Oceans 11 Part 5

It's done! Oceans 11 is complete! I'm super proud of these episodes, but it was probably the most exhausting campaign to turn into finished entertainment. I discussed the narrative problems of trying to present a version to the audience that is coherent, but that doesn't spoil the ending during the planning stages. The other big problem is that in these kinds of detail-oriented campaigns, you have to keep track of a lot of little details (distances, player positions, budget) which are needed in order to make this kind of a campaign work, but which don't make good radio. Another place where editing makes the big difference.

But overall, I think this kind of a heist campaign is actually enormous fun to play if you have the right kind of players. 99% of the challenge for me, was in turning this kind of a campaign into fun and engaging radio entertainment. If you don't have that as a limiting factor, you should go nuts with an Oceans 11-like campaign. Just be aware that you really need to be clear on all the details before you start. Construct an over-elaborate security system (I used the one from the movie, and had to make a lot of decisions where the movie left details vague) and let your players have at it. You need at least one obsessive player (like Jon) or it probably won't work. I encourage you to go more realistic than we did. I was allowing things like players talking over comms when they were in a room with other people that I would have nixed if I was doing a hardcore campaign, rather than making a comedy show for an audience. There's also a lot of fun in the list of criminal contacts, and the balance between the advantage of a larger team versus the increased risk of a mole (the "trust" value on their list of contacts was inversely correlated with dice rolls on one of the contacts being a double agent of some kind; I was slightly disappointed that none of the contacts rolled to be a mole, but Joz and Jon leaned towards contacts with higher trust values.)

On the subject of betrayals, let's talk spoilers for a bit:

SPOILERS

In case it wasn't clear, David Hamilton betraying the team wasn't because he rolled to be a mole beforehand, but came out organically in play. It was actually really cool to see how the team started to turn on each other as things went south. I particularly enjoyed how several players had characters on either side of that divide. For the record, that was all excellent role-play and none of the actors were the least bit irl annoyed at each other (well other than everyone being affectionately annoyed at Jon micromanaging every aspect of the plan, something that mostly got lost in the edit, but which I found hilarious, mostly because of how authentically stressed Jon was getting at the success or failure of the heist.)

Speaking of Jon, he said something really interesting after we started recording, which is that every aspect of the heist was meticulously planned and thought out ahead of time, with interrelated contingencies for every scenario, and the only time he was ever improvising was when he decided to blow the explosives as a distraction (the explosives, by the way, were there for an alternate contingency where Benedict didn't move the money, and once the money was on the road, the explosives were no longer needed). Of course that one moment of improvisation was what ultimately brought the plan down. Funny how those things work out.

END SPOILERS

Ok, we'll be back in two weeks with the next movie: Toy Story!