Hazard X Risk

04 Feb, 2026

For no reason in particular I've been thinking about heist RPGs. What if you and your fellow players plan a heist too well? You spend one or two real life evenings meticulously scheming and casing and... it works flawlessly. The next evening you defeat the guards, the alarms, the bolts and finally extract without a hitch. No doubt, you will feel cool as fuck.

Later, when the afterglow fades, you might naturally ask, was the actual heisting mere busy work? If we play correctly, will that happen every time? Are we just a planning committee, and all the pen pushing, dice throwing is pro forma?

We will circle back to this question.

A while a go I made a little hack for Draw Steel montages. The MCDM discord gave it a nice reception, and occasionally recommends it as a "fix" to rules as written montages found in Steel. This inflates my ego tremendously.

(Also oft recommended: a different set of wise house rules for montages. Truthfully, Ashely's approach appears to be the more popular one. There, ego shrunken and flaccid again. All is well again in the world.)

But why "fix" montages in Draw Steel? Read my hack if you want the diagnosis.¹ I will summarize the key part of the solution here:

• Challenge is about avoiding, mitigating or surpassing danger²
• Danger is not only a bad consequence (hazard), but also a product of its likely hood (risk). Thus Danger = Hazard x Risk
  • Standing on the surface of the sun would be very hazardous to your health³. Hazard = Big number, say 1 million
  • But the chance of this happening is basically nil. Risk = Miniscule fraction, say 1/100 trillionth of a percent
  • Thus the danger the surface of the sun poses to you is 0.00...[many zeros]...01.%

While risk is always a percentage (and it's good for a designer to calculate risk as precisely as practicable), hazard is fuzzier. Hazards may function simply as non-numeric statements. Or danger might threaten multiple hazards which are qualitatively different. Not to worry. Consider if the hazard possesses any kind of measurable magnitude. Can hazards of non-comparable kinds at least be ranked by preference? Failing that, simply counting a hazard present or not as a binary is sufficient.

We can easily apply this to game design.

Step 1: Challenge

Make sure there is challenge that poses danger to the players, therefore

• Step 1a: confirm there is a hazard, and
• Step 1b: confirm there is a substantial risk of that hazard

Step 2: the big part

Give players ways to manipulate hazard and risk. Statistical abilities and dice mechanics typically change the risk value. Gear, special powers or fictional positioning often mitigate hazard. Anything goes for either, really.

I submit to you that pretty much any game design will be a banger if it provides players mildly pleasant mechanics to adjust hazard and risk like little dials or levers. At least for the part where the players get to touch the dials.⁴

Ooooo Aaah OOOoooh I wanNA TOuch thEm

How to make a pleasant mechanic? Maybe go steal one, okay?? I don't know if you know this; people just leave their mechanics lying around in books free for the taking. If you find a book with a mechanic in it, at least 12 people liked it. As good as sign as any that it's worth stealing.

Okay, I do have one piece of advice.

Step 3: Pacing

Recall I said the game "will be a banger" as long as "the players get to keep playing with the dials." So give players reasons to keep playing with the dials at frequent intervals. Pacing.

That is, the dials should turn of their own accord as well.

When the players push on the game by manipulating the danger of its challenges, the game must absolutely push back. The same dial can stubbornly spring back into place, once, twice or forever until some condition is met. The response can arrive delayed or hit the player from a new angle. Many, many worthwhile approaches, so long as there is no prolonged period when danger flatlines.

im told ppl go crazy for these squiggly lines. Maybe if u imagine riding this rollercoaster in ur mind carnival for 1000 hours u will manifest good pacing

Now we may return to the heist RPG dilemma. In the planning sessions we were playing with the dials and lots of them, fuck yeah. Then comes the actual heist. The hazards are still very much present. But we've planned so well that not only are the risk dials are all turned to zero, but also we've superglued them in place. The resulting danger is akin to the sun's surface - zilch.

Players basking in the light of their own competence porn may not even notice the game has broken. The first time. The second time? It shines a little less brightly. Eventually you wind up like many Draw Steel players did with montages and start wondering what the point of all this is anyways.

the time to speak of the blade game approaches

What to do? You could compress the time where danger is flatlined. Rather than a whole evening of executing the heist, maybe it just take 30 minutes? 10 minutes? Have your cake and eat it to. Players are still rewarded with dial domination. Maybe pacing is preserved as well?

Some game masters approach old-school combat like that. The kind of combat where the real fight is all the dirty tricks you pull before rolling initiative (if you even need to roll it). This can result in a quick summary of victory, "You bar the doors to the barn and set it on fire. There is no way to escape. The evil cultists all burn to death. What next?"

I anticipate this is not satisfactory for a heist game. Surely part of one's design goals is to actually play a heist and not mostly plan them? To preform active thief-y verbs in situ?

We can see how popular criminal story game Blades in the Dark deals with this. Blades barely allows players to touch the dials of a score before tossing them into the action. But once the score has commenced, Blades offers scoundrels a veritable feast of dials to turn with flashbacks, quantum loadout, flexible actions and more and more and more. This keeps the players happy. Simultaneously, every choice in blades tends to provoke some other dial spinning up a new hazard or risk vector. This also keeps the players happy (trust me they love it when the alarm clock fills up). yay.

So should we give up on meticulously planning a heist? Not necessarily! Blades eschews detailed planning, -well for a bunch of reasons, but here is a big one- because it wants to smoothly move players from downtime entanglements (where there are mechanisms for danger), to score engagement (where there are mechanics for danger). By contrast, the "Gather Information" pseudo-phase in between these is far less supported. You can go deep on this phase, and generate hazards and risks in exchange for intel, but Blades won't help out the GM out much. Further, the scoundrels will generate new hazards and risks once they start the score anyways, making excessive gather information rolls a losing proposition. Point is, Blades doesn't do planning simply for lack of care. It has a different thing -downtime- that it wants you to do instead, and the mechanics of scores dovetail accordingly.

upshot

If planning the heist is fun because we're manipulating hazard and risk, then we must absolutely keep it. Don't let Forged in the Dark criminals talk you out of a good idea.

The planning just must not be allowed to dominate hazard and risk during the other half of the game. It may substantially change the conditions of hazard and risk, but it may not completely eliminate effective risk. I realize I have not actually offered a method for this yet. Did I ever say I was gonna? Huh!? My thesis was simply to prove the necessity of a solution.

Random Ape Encounters (linked at the top) is already contemplating several fine solutions. Give them a read.

For my money, the most promising area for the game to push back is in response to the planning itself. Everyone leaves traces. Heat from previous heists and interested folks noticing joint casing or suspicious purchases, should follow the heist planners and crop up at unpredictable times. No one has infinite time or resources to spend planning a heist, these constraints should be felt and force compromised plans. A consummate thief may be like a shadow in the night, but it is a very long shadow in a very narrow alley. The shadow only grows longer, and the walls only close in tighter.

upshot 2: upshotter

I'm tempted to say Danger = Hazard x Risk, combined with vague notion of pacing is my fundamental theory of game design. how presumptuous haha

The real, final take away, is that if you identify your Hazards and Risks you can start to do Math on them. First get a prototype mechanic which plays with danger to the table. Use it, show it off, break it, and see if you like or not. Then go and do the math below and compare that to your feelings.

I usually just say a Hazard -any hazard- is equal to 1, unless I'm measuring damage points or something.

Risks are often complicated to actually calculate, but you can usually get a serviceable model if you play with spreadsheets enough. Consider learning very simple coding to simulate many rounds of play.

Then you can actually plot a value for danger overtime in play. Note the shape of the rollercoaster that emerges and decide if it sparks joy. If you liked your prototype, this is a rollercoaster shape you should explore more. If you didn't like your prototype, the roller coaster is trying to tell you why it sucks.

Iterate and repeat weeee