From: nigel@rs733.GSFC.NASA.Gov
Subject: Re: Speaking of ambushes (where we?)...
Organization: Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md, USA
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 14:13:22 GMT

In article <1992Aug15.005209.58171@cc.usu.edu> sl9b4@cc.usu.edu (Deep Six) writes:

   Ambushes have been sort of a big topic in my campain lately. Both for
   the players and for me. Here is my dillema. 

   My characters are fairly bright (for mortals), and they are really 
   paranoid about getting ambushed. For that reason, they routinely avoid 
   areas on the map where there is the slightest chance to be ambushed. I'm 
   perplexed on how to ambush the characters. The party is a squad in a 
   military organization, so they often go on patrol. Lately,I have been 
   marking areas on my GM's map where there will be ambushes, but the party 
   never goes into my kill zones. Now, I don't want to kill the PCs off, but 
   I would like to see them have to react and defend more, rather than being 
   always on the offense. 

I assume that your players have been making the S&D rounds in a
particular sector...which means at some point the enemy is going to be
annoyed enough to either field the first string or start doing nasty
things like area denial mines to funnel would be infiltrators and
patrols into the preset kill zones...

The alternative is to simply allow for the most common patrol
scenario...the surprise engagement.  Assuming that yoour players are
dangerous enough at some point the enemy CO will decide that losing
squad sized patrols is inefficient...and start sending out platoon
sized patrols.  Then as the good guys are avoiding all the obvious
ambush sites the bad guys are doing the same...eventually they will
bump into each other.  No preset ambush...the bad guys and the good
guys start on equal footing...I hope they have practiced Rapid Action
Drills becuase if they run into first string bad guys rest assured
the bad guys will have decent coordination.

There are a couple of good patrol schemes that set up flank attacks
rapidly.  The key is training and unit cohesiveness.  Some bad guys
will have this...what percentage is good enough is up to your
campaign.  I have always stipulated that while players have a better
attributes and skills the bad guys need not to be brain dead,
incompetent or untrained.  I'd give them one or two chances to come up
with the idea of rapid action drills and planning.  Give them one
encounter with second or third string bad guys which they can simply
bull through.  Really paranoid characters will decide that deciding
ahead of time what to do will save their behinds the next time bad
guys suddenly sprout out of the jungle.  

These encounters are "unavoidable" in the sense that two sides are
actively patrolling the region and sooner or later they will go bump
in the night.  You may wish to give them an edge in the first
encounter (say the bad guys make more noise) but force them to decide
in real time what to do...use a stop watch and give them 60 seconds
and tell them they are in combat time the bad guys are no more than a
few seconds away...anything they say or do will count as if their
characters had done it.  The first time I did this my players ended up
arguing loudly what to do...so they gave their position away and ended
up not getting the surprise round.  Needless to say the second time
around they got their act together.

Then there was the time a friendly green unit screwed up and ended up
entering the player's patrol region.  The PCs stumbled on them and
really lit them up only to find out later to have decimated a friendly
platoon.  After much chewing out and some character development the
PCs now try to identify who they are shooting at before pulling the
trigger...but firendly fire is a part of war...
 

   Thoughts?

   Okay,
   +  Chadd  L.  VanZanten   SL9B4@CC.USU.EDU  +

Nigel
--
Nigel Tzeng
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