GM Corner – One Last Job
Warning: this post contains minor spoilers of SAS Geek’s One Last Job game.
Senda and I have a loooong list of games we want to play on SAS. But we don’t want to just choose systems, we want to create awesome gaming experiences and have fun. A lot of fun. That’s pretty much our goal … all the time.
So when Senda and I talk about running One Last Job (OLJ), we didn’t want to run a traditional heist game. We wanted to play with genres, give it a twist. Senda was texting me about this while watching Sailor Moon with her son and someone said “former magical girl heist!” It sounded like fun, so we made it happen.
Overall, our group had a lot of fun. The base idea is that your group is some kind of past-their-prime crew that broke up over some vague traumatic experience years ago. Your old boss calls on you for (wait for it) one last job.
The character creation process is rather unique in my RPG experiences. You don’t get to make up your own character. For a role play heavy game lover like me I wasn’t sure how that would go, but it ended up creating a lot of dynamic characters. The GM sets the stage with the crew’s former boss contacting the first character and explaining the job. The first character realizes they’ll need the entire crew because each person has a unique talent and names a second character with either a direct or implied talent. The first character seeks out the second to role play convincing them to join the crew, and the second character then names the next character and their talent, and so on.
As a GM, it was great for the players to go through this process because they set up their own obstacles. You just have to roll with the punches! For example, when James’ character Sergeant Square brought up their deceased former crew-mate, Puce, that detail had to come in to play again. The longer we went along, the more drama characters pulled out about that event that caused them to break up. Puce became an important part of that (but I’ll leave it at that because too many spoilers).
OLJ is a dice pool system. Having both players and the GM being able to manipulate the dice pool really informed the choices the players made. It also gave me a tangible feeling of ‘this is how bad things are’ as I rolled the danger pool.
I highly recommend OLJ for a fun one-shot story forward game. Even though this game was designed off of heist movies, it’s flexible because of the shared story telling format. If the GM and players commit to a genre everything will be good.
System: One Last Job
Creator: Grant Howitt
Price: $10
