Re: mechanics of surprise

Simon makes some very good points here: the op****tunity for a perfect 
ambush isn't necessarily easy to come by.

Consider the "we lie in wait outside the enemy's cave and whack them as 
they emerge" scenario. Yes if you can pull that off, and if the two 
sides were roughly equal in strength, then the ambushers should have a 
very good chance of scoring a TPK with few or no casualties on their own 
side.

Consider the setup, however. An isolated cave with no neighbors or 
passersby to get suspicious and alert the authorities - convenient. But 
then how do the ambushers know where their enemy's hideout is, let alone 
their schedule?

A very plausible way for that to go is: the ambushers spend days 
searching the woods until they find the cave, and set up their position. 
More days pass, no sign of the enemy, it's raining, they can't set up a 
proper camp, half the party is borderline hypothermic, one is coming 
down with pneumonia, the rest are bored, stiff and exhausted, eventually 
with much trepidation one steps into the cave, ****nes a light around and 
finds it's empty - this is the wrong cave! So, badly demoralized, they 
stumble wearily back towards town - only to blunder into the enemy, who 
while not expecting them, are at least fresh and in peak fighting
condition.

Sure, in some systems you can say "the ambushers could just divine the 
location of the cave and tele****t there at their choice of time"; but if 
so, that usefully highlights an area of the system that needs to be 
fixed: balance between offensive versus defensive uses of scry, tele****t 
etc.

Another example from my last campaign: the party (a Euthanatos, a 
Verbena, a Black Spiral Dancer and couple of NPCs) were up against Clan 
Tremere (and ultimately the Antediluvians and Caine). On paper this 
would be instant splat for the party, but what actually happened was 
that they ended up in a series of progressively tougher fights and they 
didn't run into the major opposition until late in the campaign when 
they had the wherewithal to deal with it. Why did the Tremere behave in 
such a suboptimal way? Because a) they weren't omniscient, and b) 
realistically, bad news doesn't instantly travel up the chain of command 
of a large organization. The clan didn't react to a low-level group of 
enforcers getting wiped out with "eek, it's the PCs, send maximum force 
at once!"; they just sent a somewhat tougher group to find out what 
happened to the first.

Now granted if e.g. one of the Shadowrun setting's most powerful 
megacor****ations has "terminate the PCs" as #2 priority on its to-do 
list, you're in trouble. But it's usually possible to set things up so 
that you don't have to break game world consistency for this to not 
happen, at least not until the PCs are ready for it.

-- 
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