DungeonWorld Spot a Pick Pocket Ideas and Questions

[Yendor]

If I wanted to pickpocket a player here are some thoughts I would appreciate input on.

1. Should I be very sneaky and make a suggestion that a small halfling bumps into you and heads off in the crowd. Then it is up to the player to make a move with a possible discern realities roll. If they don’t decide to make a move I have been lucky and got away with an item from about their person.

Note on option 1. Would you consider rolling back time a bit. Lets say the player succeeds on a discern reality. Should I then say it looks like the Halfing snagged a pouch from you and therefore they get to react to the theft before the halfling cuts the purse? So a sort of premonition type roll after the event to change the outcome before it happens?

2. Should I be a little more fair and start with something like “its crowded in this market area of town and various people are pushing up against you including a small halfling”. In this situation it is before any action is taken. Perhaps I could then say “in the corner of your eye you think the halfing is getting a bit closer to you than necessary to cut through the crowd”. At which point I have put the situation on a plate for them in regard to the potential for reacting to the situation.

3. Should I make it super blatant. You are in the crowd by the abbey entrance and a halfling reaches out to snip your pouch away, what do you do? This one is clearly an opportunity for the player to make a possible Defy Danger move to avoid the pick pocket, however it feels a little obvious to tell the player they are being robbed.

Any thoughts and how you like to handle a stealthy type tactics against the players, whilst giving them a chance to react with a move would be appreciated.

Thanks

[Airk]

To me, there’s no “right” answer here. It all depends on the character and the tone of the game.

It depends on the character, because if the character is The Thief, then I’m going to go straight to #3. They know what they’re doing, and they’re probably going to catch this would-be-pickpocket in the act. On the other hand, if it’s The Druid or The Ranger or someone who has established themselves as being from Rural Farmsville, then I’d lean towards #1; These country rubes aren’t wise to the ways of the city and the best they are likely to manage is damage control. If you’re not sure, this is a great place to Ask Questions And Use The Answers: “So, Robin, does Cory have a lot of experience with big crowds and busy public spaces?”

It depends on the “tone” of the game too, because it really just depends on how much you want to telegraph things. If the world is a hard, gritty place, you might just go “You’re shoving your way through the crowd to reach the abbey gate when someone bumps up against your side and you realize your purse is empty.” – assuming the PCs put themselves in this situation in the first place. If this is an in medias res start, then #1 feels a little less fair, but still within your right as a GM… but be aware this is going to encourage your players to take precautions in the future. That might be exactly what you want, or it might not.

[Paul_T]

This is a great question. It’s not an obvious thing to handle under any rule set, and well worth discussing. On one hand, PbtA games usually provide few mechanical/move-based ways to handle such a situation; on the other hand, the structure of play, particularly regarding MC Principles and soft and nice hard moves, gives a set method for introducing and playing out such situations, which is more clarity than in many other games. I’m looking forward to hearing some different takes on this.

My own approach would be to describe the possible danger and then offer the players a choice to expose themselves to it or to be cautious. Perhaps they want to get close to the center of the crowd, where someone is speaking - so, make it about that: “Do you want to move closer to the speaker? You’d have to get in pretty cramped quarters with the rather questionable people you saw earlier.” If they do, I’d give them some reward for doing so (like learning something interesting, perhaps the speaker’s identity) and introduce the problem of the pickpocket as in your option 1.

That creates meaningful choices for the players, keeps things interactive, and turns the whole situation into something like a 7-9 outcome: “yeah, you got to the centre of the crowd and saw the speaker’s face… but now someone is running from you. Did they take something?”

I like Airk’s thoughts on using it as an opportunity to highlight something about the character, the NPC, or the setting. Perhaps a naïve foreigner in the city who has become the target of an elite gang of criminals would get option 1, maybe with even some misdirection included (e.g. the person fleeing is a plant, not the thief!), whereas the confident assassin in the village would see the poor kid trying to rob her immediately, before they even get close. ( “The dirty kid has his eye on you and always watching you in the crowd. Did he just look down at your coin purse and lick his lips?”)

Is there a feature of the character - their Drives or their history or a downside to their “stuff” you can activate - or the setting or the NPCs you can use this as an opportunity to bring out? Then you’re developing the fiction nicely. (An obvious example is that if one of the characters is Frodo, and he’s carrying the One Ring, then of course the pickpockets would be drawn to that; highlighting that allows you to build on the motif of greed and the Ring’s power.)

The game gives you the room to frame this dramatically rather than making it “fair”, so use that to emphasize an aspect of the character, plot, or setting you’d like to highlight. (And build a player choice into it, so it remains interactive!)

[JimLikesGames]

If getting their pocket picked is the result of a hard move (use up their resources/take away their stuff, or maybe a monster move for a street urchin or whatever) then you don’t roll anything, it happens and they learn something fictionally about where they’re hanging out.

If it’s a soft Move then you give them a chance reverse it: “oh man, that messenger girl just totally cut a hole in your small sack and snagged the chalice, now she’s bolting, what do you do?”.

But there really isn’t a way to “Make a Perception Check” and that’s by design. Go back over the sections on Moves and look closely at the difference between Hard and Soft Moves.

[Yendor]

Thanks for the excellent range of ideas. I actually ran this last night and I can tell you how it went. In my setting the Halfing’s as a race are not a nice bunch, a little down trodden but also generally a bit unsavory and prone to taking advantage of people. I was using this scene to introduce the players to just how nasty the Halfings can be in the setting and it also kicked off a story arc with Shalpie the leader of the urchin thieves gang.

So a bunch of halfing street urchins did end up mixing with the party outside an Inn beside a busy market. When I first described the Halfling gang a couple of savvie party members did say they were watching pouches for theft, so they took the hint. However it got more crowded as the urchins moved in on the group when they approached the Inn and because they were watching I then described they spotted one deftly mixing a bump with an attempted snatch. So the player made a Defy Danger with Dex to avoid having a pouch snipped off them and got the partial success on an 8.

They blocked the snatch but their pouch fell to the floor between them.

The Halfing scoundrel leader “Shalpie” addressed the group with a threat to the out-of-towners and the ranger player being assaulted made a Hack and Slash move to attempt to tackle the rascal away from his pouch on the floor. He failed on a 4 and the Halfing picked up the pouch and as a group they then attempted to escape the players down through a sewer access hatch beside the Inn.

Our Mage character Avon then jumped into action and described using Prestidigitation to flap the sewer access hatch back and forth with a banging noise to scare off the urchins. He then made a Parley roll and got the 10+, so the halfing urchins, fearful of the wizards power, scattered down a side ally and I said they dropped the rangers pouch whilst making the escape and they also dropped another pouch with some copper coins and an item which was a bit of a hook into another thread of the story.

Thats how it went down and thanks for the ideas. I especially like the thoughts on reflecting the character backgrounds in how they react. This is only our 3rd game of DungeonWorld, so we are still encouraging each other to think a bit differently about scenes, dialogue and stepping outside a bit. So we are a work in progress group :).

On a related note we were using Roll20 to play, we actually live in the same UK Town, but decided to play on-line. The Roll20 DungeonWorld implementation works really well and I used some of the Dyson maps loaded up for a sewer scene later in the game. My only complaint about Roll20 is that I would prefer slightly larger video screens, because with DungeonWorld 80% of the time we are just talking, so the screen real estate is a bit wasted on a big space for a map. I would rather see bigger faces to help with dialogue and visual connection etc.