Time Heist

“I was hoping for minimalism, but I think I came up with ‘magician’...”

A Time Lord, a teacher, a shapeshifter and a cyberpunk archetype walk into a bank so secure it has its own planet...

After a quick intro, Memory Worms, and then a nice use of a setup I’ve played through before - in Shadowrun, appropriately enough, as this is a heist with cyberpunk hackers and shapeshifters and the like - the characters wake up with no memory of recent events and have to investigate and/or act from there.

Despite the name, a relative lack of time travel tricks - as the Doctor notes, a TARDIS would make this easy.

Unfortunately another easily-avoided complaint about gender bias in who rescues whom.

Abslom Daak! Captain John! The Trickster! The Terileptils!I never thought I’d see the day.

The Architect putting a gang together, who might well recur. (There’s even a laughing over takeout ending.)

For gaming, it’s an example of taking an outside genre (really a hybrid, the heist caper and the cyberpunk story, in the Shadowrun mould) and running the Doctor and friends through it sideways. Some of the flashback reveals are time travel tricks and some aren’t, so a Leverage approach to the planning and action would work. (The Leverage RPG has a flashback mechanic to simulate the moment in a caper where we discover that the heroes have already picked the mark’s pocket and so on. In a DWAITAS caper, maybe use a Story Point or two to dodge around a plot twist?)