Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-121.222.136.235-20140704221339/@comment-10390252-20140728210036

Disguise depends a lot on psychology. Our brains tend to snap to unique details - colour, shape, scent and sound. A good disguise... a really good disguise... contains some element that overwhelms all the other memories and forces the brain to focus on one thing. Say, an incredibly bright colour of the suit or an overpoweringly unpleasent scent. In most cases that is all the witness will be able to remember.

As for cameras? If you've done your reccie, you can beat them. The resolution on most CCTV units is so poor that a hood is enough to render them as useless as a hollow bit of plastic.

As for escape? The very best place you can have as a hide-out is a fully-paid-up apartment opposite your target. You stay put for a few weeks as the radius of the search increases and then walk out, openly and, ideally, in broad daylight, through the increasingly-porus perimeter as they look for someone wearing a neon-green boiler suit and smelling overpoweringly of musk oil instead of the guy in jeans and a polo shirt with a backpack (containing your ill-gotten gains).

Most of these ideas come from Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat, a near-perfect fictionalised how-to manual of crime for the sake of the challenge of getting away with it.