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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6992843" data-attributes="member: 42582">At the moment there are two or three threads running concurrently that involve many of the same participants and deal with many of the same issues.In some of those threads, those who are focussing on mechanics - mechanical solutions to issues they have, or trying to hone in on precisely what mechanical features of the game are leading to them have issues - have been told, more-or-less, that by focusing on the mechanics they are focusing on the wrong things. They should, rather, be focusing on "story" and "flavour text".That's the context in which I was moved to comment on the gnoll encounter - because the criticisms of the handling of that encounter focus primarily on the gnoll stat block (the presence of longbows - despite the fact that many illustrations of gnolls in this edition, as in past ones, don't include longbows) and on the failure to optimise tactics. Taken as a whole, I see a tension in these two different lines of criticism of CapnZapp. (Although you have not been party to the first - so in your case there is no tension, but you are one of those who seems to be criticising CapnZapp for departing from the stat block and for running the gnolls as slavering berserkers, although that does seem fairly consistent with their flavour text.)I personally don't see anything wrong with testing a "mob" technique with melee-focused attackers. And if I had the same result that  [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] did - of the auto-damage rules meaning that the fiction did not turn out as I expected/hoped for - then I would look at changes too (eg increasing hp).Along the lines I replied to you quite a bit upthread, I think  [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] perhaps frames his issues too much as "WotC needs to fix this" rather than "What are possible solutions to these problems I'm having" - but nevertheless he is actually identifying solutions to his problems. And the isssue of auto damage vs mobs is, in my view, a legitimate problem. It comes up in other games and other editions with auto damage - because auto-damage bypasses action economy and bypasses defence/cover rules, it can produce wonky outcomes when there are large numbers of targets affected by it.Of course it's possible to treat the auto-damage as a "given" feature of the gameworld, and to have everyone adopt their tactics to it (eg the gnolls form a cordon and wait for the Spirit Guardians to depart). But to me that is letting the mechanical tail wag the fiction dog. Probably the pithiest way for me to put it is that the Spirit Guardians provides better defence against an onrushing horde then would a single powerful angel, which would still be able to make only one OA per initiative cycle, and maybe half-a-dozen attacks on its own turn (depending on details of implementation). To me that is best seen as a byproduct of the mechanics that at best we ignore because it's a corner-case, or else we fix it (as CapnZapp is proposing to do) - but it's not a core case of the mechanics producing appropriate fiction.In AD&D, which has relatively little aura-type damage (the only one I can think of available to 8th level PCs is Fire Shield, and it triggers only on an attack being made), this encounter would have beeen threatening. 70 gnolls, entering through a chokepoint in the ceiling, will pose a significant threat to 4 8th level PCs, and a single cleric won't be a very effective defender of that choke point. (Mechanically, the cleric hits an  AC 5 gnoll around half the time, for probably around 6 or 7 damage unless wearing Gauntlets of Ogre Power; a gnoll probably hits the AC 0 (or thereabouts) cleric one-quarter of the time for around 5 damage. Even if the gnolls just line up, the cleric can take down a little more than a dozen of them before his/her 40 to 50 hp are ablated.)The only reason this encounter was not threatening was because of Spirit Guardians. Which is exactly why  [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] has indicated a preference to use higher-hp enemies who are not so vulnerable to that spell.And, as per my maths in the earlier post and as already mentioned in this post, the threat posed by Spirit Guardians in this situation is not about the fiction - it's about the mechanics, and the fact that an aura bypasses action economy, defence/cover rules, etc, and hence becomes disproportionately effective against very large numbers of low-hp attackers. (It's sriking to me how much less effective Fireball - the quintessential 3rd level anti-mob spell - would have been in the scenario CapnZapp describes: the gnolls weren't grouped together until effectively on top of the PCs, and so could not have been fireballed without also inflicting damage on the PCs.I don't see how having gnolls use bows from more than 15' away from the cleric accomplishes "charging.slavering gnolls posing a threat to the group". It seems an alternative to that.I don't see why gnolls stats (which include longbows) and Spirit Guardian (which is an ongoing aura of auto-damage) are so sacrosanct that the game fiction has to bend to accommodate them, when there are ways of adjusting the way that both work so as to yield the fiction ("charging, slavering gnolls") that CapnZapp seemed to be aiming for.</blockquote>

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