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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6991984" data-attributes="member: 42582">Page 34 of Volos - which was one of the previews - says this about gnolls: "Strength, hunger and fear are the three concepts that every gnoll extols. Strength allows a gnoll to overwhelm, kill, and devour a foe. . . . Gnolls might seem to throw themelves into battle mindlessly, driven only by fury and hunger, but they do possess a rudimentary form of cunning"; and it has a picture of 4 gnolls launching an assault, none of whom has a longbow.So when you say that "5e gnolls weren't designed to behave like that" - as berserkers, who seek "to tear the defiler limb-from-limb", and "charge the cleric, with sneering disregard for his/her petty spirit guardians", I ask - what is your authority?And when you say that they should shoot their bows, or throw their spears (thereby disarming themselves?), and that they will always have a "back row" - what is the nature of that should? Because I'm not feeling its force.First, I didn't read     [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] as complaining about anything. He was explaining why he doesn't want to use masses of low-hp "minions".Second, you might absolutely decide to have a bunch of berserkers attack and be surprised by how it works out. Being surprised by how things work out is a natural consequence of integrating many granular resolution elements and letting the consequence emerge. I've certainly read plenty of posts about GMs being surprised by how particular encounters worked out. (That's part of why 4e adopts various non-agglomerative solutions, like swarms - they make it less likely that the participants will be surprised by the outcomes the mechanical processes yield.)In one of these current threads, you said something along the lines of the following: that in your game you'd regard a group of mid-level PCs vs 80 orcs as touch-and-go, because you find the fiction in which the PCs beat up on those orcs too absurd/gonzo/over-the-top (I'm paraphrasing, but I think not too loosely). Would that apply even if the orcs berserkly charged the PCs? And what about if one of the PCs had Spirit Guardians memorised? Suppose you decided to resolve it via the mechanics, rather than to stipulate an outcome, and then the PCs ended up butchering the orcs by taking advantage of Spirit Guardians as a mobile aura, would you be surprised by that outcome?This seems to me to be one of those cases where the mechanics of the game yield an outcome that is not necessarily to be expected a priori. I seem to have been the only commentator in respect of it, for instance, who predicted without needing to be told that Shield Guardians was being used as a mobile damage-dealing aura. (And not in a very optimised fashion. Combine that with some sort of teleportation ability, or rapid flight, and it gets noticeably stronger.)That's not in dispute. I mean, it's almost tautological - better tactics will almost always increase the degree of threat.What I am questioning is the apparently automatic inference from "the gnolls used poor tactics" to "the GM was doing a poor job." When none of the posters drawing that inference was at the table, or has any knowledge of the table circumstances, or the fiction surrounding the encounter. This seems particularly odd in a thread in which CapnZapp (and others) are being lectured about being videogamey, and not caring about the fiction. If one cares about the fiction of gnolls - or even just looks at their 6 INT, CE  alignment, and rampage feature -  why would one assume they use anything even approximating effective tactics?Relating this back to the topic of the thread:     [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] has made it clear that he prefers D&D in which melee is dominant over ranged. That is a reasonable preference, in my view. In any event, it's one I share.If one way that preference is vitiated is because when hordes of mooks seek to melee the heroes they get cut down by auto-damage auras, then that is something that people who have that preference have to deal with. And telling them to play a game in which the savage berserkers instead use hit-and-run ranged skirmish tactics is no help.This particular problem is mechanical, and doesn't arise from the fiction - for instance, with auto-damage there is no way that one gnoll can take the hit for another, or shield him/her; whereas if an attack roll was required then it would be different (eg one gnoll could provide cover to another while dodging itself). When I used these sorts of massed humanoids in 4e I often statted them as swarms, which helped deal with this particular issue - auto damage against a swarm doesn't kill all its members in one round, thereby taking it off the board.CapnZapp has expressed a preference for a different sort of solution, namely, increasing the humanoid hp so the auto damage is not as close to an auto-kill. That's probably not how I'd do it myself - I prefer the swarm approach - but obviously it's one approach to solving the issue.But the bottom line is - the point of the rules is to generate the fiction that the table wants. There is nothing remotely absurd, in the fantasy context, about 70 charging, slavering gnolls posing a threat to a group of mid-level PCs. The fact that the Spirit Guardians can so easily cut them all down is an artefact of the auto-damage rules. Deciding to change something to avoid that sort of outcome in the future strikes me as extremely sensible GMing, not bad GMing.EDIT: Read this post, also seemed to belong here:But what, then, about the picture in Volo's of gnolls without bows?Or - suppose the gnolls are returning from some other skirmish, and are out of arrows?Or - suppose instead of gnolls the GM had used orcs, which are also CR 1/2, have fewer hp and so are even more vulnerable to the autodamage, and whose ranged attack is javelins? If they throw one javelin and miss, they have to close. (And they have a feature - aggressive - which, like a gnoll's rampage - makes me think that on the whole they prefer close combat.)And even if the orcs, or gnolls, or whatever, see the Spirit Guardians, how are they to know that they will die to them? At a base 3rd level casting the aura does 3d8 auto-damage, WIS save for half. Suppose that, for a 5th level cleric, the DC is 15. That means a gnoll or orc with +0 to save takes an expected damage (when it enters, and when it starts its turn) of .7*13.5 + .3*6.75 = 9.45 + 2.025 = 11.475.Suppose we imagine gnolls or orcs engaged in combat with one another (presumably a not-infrequent occurrence). The former are AC 15, with +4 to hit and doing 5 damage. That's DPR, gnoll vs gnoll, of 2.5. For orcs, with AC 13 and +5 to hit for 9 damage, it's DPR of 5.85 per round, orc vs orc.So for the gnolls, just entering the Spirit Guardians is like spending 6 seconds fighting of 4 or 5 of your fellows. For the orc, it's like having to fight of 2 of them for 6 seconds. Or, here's another way of looking at it: moving through the Spirit Guardians is like trying to move past a 20th level swordsman with a magic sword. An OA from this character has +12 to hit (+5 STR, +6 prof, +1 magic) which is close to auto-hit. and does expected 10.5 damage (4.5 for longsword wielded two-handed, +1 for magic, +5 for STR).How is the orc or gnoll - who has survived so many skirmishes in the past, and never yet been cut down - meant to infer how dangerous a Spirit Guardian is just by visual inspection - that just passing through a spirit guardian is as dangerous as trying to run past Conan? Even if a couple of friends start falling, mightn't an angry gnoll think that the spirit guardians just got lucky?In my view this is a case where the hp mechanic, and damage scaling, stop supporting a "naturalistic" fiction if left to their own devices. This is why, in a different iteration of D&D that has a similar approach to damage scaling (4e), I used a mechanical solution to deal with the issue, namely, the swarm approach.</blockquote>

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