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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6992891" data-attributes="member: 6787650">I don't have an agenda here so I hope you won't mind if I respond to individual points instead of trying to drive to some sort of resolution here--I think there's no resolution to be had, since we all have different preferences, but that doesn't mean useful observations can't be made.(1) Spirit Guardians is, of course, not the only auto-damage effect in 5E. The exact same thing would have happened with a Wall of Fire, or even (as happens sometimes) with regular jars of flaming oil from the PHB, each of which does 5 HP to anything that passes through it.(2) Spirit Guardians is one of the things that make this encounter play out differently from AD&D, but the existence of Dodge is a huge one too. Dodge magnifies the effect of high AC. In AD&D there is now way to get hit less than 5% of the time, but in 5E you can reduce it to 0.25% by imposing disadvantage.(3) In AD&D, a 9th level spellcaster would have not only won the encounter, but also taken over the whole gnoll tribe as the new chief. (Thanks, Magic Jar!) 5E magic is generally weaker and more tactical. At 8th level, an AD&D wizard could have produced a 2d4+2d6+8 Wall of Fire which would be approximately 100% lethal to all the 2 HD (2-16 HP) gnolls that charged into it, and that Wall of Fire would last for as long as he cared to keep concentrating on it, or else eight minutes if he decided to just walk away instead of concentrating on it. There are probably other options too which I'm overlooking due to being decades out of practice with AD&D.Obviously, if you want to change the fiction, you can change the mechanics to match, but that isn't 5E-specific. You'd have to change the AD&D mechanics too to make this scenario work there, unless you were willing to change the gnolls' behavior instead.(4) Encouraging the bad guys to clump up so you can hit them with an AoE is a classic tactic, and one of the things that Dodging is good for. E.g. the cleric Dodges until all the zombies are nicely grouped around him, and then cuts loose with a Turn Undead to blast them all to smithereens. (This can go sour fast if the zombies are the grabby and grapply type, but it works fine against smiters and biters. In the case I'm remembering, the zombies were not the grabby type and the cleric got to be awesome. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> There were also three hobgoblin vampires in the fight and taking the zombies out of play sure helped the PCs focus.)</blockquote>

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