Classic heist generator

[enkiv2]

Since I managed to do two entries early in the month this time, maybe I'll give this project another go.

Years ago, I wrote a 'heist generator', before I really had gotten into heist movies. And, in 2018, I wrote a bit about what it would take to make a real heist generator. At the time, this was sort of beyond the scope of what I was willing to prototype during the month.

The relevant bits:

A proper heist contains a bunch of things that scene/sequel doesn’t: on one hand, it has multiple specialists, and on the other, much like a mystery, it needs to trick the reader. However, the way a heist tricks the reader is different & easier, because it relates to the goal, not the content. The heist has three parts. The first part is finding specialists to execute parts of the plan, and isn’t part of the plot per-se. (In fact, the specialists don’t need to have their own planner systems & can be treated as tools of the main planner for the sake of generation.) The second is the explanation and implementation of the apparent plan. The third is the twist, where additional steps are revealed that transforms the apparent plan into a second, hidden plan with a different goal. The relationship between the two is that the hidden plan contains either all of the same steps as the apparent plan or a set of steps that visibly resemble those steps, and the set of steps needs to be necessary for both (or else you get a failure mode like Ocean’s 12, wherein the audience was disappointed & confused that so much of the plot was ‘unnecessary’.) If we go about this backwards, we can choose an initial goal, evaluate it to produce the plan just as with scene/sequel, but upon getting to either the climax or the ultimate failure of that goal we implement the twist: we choose a different goal and then navigate to that one, explicitly picking one that is within a certain number of hops & wouldn’t be more reachable significantly earlier. (Usually in actual heist flicks the hidden parts of the plan occur in the middle but we can get away with something closer to the end. Consider Logan Lucky, where the brunt of the hidden parts of the plan were after the apparent partial failure of the heist.) Outside of the plot structure, the appealing components of heists are basically amenable to generation: the specialists should each have one humorous quirk in addition to their specialization, and don’t need to have any kind of interiority — flavor/filler dialogue composed of specialists criticizing each other for their quirks or playing their quirks off each other act as the primary form of comic relief.

In other words:

1) I'll adapt the planner I wrote for scene-sequel to produce variations on a plan, where a failed plan can be a subset of a successful plan with a different end condition.

2) I'll change how this planner system writes out information, so that rather than a single first-person narrator describing the plan, it can be made into a set of characters arguing about a plan with some missing information. (Stretch goal: make gathering the crew a part of the plan, Ocean's 11 style, & make it so that only characters who have already been gathered can be the mouthpieces used to describe the plan.)

3) I'll make it so an already-planned structure can be traversed multiple times in different modes -- one time to describe the plan and talk about contingencies, one time to actually implement it (with more complications introduced, probably), and with the ability to change the ultimate goal.

I'm not sure if I want to eliminate the ability to have plans completely fail. That was part of what was so shocking and interesting about the original 1957 version of Ocean's Eleven -- they gather up the crew and despite one of them dying, they manage to create a new plan to get the money out, but ultimately they actually lose because the money they stole gets set on fire. That kind of weird twist ending is something that computers are excellent at creating. But, on the other hand, it makes it harder to highlight the whole 'we lied to the audience about what the plan was' aspect, that made the Ocean's 11 remake (and Logan Lucky) so great.

(Also, it's possible that work will suddenly get busy or that this will require a lot more templating than I expected and I won't be able to get anything done on it. It seems to happen every year.)

[MichaelPaulukonis]

Was it Bard that had a knight eating a princess, since the knight was hungry and the system calculated that the princess was edible (since dragons eat princesses) ? It was considered a failure by the team, which astounds me still.

[enkiv2]

I hope to have failures half as amusing

On Sat, Nov 9, 2019, 10:09 AM Michael Paulukonis notifications@github.com wrote:

Was it Bard that had a knight eating a princess, since the knight was hungry and the system calculated that the princess was edible (since dragons eat princesses) ? It was considered a failure by the team, which astounds me still.

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