The "Gotcha!" "strategy"

"I can't stand it
I know you planned it
[...]
You'll shut me down with a push of your button"

Beastie Boys - Sabotage


I'll probably expand on Shadowrun: Hong Kong whenever I get around to discussing writing in RPGs once again, as it provides an interesting comparison to its preceding campaign, Dragonfall. For now, it bears mentioning one particular mission from the bonus campaign, Shadows of Hong Kong.

You're given the opportunity to loot a police armory and escape before the doors automatically close in 5 rounds. Which is fine. TBS players will be no strangers to timed objectives and planning several rounds ahead. You're also introduced to multiple new enemy types capable of sapping your action points, stunning your characters for one round every round, like "shock troopers" (yes, yes, very punny) with stun batons. This is also not a problem. Variety being the spice of virtual life, players are always asking for new enemy types. (Like me; I would be one of those players.)

It's the fact that the shock troopers first seem to even show up in the entire game during those five rounds of combat that makes me call bullshit. Any good tactician might logically position defenders to either side of the large door in the center and whittle down at least some of the cops as they trickle in. Then, in the last round, charge out and reposition to flank the remaining assembled enemy pistoleers. If you can thus bait and trap a few enemy melee, all the better. This means the first time you're likely to see a shock trooper is when a pair of them round the corner and stun-lock one of your characters inside the main chamber, thereby losing you the entire mission in a single action. Note, the problem is not just introducing a new, challenging mob type, but one specifically designed to inconvenience the player in that one specific mission.*

Then there's Warhammer 40,000: Armageddon, which for a summarily reskinned WWII TBS video game with no animated character models proved both surprisingly enjoyable and, from what I can tell, unexpectedly successful for its small-time developer and publisher. One mission in a DLC pack positions you in the east of the map, sweeping westward to capture several control points. As I mopped up the westmost control point I couldn't figure out why the mission wasn't ending. So I reloaded... and zoomed out.

In case you can't tell, the two eastmost highlighted hexes are no longer flying my banner. Apparently some enemies had spawned behind me as I steamrolled my way through and recaptured everything. Which would not be a problem had their appearance been properly signaled to my proud imperial self. Maybe at least call the mission "capture and defend" instead of just capture.

Surprises can greatly spice up our virtual adventuring when they're properly contextualized or naturally grow out of randomization and the rules of the game. In fact, roguelike and sandbox genres bank for their appeal largely on such emergent properties of a system's basic rules. Even there, hiding or neglecting to provide necessary information, a.k.a. dropping a piano on the customer, can invalidate much of your appeal. More to the point for strategy games, when trying to engineer, to script, to choreograph surprises, developers too often seem more concerned with feigning cleverness by withholding information from the player. A strategic daemonus ex machina is no wittier or more satisfying than fabricating a cheap, trite literary happy ending. If the mission becomes trivially simple once I know of your shock troopers and reload a fresh save, then their shock value gets re-appraised as a rip-off. "Restart mission" is not a strategy.

The goal of a game master or level designer cannot be to simply blast players off the map via concentrated squirts of narrative omniscience, but to provide difficult yet surmountable challenges. To once again quote an old PvP strip as I did in my contrast of Sir, You Are Being Hunted and Don't Starve:
"Whoa! That was close. You almost solved the mystery. I killed you real good that time."
- doesn't make you a very good storyteller. It makes you an adolescent poser.


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* To add insult to injury, that Shadowrun:HK mission hands you at least one easy method of defeating the shock troopers. You find a cache of grenades nearby and a demon to summon which can both buff one ally's damage resistance and debuff enemy armor, letting you send one tank in to absorb the stun-locking attacks while you pepper the whole group with grenades. None of which you could know until you actually summon that demon.