So, I’ve been running this mission where the crew is in an low-income Arcology and one of the local functionaries has hired them to clear out a particularly violent gang pushing some bad drugs. The gang controls a cluster of apartments on a floor in one of the four towers, as well as that tower’s loading dock. The PCs and the fixers gang have drone visual coverage in the tower, a comm jammer, silenced weapons, and access to the electrical room of the floor the gang is holed up in. They’ve got the info that the gang is most vulnerable when they’re reacting to something they don’t have context for, or from assault from behind their perimeter and least vulnerable to a direct firefight.
The PCs (a killer, a hunter, a fixer (with a small gang of loyal ex military), and a tech) currently have a FOB in the form of an apartment one floor above the gang’s stronghold. As a complication from a hit the street, an AI Real Estate Manager required the group to switch the authorization certificate in one of the apartments with spoofed ones that will say she’s the owner of the apartment. However, I’ve already stipulated they’ll get more cred the more apts they do.
Right now, the PCs are set on giving the gang a firefight. That’s fine and we will totally do a firefight.
But I realized tonight that if they created a diversion that drew the majority of the gang down to the loading dock area, then hit the apartments hard while they’re minimally defended, switching the auth codes as they did, they could then set up an ambush for when the gang returned, and do the whole thing nice and clean.
I’d love to to get them thinking on a path like this, doesn’t need to be this plan exactly, or similar but don’t want to spoon-feed/railroad them. There’s an NPC in the room (the head of the Fixer’s gang), that could say something, but I’m worried that depending on what I have him say, it might be leading them too much. Thoughts?