#44 : The Score | A D&D 5e Heist One-Shot for 2–3 Players
Your players make the plan before a single die rolls — then live with every decision they made.
The Score is a complete D&D 5e heist one-shot designed for 2–3 players and a runtime of 2–3 hours. The players are hired professionals — thieves, operatives, anyone with the right contacts — brought in by an unnamed crime lord to steal a ledger from the vault of the Merchant's Bank before the city watch raids it at dawn. One night. One job. No second chances.
What makes The Score different from any other dungeon crawl is how it starts. Before play begins, the players plan the heist. The Dungeon Master walks them through four decisions — how to get inside, how to handle the night watchman, how to crack the vault, and how to escape — presenting three options for each with a plain description of what skills each path demands. Then the plan locks. They execute what they chose. The tension of a heist comes from committing to something and watching it bend under pressure, not from improvising freely.
Two mechanics run beneath the surface the entire night. Complication tokens accumulate from failed skill checks and make every subsequent act harder — a rough entry makes the watchman encounter harder, a botched vault job means more guards in the escape. The body count tracks every guard killed or subdued across all four acts. At the end, those two numbers tell the DM which epilogue to run: a clean job earns a bonus and anonymity, a messy job earns payment and scrutiny, a dirty job earns enemies. The crime lord paid for discreet. Whether the players delivered that is entirely up to them.
The adventure is built for morally complicated play. Nobody in this story is purely villainous. The guards are doing their jobs. The watchman has a dinner break. The crime lord keeps his word — exactly as much as serves him. The players are criminals doing criminal work for complicated reasons, and the adventure never pretends otherwise. Multiple approaches succeed at every decision point. There is no correct plan, only the plan they made and how well they can hold it together.
What's Inside:
- A complete four-act heist adventure with a pre-game planning phase and locked plan structure — no railroading, no hidden correct answer
- Six fully described battle maps including the bank exterior, ground floor, basement vault, street escape, rooftop canal route, and sewer tunnel
- Full stat blocks for all creatures and NPCs — Calder the night watchman, Bank Guards, City Guards, the City Guard Captain, the Mastiff, and Veck the crime lord — no external sourcebook required
- Four ready-made characters at Level 2: a Human Rogue, a Half-Elf Bard, a Human Ranger, and a Halfling Fighter — skill coverage for every planning path
- A DM quick reference tracker for the four planning choices, complication token count, and running body count
- Six opening hooks, four campaign hooks, and a full What If? appendix covering the nine most likely player departures from expected structure
- Designed for characters Level 2–3 | Runtime 2–3 hours | Party size 2–3 players (scaling notes included for 4)
Perfect For:
- Busy Dungeon Masters who want a complete, zero-prep session ready to run tonight
- Groups of two or three who want an adventure built for their size — not scaled down from something larger
- Tables who want moral weight and real consequences without a five-session commitment
- Players who have always wanted to run a heist and never found a system that made the planning feel meaningful
The Score is part of the Ready Adventure Series from Anvil N Ink Publishing — zero-prep one-shots for small groups, designed for the table you actually have.
Plan the job. Run the job. Live with it.
