Defensive Feint Trap / Video Games

• The entire strategy of "pulling" in video games — one person is the "puller" who gets the enemy's attention so the enemy will follow to a different area. This is done to fight one enemy (or a small group) at a time from a larger group of enemies, or (more rarely) to lure the enemy off of terrain favoring them and/or onto terrain favoring you. A variant, "kiting," can be done on particularly slow enemies, where the puller lures an enemy around and around, as the damage dealers whale on the enemy.
• In multiplayer games where the enemies are human, and therefore too smart to simply chase anyone who walks up, attacks once, and then runs away, a genuine attempt must be made to appear weak or show that an ostensible plan has failed; This more difficult distinction is called "Baiting". MOBAs such as League of Legends or DOTA can have this as a key point of strategy. In a game where positioning is crucial, drawing an enemy even just a few virtual meters from safety with the promise of an easy kill on a healer can turn the tide of a teamfight, or even an entire match.
• In 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds, two different endings require Guile Hero Lucy to lure the vampire into an ambush in an alley. Solo variations of the tactic involve her secretly arming herself.
• If you hack a turret or camera in BioShock, this tactic can save you quite a bit of ammo. Or, in the case of camera, kill your enemies without ever lifting a finger (or being anywhere near the camera on the map) and plenty of non-hostile drones to catch and hack.
• Diablo:
  • A typical tactic in hack-and-slash games such as Diablo is to make the enemy forces stretch themselves thin by retreating. It can also be used to lure mooks away from a boss (handy if he can resurrect them), in a cheap but entirely legal exploitation of AI limits.
  • Also, to change the terrain in your favor. A doorway was one of the more important locations you could have, allowed you to bash at the enemies one by one while being fairly safe and still able to withdraw if it goes bad, as opposed to be being in a corner.
  • In Diablo II, named monsters have a group of mook buddies that stick to them on an AI "leash." Getting mobbed is a very real danger in this game (each hit disables you for a set amount of time, leading to a Cycle of Hurting if there's a lot of things hitting you at once.) Thus, the pack of normally-laughable fiends who avert this trope tend to be more dangerous than the miniboss itself.
  • Diablo III: The Demon Hunter's Sentries are built for this; use up your Hatred resource to summon all your magically-automated crossbow turrets in one spot, then lure your enemies by Vaulting with your Discipline resource back and forth into your turret nest.
• In Pokémon, there are a few moves that have the same practical effect. Payback works like this - if your opponent hits you before the move goes off, you do double damage with it. Avalanche does as well. Fairly obviously, so does Revenge. There are also combinations that involve setting up a Desperation Attack (Flail and Reversal) to effectively function like this.
• In Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, enemy leaders and yarhi/espers/whatever will often do this in battles involving Summoning Gates and Soul Crystals. Naturally, the group that had had the command to 'attack' will continue to follow the command, and chase after them if not intercepted quickly. If they are not intercepted then the group will end up in a trap of ever-spawning leaders or yarhi/espers/whatever from the Summoning Gate/Soul Crystal, and either fight until they die or get very injured/die while they escape.
• In Warcraft III, the alliance against the Burning Legion is simply intended to hold them off just long enough to set up a trap. Of course, given the odds they were facing, they weren't exactly letting them have it easy on purpose.
• In the original Warcraft, this was a not uncommon tactic for a human playing the computer. The archaic UI made a coordinated advance difficult, but sending a bait unit to draw the computer into an attack on your carefully drawn-up defensive formation usually worked pretty well.
• If you want to survive levels 1-3 in the Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, etc.), learning this tactic will be a godsend.
• Often happens with Demomen or Engineers in Team Fortress 2. A Demoman will lay a stick bomb carpet somewhere, or an Engineer will put up a sentry, and then they'll go off and engage the enemy. If planned properly, they can simply retreat into the sticky bombs or the sentry and kill their opponent instantly.
  • This particular tactic appears explicitly at the end of ''Meet The Demoman," where the RED Demoman retreats from the charging BLU team... to lure them into a gigantic cluster of sticky bombs hidden just out of sight until it's too late. Cue Oh, Crap!, Stuff Blowing Up, and Ludicrous Gibs, in that order.
  • Scouts can also pull this off with a little practice: Run ahead of main force. Shoot enemy. Run back. Kill assist. Repeat.
  • Pyros, too. A common tactic when outgunned is to pretend to retreat and stop just around the next corner, flamethrower ready. Works best if the Pyro has managed to puff some flame at whoever is going to give chase before said chase starts.
  • A Spy with even a bare hint of height advantage can quickly turn a retreat into a Back Stab opportunity by jumping over the opponent. This is known as an airstab or stairstab, as usually the path of retreat is up a flight of stairs, and jumping right back down behind the now-victim.
  • Heavies can pull off a variant with the default loadout. Many Heavies tend to dispense with the shotgun in return for the health-restoring Sandvich, which unfortunately forces the Heavy in question to duck around a corner to relative safety due to being vulnerable for about four seconds as the Sandvich is heartily devoured. This trope comes in if a Heavy ducks around a corner as if to eat a Sandvich and is chased by an opponent hoping to attack during the vulnerability—only to find out that the Heavy does not have a Sandvich and is, in fact, about to blow off the opponent's head with the shotgun.
• In Dragon Age: Origins, this is basically the entire battle plan for Ostagar: Lure the darkspawn into charging the main force, ambush them from behind. We'll never know for sure if it would've worked, thanks to Loghain having other ideas. Survivors from the main force think it would have and consider the withdrawal a Cavalry Betrayal; Loghain and his soldiers insist, even years later, that the battle was so one-sided (the main force broke before the entire darkspawn horde was committed) that charging as planned would have been a pointless suicide.
• In Dynasty Warriors, the best ways to kill Lu Bu are power-leveling, and using this tactic to get him to follow you into your main base, at which point, a number of allied officers, and *infinite* allied mooks will bear down on him. Of course, he's still Lu Bu.
• Wolfenstein 3D featured a level where opening a door would cause an army of Nazis to come at you from all directions. A sound tactic here (and all around the game) was to retreat to an earlier (hidden) room and, as the enemies followed you, open on them with a machine gun since they're conveniently bunched up and bottlenecked at the entrance.
• Warriors Orochi 2 has at least one instance of an enemy army pulling this on the player. Would be more convincing if the felled enemies didn't give the strategy away by taunting in their defeat messages, but you have to fall for it anyway in order for the battle to progress.
• In Jade Empire, the Player Character end up doing this unintentionally. Your Magnificent Bastard Master deliberately built a weakness into your fighting style that only he can exploit. Other masters took notice of a peculiarity in your fighting style but dismissed it as an actual Defensive Feint Trap. At the climax of the game, the trap was used for its intended purpose.
• In the Freelancer backstory, the GMG's main tactic during the 80 Years War was to lure the Rheinland ships into explosive gas pockets and other navigational hazards in the GMG's home nebulae.
• Mogami Yoshiaki in Sengoku Basara has two moves, the first of which involves him standing idly while taunting, and the second falling to his knees and begging for forgiveness, only to attack with a Diagonal Cut the instant you touch him. Since it's impossible to defend and this will down your character for 10 seconds or more, it's best to just avoid him or use a ranged attack if you have one.
• In Fallout: New Vegas, this happened four years prior to the game at the first Battle of Hoover Dam. The NCR feigned retreat from the dam into the nearby Boulder City, sniping at the Legion commanders the whole way. Once they were in Boulder City proper, the NCR sprung the trap: they'd rigged enough explosives to level the town, and all the Legionnaires within it. And they did.
• Thanks to Artificial Stupidity, it's possible to win battles without losing a single unit in Empire Earth. The AI will target only the attacking unit, so park your army close by, send an archer to fire a single arrow, then run it to the back. The AI's units will get slaughtered as they try to get at the archer. The most glaring example would have to be the Greek campaign, where Alexander the Great's army can basically win without a single loss.
• This happens in Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. In the second to the last chapter: Castle Guards, the player will encounter a battle that seems much too easy. It's just a few bucklers and some enemy fodder. One can rush in and quickly dispatch these enemies. One short lived celebration later, queue Mario pointing to new enemies. Then, a new, dire situation is revealed. Now the player is backed into a corner with little cover, their retreat cut off, surrounded by a garrison of beefy, well armed, well supported enemies in proper formation. And, once that battle is over? There's another one straight away with the Quirky Miniboss Squad.
• In Danger By Design, Nancy defeats the villain simply by parrying one attack after another, until said villain (who's not much of a fighter) is too exhausted to continue.
• A staple player tactic in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, where it's commonly known as the Overwatch trap. Make contact with an alien pack in terrain that favors the aliens, fall back and set troops the aliens can't see in Overwatch mode. Works especially well on the more aggressive and less intelligent aliens, but it's not foolproof. Smarter aliens either won't fall for it or will just grenade where they think you are, while your own troopers can mess it up if they've been attending the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy. And in the sequel, captains will invoke Why Don't You Just Shoot Him? and sacrifice an opportunity to get into cover for a full Alpha Strike on the bait who charged in alone. Of course, since you now have specialists that can stay in stealth until a precise meal of buckshot is needed, enemies may try to flank your main units only to accidentally run straight into the killzone of a shotgun specialist who is still in concealment mode.
• An incredibly common tactic in Real-Time Strategy games, against either an AI opponent or someone who doesn't micromanage very effectively: send out a small group/lone unit, drag back a portion of the army (preferably through a choke point) into your waiting defensive line. Move said line forward if possible, lather, rinse, repeat. This is especially effective in games that have units whose effective range is longer than their actual sight into the Fog of War; Terran Siege Tanks and upgraded Tau railguns made this both tactically and visually satisfying.
• In No More Heroes, Bad Girl may occasionally get on her knees and start crying. If one of her hands are still on her bat, it means that she'll counter with an insta-kill maneuver if you attack her in this state. If both her hands are off her bat however, it means she actually is having a psychotic breakdown and is vulnerable.
• The first Modern Warfare game has an example of this pulled by al-Asad on American forces. Intel indicates al-Asad is holed up in the capital, US sends lots of troops to hunt him down. Turns out he's not there...but a nuclear device is. End result: 30,000 dead US soldiers and a furious General Shepherd.
  • And in Modern Warfare 3, during the battle of Berlin, Russian troops pull this, luring in a Delta Team and two Bundeswehr tanks then collapsing a freakin' building on top of them.
• A quintessential part of normal gameplay in Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Dark Souls II. Failing to grasp this concept will lead to a player getting massacred, whereas proper use will put the odds at merely butchered (assuming the player is just starting out; more experienced players will be able to handle most enemies without much trouble).
• Can sometimes happen in World of Warships by clever... or insane... carrier players. It's no great secret that the fighters a Carrier can launch can be a major annoyance to the opposing team at best, or a nightmare at worst, so it stands to reason that Carriers would be a major target. What then happens is that the second a Carrier is spotted, players willing to destroy them will focus everything they have on the Carrier in an attempt to sink it, thus enabling the Carriers own team-mates to move in, and pick off the other team while they're distracted.
  • It should be noted that only a few Carrier classes are actually capable of pulling this off. The Independence Class for example are based on the Cleveland Class cruisers, and boast the latter ships top speed. However, the two preceding Carriers, Langley and Bouge, are based on a Coalier, and a Cargo ship respectively, and as a result, are painfully slow, and just unable to avoid incoming fire.
  • On battles where members of a team are actually cooperating, especially players using destroyers, it's not unknown for one destroyer to act as Schmuck Bait get a heavier ship to chase it down a narrow channel so it has no way to escape the wall of torpedoes the other destroyers launch at it.
• You can do this on Undertale against the bosses if you're feeling particularly cruel and sadistic. If you go through the steps to win the fight via pacifism, and then strike once you've convinced them to stop fighting and spare you, you get a One-Hit KO and unique dialogue where they remark on how much of a monster you are.
  Toriel You... at my most vulnerable moment... To think I was worried you wouldn't fit out in there... You really are not different than them! Ha... ha...
• In Oddworld, lone Paramites will retreat from Abe - but if they are backed into a corner, they will lunge at him and attack. This behaviour is meant to lure potential predators straight into a nest of them, which is supported by the fact that they just straight-up attack Abe when two or more of them are together on screen.