Can anyone suggest a good gaming system to run a Mission Impossible style game? (I mean the old TV version of the story.) The GM would present a problem (e.g. Extract the ambassador's daughter who is under house arrest and implicate the generalissimo as a traitor.") as a challenge. The players would have to design the con/heist/sting.
The Leverage Roleplaying Game is designed specifically for heist stories, using a flashback structure to get that "Oh, it looks like it's going wrong--wait, this was in the plan all along" effect.
It encourages and supports focusing on the kinds of things which make that sort of structure work, so the group doesn't have to all be intimately familiar with the genre from a writer's perspective.
For example, by making your skill set Grifter/Hacker/Hitter/Mastermind/Thief, Leverage focuses all mechanical actions into the heist-story box. And it uses the Cortex dice-size system to ensure that more complications arise when a character's working outside their wheel-house, semi-independent of success or failure.
My Pathfinder DM and Wizard showed up yesterday and we went walking around town. We stopped talking with a friend and we crossed paths with a group of people that were back from a wedding, including our Alchemist. They were going to a nearby pub, so we followed. Our Paladin was also back from the same wedding and showed up at the pub to meet with the aforementioned group.
@KieranMullen Wilderness of Mirrors is also written for infiltration style of play, but puts most of the workload on the players, who are very free to narrate their legwork. The job of the GM is then more to add complications to the actual execution. I liked the Cortex+ system (which I only saw in Firefly, not in Leverage) a lot better than the Wilderness of Mirrors system, though, but I thought it worth mentioning anyway.
Blades in the Dark does not fit from the setting, but it's quite open to being hacked (“Forged in the Dark” is the line of games that are based on it), so I would not be surprised if someone had done an adaptation for Mission Impossible missions for it.
The system is focussed on crews with different specialities pulling off heists/missions, it includes flashbacks and interesting, not boring, ways to run preparation and pays attention to the growth and change of the players' support structure (in vanilla Blades the criminal gang headed by the PCs) through time.
I think if I would find a Forged in the Dark game that fits, I would take that, otherwise I'd take Leverage.
@HellSaint And then someone else goes end does it in the sea to see whether it still holds more generally. With comments by experienced divers and everything. Science!
