# The Rogue Loots the Dungeon Two Hours Before the Party Wakes tags: #thoughts #game/rpg/blades-in-the-dark #game/rpg/starforged ![[Two Hour Early Rogue.png]] -- https://twitter.com/ithayla/status/1769021014950961556 I've been thinking specifically about this story that's been going around, and firstly I think *it's bullshit*. No group sat silently for an hour while the GM played a one on one with the rogue to pillage the dungeon they were headed for in the first place. Hands up, it didn't happen, posting for clout. Happens all the time, okay we get it. But then I started thinking – *how would I actually play that out if, for one reason or another, I really wanted to?* Because it's not an unthinkable situation to get into, realistically. *"Someone got to the dungeon before you did and cleaned it out."* That's actually quite straightforward. Pretty reasonable, as narrative setups go. *"It was someone in your party that got up two hours early."* This actually makes me laugh, not just because it's the traditional "the rogue is an asshole" story but because it begs so many questions about your group. But assume I wanted to play it out? Well, I have a cognitive tool in my back pocket that I can say was provided to me by **[[Blades in the Dark]]** which provides a whole lot of examples of it: **Flashbacks.** And, technically, I don't even need to be playing a **[[Powered by the Apocalypse|PbtA]]**/**[[Blades in the Dark|FitD]]** derivative to make use of this mechanism. Go with me here… Rather than playing a one on one with the rogue for an hour, he states that he wants to get up two hours early and heads off to the dungeon alone. *"Okay. We'll just skip forward two hours, and the rest of the party is waking up. You guys go about your morning ritual and discover that the rogue is missing. What do you do?"* The players, having been sitting around for the last 10 minutes and not being stupid, say they track the rogue to the dungeon. Perfectly reasonable. **Flashback two hours:** I ask the rogue's player what he did on the way to the dungeon. There's probably one scene that ends up throwing some dice. Something happens. **Flash forward:** What is the party up to? They discover some evidence of what we just played out and maybe some fallout from it. **Flashback:** What did the rogue do next? How did the first room play out? What challenges did he discover? Again, very light dusting of mechanics. 15 minutes tops. I definitely don't ask what the rogue did after the narrative climax of that moment. **Flash forward:** The party comes on the remnants of whatever the rogue ran into. They probably discover something he missed. I asked the party and we probably go to the dice for what the rogue did next, and they tell me. **Flashback:** Pick up with the rogue with that being the situation they find themselves in. We continue onward. We deal with the current narrative crescendo and then… Cut to flash forward. Rinse and repeat until either the rogue hits something they can't deal with and books it out of the dungeon (with their status being unknown and unnarrated because they clearly didn't make it back to camp), or the party finds their corpse. Everybody gets to play. Nobody knows how everything is going to turn out except for a couple of fixed points (*the rogue made it to the dungeon, the rogue did not make it back to the camp*). The party gets to impose some conditions on the rogue, putting them in unexpected situations by way of their post hoc investigation. The rogue, hopefully noticing this as we go, actually gets to put the party into situations by way of what happens in their flashback scenes. Nobody is sitting there for an hour with no investment in what's going on in front of them. You don't have to play a story game or a fiction-first game or a narrative game for this to be a useful technique for you to bring to the table. You can play this way in raw **[[Dungeons and Dragons|D&D]]**, if you want to. It has a key component, however: You have to want to enjoy playing with your friends, and that has to be more important than some kind of fictional straight timeline. If I were playing this, myself, it would probably be in **[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]]**, and the complication from a hard miss in a bad spot during reconnaissance of an exploration POI certainly could be "somebody got here first." Which would then just set up a lot of the ensuing complications being the result of dealing with crap whoever was there first left behind, from triggered security to empty storage lockers. Actually, this sounds pretty fun.