Review of Three Days of the Condor

I'll be honest: part of me spent the whole movie waiting for Joubert's (Max von Sydow) line in the penultimate scene which begins, "It will happen this way." It's the perfect description of an assassination, uttered by a consummate assassin.

What I tried to concentrate on hardest was the change in Turner (Robert Redford.) Turner starts off scared and desperate, but he's inventive and willing to take risks. Though initially the underdog, he goes from being on the back foot to surprising and outwitting his pursuers, first with the kidnapping scheme, then by jacking into the municipal phone lines. I think it's important to notice, however, that his resourcefulness doesn't instantly turn him into an expert field agent, much less a hardened killer. Near the end, we get an excellent demonstration of what Turner is not by contrast with Joubert, who enters onto the scene, kills Atwood, and immediately begins wiping down fingerprints and asking Turner what he touched.

This leaves me wondering how I can arrange the game setting, including friendly NPCs, to encourage players to take (calculated) risks the way Turner does ... and how to make those risks seem both daunting and tempting. What are concrete steps I can take as a designer? If I want enable maneuvers like the phone hacking scene, I can try to:

• keep PC skills / sage abilities in mind as I research my setting's historical backdrop (1650s Earth), trying to map actions taken by historical or fictional people onto the capabilities offered by said skills / abilities
• draft brief vignettes which describe setting chunks from a inhabitant's perspective, and explain / show how someone with sage ability X is able to influence that part of the setting -- both to fire players' imaginations, but also to prepare myself for when they might try to do something similar.