describe the most fiendish scenario you've played or built.

[Cannonshop]

all too often matches tend to end up being two groups of 'mechs standing at medium range rolling dice on clear terrain.  This type of 'straight up' fight is very popular, but tends to favor a pretty specific build on both sides and generally winds up being somewhat more of a gentleman's duel,than the messy chaos of a battle.

then, you get fiendish scenarios.  a Fiendish scenario is one where at first glance, the fight looks like it's one-sided, but in actual play, that one-sidedness falls apart, and everyone has to scramble to figure out some new way to beat it (and beat the other guy).

My elements of a Fiendish scenario are pretty straight-forward;

1) Victory conditions that don't rely on last man standing.
2) unequal-seeming objectives, (Hold at all costs vs. breakthrough is straight forward, hold at all costs vs. a headhunting mission? that's a bit more complicated.)
3) Terrain is a character.  the map inherently impedes one (or both) sides in their objectives, or presents a situation where the standard 'go-to' (icbox energy heavy being the most common) isn't necessarily the right choice.
4) Built-in time-limits.  You only have a certain number of turns normally, but this takes and codifies that; you have to get as far as you can, as quickly as you can.  time limits force engagements and movement.
5) The obvious answer...isn't the answer.  this has to do with how the scenario's been thought through by the guy creating it; if there is an obvious solution, the designer needs to shift perspective and determine the counters-then incorporate them into the scenario before presenting it to the players. 

I've tossed a few attempts to design "Fiendish" scenarios here under the posts titled 'Tactical Problem' but I'm kind of curious what you guys have seen or come up with.

[Firesprocket]

I had my players run from one side of the map to another to take down a fire base.  Or at least that is what they were told.  There was also a lance or level II guarding the base which had their hands on a Matar.  Had just enough light and mediums to slow down the players while I shell them.  As I lie out the dice for record keeping each turn eventurally they had to move mover some of those areas.    Finally a long tom hit accurately right on the ground around the units.  Those units ended up falling though the ground into liquid magma.  All the arty was there to do was distablize the ground just enough that the weight of a mech would cause a collapse.

[Mendrugo]

One option to throw players for a loop is to set initial objectives and let them play according to those understandings, only to subvert that midway, changing both the odds and the objectives, and seeing how quickly/well they adapt.

For example - a planetary garrison force with armor and infantry defends a bunker, turret and trench equipped strongpoint against insurgents with armed WorkMechs.  After about ten turns, the ground shakes and a Corx Mobile Tunnel Miner emerges inside the strongpoint, followed by a substantial force of insurgent armor and infantry.

Now trapped between two forces, does the garrison dig in and go down swinging, or regroup for a breakout attempt?

Scenarios like this are particularly good if doing a linked campaign, because then the players have strong incentives to preserve their forces for future battles, rather than eking out Pyrrhic victories where almost everyone on both sides dies.

Note - a repainted Screw Head GoBot makes a marvelous Corx.

[Church14]

A simple one I use as a GM:

If the guys are the attackers while my OpFor defends, I’ll have them start the fight with a serious BV advantage and have my defenders equipped without a lot of ranged weapons. The attackers also know that a rapid response force is coming that will tilt the BV in the defender’s favor.

They can rush the defenders and mix it up, trying to kill the OpFor quickly so the response force bugs out OR they can sit back and snipe and hope to wear down defenders enough to even the fight when the response team arrives.

Ticking clocks are good.


Besides that, indirect fire being called in by infantry does wonders to get a team off its butt.


I also pack maps as full of terrain as possible. 25 hexes of LoS is not feasiblenon most of the map.

[abou]

2 custom maps: a Star League-era canal with walls too high for most 'mechs to jump up to the surrounding terrain. In some spots there are collapses in the wall that give 'mechs with jump jets access. In the middle of the canal, there are small islands of collected sediment, but only offer 1 to 3 hexes of dry land. In general, the water level is low at level 1 depth.

Player force: 'mechs

GM force: hovercraft -- including Saladins!

Players need to make it from one side to the other and escape while being hounded by hovercraft and dealing with limited mobility.

[Sartris]

1) pc had to cross an open / rolling hills area in the dead of night opfor in the town between them and the objective had a lance of the flatbed trucks with the dual mech mortar  1s and they were raining flares in the pc's path. pitch black conditions are hell as it is with the reduced movement and heavy TH penalty but then the insult of being exposed repeatedly and rained on with heavy ordnance was especially trying. when they finally hit the town, i had floodlights (using the same illumination rules as flares) pop on. they squeaked out their objective but the repair costs were very very high.

2) in a long-running au periphery campaign, i was a former merc turned cartoonishly evil petty warlord / bandit king. long story short, another PC married my ultra-hated nemesis (one of my former employers  with whom i had a decade-long blood feud. the sheer insolence had to be punished.

step 1) select a poorly defended world on his territorial border
step 2) move the strike force (an excalibur-worth of light and heavy vehicles plus three regiments of infantry) through an ally's territory
step 3) launch commando raid and kidnap unsuspecting sister of arch-nemesis
step 4) secure hostage, evacuate to previously mentioned border world
step 5) as the commando raid is taking place, troops jump into border system and secure starport, largest city
step 6) proceed to rig the entire city with booby traps, pillboxes, fixed position weapons, other traps (there was no hpg to warn anyone this had occurred)
step 7) make it appear that the jumpship carrying the hostage broke down and was unable to jump out
step 8) move hostage to dropship carrying poultry on a flagged free-trader merchant, which then jumps out
step 9) make a lot of noise about how the hostage via an encryption code i had intentionally compromised for situations like this that been moved to the planet's surface 
step 10) put the body double of the hostage in a tall building at the city's center making sure to do it in plain enough view for his operatives to see her.

game on (it took two weekends)

he lands his own strike force and comes into the city. negotiations involved me sending faxes of my middle finger. all hell breaks loose. the gm constantly reminds him about collateral damage, which he waffles on repeatedly. absolute carnage. the paths to the target building were especially thick with infantry platoons. when he finally broke free and reached the objective, twelve vehicles (limos, armored cars, etc) came rolling out, speeding down the various roads toward the city limits. after a few turns, every one of the vehicles stopped, the drivers ditched, and detonated the thermite grenades, incinerating every vehicle. finally realizing what was happening, he decides to cut his losses and head for the hills.

remember how the dropship was an excalibur? i did. i put a heavy company on it. they were hiding in a swamp that cut across his line of retreat. as his battered forces returned to their dropships, my mechs rose out of the swamp and tore them apart. i let the survivors go. but i took their boots. it was a 100km walk.

and that's why no one attacked me very often.

[Daryk]

Beautiful, Sartris… simply beautiful...  8)

[Jellico]

Once played a campaign where the GM seemed to think a Clan force could always charge its way through without thinking about what you might need in the second or third battle.

He balanced the forces accordingly and managed to forget that terrain plays a part too...

So the Clan forces sets out and immediately hits a city full of hidden forces that need to be cleared out at Elemental speed. The alternative is a Demolisher behind every building because Clantech is overpowered don't cha know.

In the mean time off board enemy spotters are working into a position to illuminate our DropShips for artillery.

Ultimately the Clan force was stuck because it didn't have the numbers to clear its flanks or contain the main force in the city.

The GMs position was that it was the players' fault because the Clan force should have been able to blast through the city ignoring the free kills that would have followed. Maybe there wasn't a big force in the city but that is fog of war for you.

It would have been nice to chalk it up to the advantages of an IS combined arms force with its superior numbers of scouting elements but there was no way the game rules would have allowed the Clan force to break down small enough to avoid hostile slipping through.

I was not impressed.

[Lorcan Nagle]

So a couple of years ago I wrote up a scenario, emailed objectives and victory conditions to the two players commanding the teams.  As the game progressed at the end of each turn I made them each roll a dice.  When they reached a threshold I handed them an envelope.  Turns out they were involved in a Blue on Blue incident and a lot of the things they had just been scoring points for became negative.  And they didn't realise it was Blue on Blue at the same time, so one side started falling back and conserving fire before the other.

[Kovax]

I played one scenario at a conference in New Jersey a couple decades ago that was clearly designed purely to destroy 'Mechs ASAP.  The players were allowed to buy another ticket and re-enter the game as many times as they wished, and I believe that the GM was entitled to a percentage of it.

The players' 3025 'Mechs were dropped straight into the middle of the objective town to find out what happened to the recon lance that was sent there, much to my objection, rather than drop outside of it and regroup first.  Scatter and landing success were rolled for each 'Mech, and the modifiers were not kind.  The woods at the edges of town were all considered to be "ironwood", and a 'Mech was destroyed automatically if it scattered widely and landed on one of them.  Landing on a building caused damage to the 'Mech, and then you fell from the top of the building.  There were a lot of buildings to land on, and not much room in between.  Once on the ground (some of us in pieces), it turned out that more than half of the buildings were actually gun turrets, "testing" various weapons, and half of the remaining buildings contained troops or vehicles that came out and attacked the 'Mechs as soon as they landed.  Nearly half of the player force was either destroyed or rendered combat-ineffective in the landing, and most of the rest were quickly taken out by gauss rifles, pulse lasers, Ultra AC/5s, as well as various standard LRMs, SRMs, lasers, AC/20s, and other weapon turrets, and the defending vehicles.

I recall disabling a turret by inflicting a critical hit on the weapon, and jamming the turret on another building so it couldn't track me as I moved out of its arc.  Both were automatically considered "repaired" on the next turn and fired at me unexpectedly.  One player, whose heavy 'Mech was literally "disarmed", leaving it with only one small secondary weapon and no upper limbs, ran it through buildings repeatedly, eventually causing enough damage to collapse several until the cumulative damage from the impacts, turret weapons, and vehicles finally destroyed it.  The GM probably didn't think about rolling for basements, otherwise that would have ended much more quickly.  The landing force was soon reduced to two badly damaged 'Mechs near the edge of the town, one of them my Shadow Hawk, which managed to limp away from the scene with armor gone and an actuator hit on one leg, and one torso side stripped but with no structural damage, after destroying a couple of buildings and a vehicle.  The other survivor's Phoenix Hawk had the CT breached, engine damage, and the right arm gone.

The GM pointed out that we were abandoning our mission to rescue the previous Mechwarriors (which was NOT what we had been told was the objective), who as it turned out were in some building on the other side of a heavy minefield which none of us had enough range to jump over, and going around would have put us into short range of several of the more powerful turrets.  I pointed out that I was told to find out what happened to the recon lance (it's pretty obvious that they were destroyed), and that I was achieving my mission objective, as given, by escaping and surviving to report.  The GM counted it as us having abandoned our duty, and seemed really pissed that we didn't charge right back into the killing ground.  Just to be spiteful, he pointed out that the building I had destroyed wasn't related to the objective, and that turrets were cheap and easily replaced.  I don't believe that even a single player bought a second ticket, and I was actually tempted at one point after the landing to just walk away from the table.  For the players who crashed on landing, and didn't even get to roll the dice once (the GM rolled the scatter and landings), it was an expensive waste of a few minutes.  For those of us who got to play further, it was a miserable scenario that made very little sense and took liberties with the rules to destroy the players' 'Mechs, possibly just to get people to buy more tickets.

[Daryk]

That's... PURE evil...  xp

[JadeHellbringer]

Several years ago, as my local players went through a merc campaign (unwittingly helping me test the webbed campaign that showed up in Campaign Operations), they had a tough time ahead. They were supposed to hit targets on the world of Tall Trees in 3071, as the Word of Blake held the planet. Good news- only WoBM, no Manei Domini or Shadow Divisions or any of that. Bad news: Things went poorly early on, courtesy of an Essex-class warship (WoBS Deliverance) that happened to be in-system when they arrived.

Their objective in a forested hills area was twofold:

1) Rescue local partisans and political prisoners being held in an old Succession War-era prison. (Doing this successfully would allow them greater access to friendly infantry and light artillery in future operations)

2) Destroy a mobile sub-orbital battery (based loosely on the MODL from the Mechwarrior 4 games, and played on the map by the big sculpt of the Demolisher tank). Doing this would allow for the remaining battalion dropship assets to move around a little easier.

Now, the players knew this was a trap, because it had to be. The prison was poorly defended, the MODL was way the hell away from it, clearly I'm up to something, but they still have to do it. I love making players cut their own throats.

Sure enough, upon kicking in the prison gates, an automated beacon went off, and our players got a call over an open frequenccy- the captian of the Essex-class, who due to the destruction earlier of a satellite uplink system hadn't been able to reliably track the players to fire on them. Since he couldn't find them, he put out a fake prison trap and called them to where his guns were pointed. He gave them the usual offer to surrender, they refused, he admitted he wouldn't have cared if they did, and the show was on. The players had to pick between fleeing for their lives, or finishing the mission. Luckily for them, a team of their combat engineers (along to help out at the prison) were able to take control of the MODL and get in a couple of shots at the Deliverance, forcing her to back off. (This prompted a fun reversal in which the MODL, previously under heavy fire from the mercs, suddenly was being defended by those same mercs while the Word tried to finish it off.)

The short version- I forced the players to stick their hand in a bear trap to see what happened.  >:D

[Kibutsu]

I once ran a scenario with no opposing forces...and the player unit epic failed.

The setup was that the player's merc unit had taken a contract with the Duchy of Small and were part of a larger planetary invasion force tasked with securing Sheratan. Duke Small was trying to expand the Duchy and Sheratan, ravaged by forest fires and the collapse of central government following Operation Guerrero, was a logical target.

With no government or organized militia to speak of, the player unit was mostly facing bandits and assorted rogues in the form of infantry and vehicles. We were using the Level 3 infantry rules at the time and merc Mechs were dropping left and right from ambushing infantry with point blank shots, dug in field guns and man pack PPCs. After a few missions of this, they were antsy to say the least. They were given a mission to recon yet another burnt-out settlement and when they approached the center of town, starving, disaffected civilians came pouring into the streets and a mini riot ensued, with the civilians throwing bottles and bricks at the player Mechs. Of course, the players did not realize these were civilians. They saw a group of people and immediately thought "infantry ambush", so when a small caliber round from a hunting rifle pinged off the armor of their P-hawk, all hell broke loose and the players opened fire on the crowd, resulting in a massacre, and a complete mission failure.

This set up one of the greatest scenarios we ever played. Duke Small was trying to legitimize his invasion and have his realm recognized by the great Houses. A war crime committed by a unit in his employ would scuttle his plans very quickly, so he had to make sure what happened on Sheratan stayed on Sheratan. The merc player had to destroy the HPG in order to keep news of the atrocity from getting out. The only working HPG was located in the only viable city left on planet, the capital, which had the only organized militia presence anywhere as well as a full Comstar Level II at the HPG compound. The mercs combat dropped a lance straight onto the compound and began pouring fire into the HPG datacenter, while absorbing damage from the Comstar Mechs as they powered up and left their berths.

A single merc Wolverine scattered during the drop and ended up off table for 6 turns. The rest of the lance was getting pounded by the Com Guards and could not bring the building down before they were all taken out. The Wolverine made it into the city and jumped over the compound wall, landing right on top of the building...which had been weakened to within a few points of collapse, which it did under the Wolverine's weight. We rolled for a basement and rolled a double basement. The Wolverine took five levels of falling damage, yet still managed to claw his way up from the rubble, jump over the wall and MASC his way to the pickup point while under fire from the Com Guards and the city militia who were converging on the compound. It cost the mercs most of a lance but the mission was accomplished and the invasion continued.