I’m a huge fan of Dimension 20. A good friend pointed me at Fantasy High and I’ve been hooked since. The cast is great, Brennan is one of the best Actual Play DMs I’ve seen, and the production is gorgeous. One of my long term goals is to run one fight in Lancer with the production values of a single Dimension 20 combat.
So I watched and greatly enjoyed Tiny Heist. But its finale brought up an issue familiar to many in the TTRPG scenes. Namely, during the climactic Heist, the fact that the game was Dungeons and Dragons was a detriment to the way the game was played. The game would have played more cleanly were it in a system better suited to heists, as shown by the car chase that follows which does play more cleanly.
The basic reason for this is that Dungeons and Dragons does not have a heist system and attempting to play out a heist using the existing mechanics kind of sucks.
This isn’t new to anyone in TTRPG writing or design, and is a common refrain in criticisms of Dungeons and Dragons and games like it. However, I feel like it’s a lesson more commonly espoused through insults and at odd angles rather than explained in a straightforward manner, something I hope to correct.
Fear The Swarth 