458872
Start out with the exact same map with varying things to steal.

Over time actually throw in some good maps and start supporting stealth more than not at all.

After a while start letting more people join the game, even if their characters aren't very plausible.

Add insane amounts of resistance and chalk it up to the player's growing reputation.

Every time the players want to play something else, I'll ask for some money and give them a new heist.

Eventually, I will begin taking money and awarding minor buffs to PCs weapons.

Also, sweet music all the while.

My weekly PF campaign is quickly turning into a heist campaign and I love every second of it.

>>44458872

Run a tacticool build of GURPS. Then take the general game template from Shadowrun. Go look up the template for a heist film and follow that script.

Heist games need to be tightly scripted and planned by both you (the target) and the players (the crew, planning how they take it down).

The trick is that you set up the score in immense detail so you won't have to worry about the players taking it down in ways you didn't expect. Which will happen every single time. So don't plan your target with a pre-built vulnerability. Otherwise you'll get pissed off and want to punish them when they see some other vulnerability that you DIDN'T plan. Come up with a juicy target and reasonable* defenses. Do it in detail before handing it off to the players, then stick with your plan and let them do it their way and react as you planned. When it's smooth, it's smooth. When it screws up, it screws up. At worst, they can be shot, wounded, and then arrested and jailed. Three years later they're out and that's handled in downtime.

* the other big failing I've seen in this kind of game is the GM who loads up on intricate and expensive defenses. Spending three million dollars protecting a few thousand dollars in loot makes zero sense, yet GMs do it all the time. I'd give yourself a budget. Remember also that in Heat it wasn't the bank that was so intent on catching Neal's crew. It was robbery/homocide.

One final consideration. Think about borrowing the Rogue Trader idea of an episodic format. So the same players need not show up for every game, and some players may have more than one character. The leader recruits the guys he needs for a particular job, with the stipulation that you can't play more than one character at a time and your character can't be on the job if his player doesn't show.

>>44458872

Planning something similar for cons.

>Cast a large mansion esque building in dental stone, paint it up. Already got the stuff to do this
>PC's get to pick from different characters/loadouts
>I'm thinking of some sort of bragging rights or points based challenges, like not killing anyone, not setting off an alarm, tougher guards, etc. etc.
>Guards will follow a set patrol pattern that goes every turn on a hidden map until PC's see them then the model gets put on the map

Idk, I've never seen it done before and playing as a band of thieves at a con sounds pretty fun.

Oh, and it's pathfinder/d&d setting and system

>>44458872
>open-ended
Ah, now here's an interesting one.
How about this for a twist: get the PCs to prep the targets for you.
Your players need to make a pitch. The pitch lays out the locale, the security, and the target. They also give the outline of the plan. The outline should run along these lines:
>X, you're a hitman. We need you to control the security team in the office
>Y, you're the driver. We need you to run crowd control, move the take to the vehicle and extract us
>Z, you're the hacker. You need to beat the alarm circuits so we don't get hit by police before we're ready
>I'll be defeating the slipcatch system on the casings
Essentially, everyone will have the outline of their role, and you circumvent the boring part of planning by just getting to the meat. You can either do this out of session and prep, or you can pre-prep heist elements and then play on the fly from the pitch.
You can also veto pitches as too easy or implausible, and if you let an easy one run, make it a sting, doublecross or other fuckfest.