iserith
Magic Wordsmith
There was an occurrence at last night's Sunless Citadel game that I wanted to report because I thought it was interesting and I'd like to see if this has happened in other games. Some spoilers will follow.
Having defeated the hostile kobolds and installed Meepo as their puppet dictator over what remained, the PCs decided to push into goblin territory. This led to some running battles as goblin archers in defensible positions took shots at PCs, but fled deeper into the dungeon when overrun, repeating a tactic of fleeing, hiding, readying attacks, and fleeing as best they could. The goblins were slowing getting picked off, but the PCs were losing resources, too.
At a certain point, the PCs pushed them back to an area rife with goblins and so now things got very dangerous for the adventurers. In a long hall dotted with pillars they found themselves in a pitched firefight with their foes as reinforcements in the chamber past the goblins starting rallying. The crotchety PC wizard, Farkus the Illuminator, decided to put the back ranks of the goblins to sleep, in particular the ones guarding the door into the chamber beyond, leaving the front ranks to be dispatched fairly easily by the PCs. This would give them the opportunity to fall back before the goblin horde retaliated.
Or so he thought.
With a roll of 23 on sleep, he was able to knock three goblins at full hit points and one goblin at 2 hp who had taken some damage from an earlier skirmish with the PCs. Those four goblins down, the PCs set about attacking three conscious goblins that remained. One died to a spear, another to a javelin, the last one to a crossbow bolt. The simple cleric Drongo waddled up to one of the sleeping goblins and smashed it with his mace doing 6 damage - one hp shy of a kill. It woke up, and now it was the goblins' turn in initiative.
Here's where an artifact of group monster initiative came into play: The wounded goblin stood up, slapped the face of the sleeping goblin next, disengaged, and fled into the chamber where the goblins were rallying. The slapped goblin did the same thing. So did the next one, and the next one. Essentially, the work of the sleep spell was undone by monsters all acting on the same initiative. The last goblin to flee into the chamber slammed the door while another locked it. Meanwhile, sounds of heavily-armored reinforcements - probably hobgoblins - were coming from a corridor north of the PCs' position.
What happened next was pure hubris on the part of the adventurers that led to three out of five of the PCs dying. But what I found interesting was how the sleep spell was undone essentially because like monsters all act on the same initiative. This would be much harder for PCs to pull off, I think, if the situation was reversed since they act on different turns, often with monsters in between. It was the first time I had seen things go that way, so I found it notable.
Have you seen a situation like this unfold in your game? What other sleep shenanigans have you seen play out?
Having defeated the hostile kobolds and installed Meepo as their puppet dictator over what remained, the PCs decided to push into goblin territory. This led to some running battles as goblin archers in defensible positions took shots at PCs, but fled deeper into the dungeon when overrun, repeating a tactic of fleeing, hiding, readying attacks, and fleeing as best they could. The goblins were slowing getting picked off, but the PCs were losing resources, too.
At a certain point, the PCs pushed them back to an area rife with goblins and so now things got very dangerous for the adventurers. In a long hall dotted with pillars they found themselves in a pitched firefight with their foes as reinforcements in the chamber past the goblins starting rallying. The crotchety PC wizard, Farkus the Illuminator, decided to put the back ranks of the goblins to sleep, in particular the ones guarding the door into the chamber beyond, leaving the front ranks to be dispatched fairly easily by the PCs. This would give them the opportunity to fall back before the goblin horde retaliated.
Or so he thought.
With a roll of 23 on sleep, he was able to knock three goblins at full hit points and one goblin at 2 hp who had taken some damage from an earlier skirmish with the PCs. Those four goblins down, the PCs set about attacking three conscious goblins that remained. One died to a spear, another to a javelin, the last one to a crossbow bolt. The simple cleric Drongo waddled up to one of the sleeping goblins and smashed it with his mace doing 6 damage - one hp shy of a kill. It woke up, and now it was the goblins' turn in initiative.
Here's where an artifact of group monster initiative came into play: The wounded goblin stood up, slapped the face of the sleeping goblin next, disengaged, and fled into the chamber where the goblins were rallying. The slapped goblin did the same thing. So did the next one, and the next one. Essentially, the work of the sleep spell was undone by monsters all acting on the same initiative. The last goblin to flee into the chamber slammed the door while another locked it. Meanwhile, sounds of heavily-armored reinforcements - probably hobgoblins - were coming from a corridor north of the PCs' position.
What happened next was pure hubris on the part of the adventurers that led to three out of five of the PCs dying. But what I found interesting was how the sleep spell was undone essentially because like monsters all act on the same initiative. This would be much harder for PCs to pull off, I think, if the situation was reversed since they act on different turns, often with monsters in between. It was the first time I had seen things go that way, so I found it notable.
Have you seen a situation like this unfold in your game? What other sleep shenanigans have you seen play out?
