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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 7408135" data-attributes="member: 1465">Just wanted to share yesterday's game with the family... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" />We're playing an old edition module converted to 5e, and we had a big fight in a very large room against 5 hobgoblins, 1 hobgoblin captain and 4 goblins. The PCs are all 3rd level humans, except one of them is a centaur, but uses human stats for simplicity: Fighter(Battlemaster), Cleric(Life), Druid(Moon) and Rogue(Swashbuckler).The PCs had previously managed to spy into the room unnoticed, and they could see 3 hobgoblins and 2 goblins busy with food, gambling and bickering, plus a few more figures farther away sleeping (2 hobgoblins and 2 goblins). The hobgoblin captain was not in sight, he was one room further.The PCs discussed shortly about tactics, and decided to let the Druid sneak into the room and cast Entangle on the awaken monsters. I went easy with this and allowed the tactic for the Druid to possibly get the benefit of surprise, but the Druid failed the Stealth check, and so everyone just rolled initiative. Only the sleeping monsters counted as surprised and skipped the first round (this was planned in any case).Here's a short summary of what happened during the combat, which lasted about ~10 rounds:- the Druid went first anyway and targeted all the awaken monsters with Entangle, affecting two of them who wasted a few rounds before getting free- the Cleric cast Blindness on the nearest hobgoblin, who could do absolutely nothing because of that, and was killed swiftly by the Rogue's arrows- all the monsters were armed, even the sleeping ones had weapons within reach, so there was no further delay in their actions besides surprise for the sleeping ones- the hobgoblins tactic was to charge into melee and stick together to gain the damage bonus from fighting alongside each other- the goblin tactic was to shoot arrows from behind, move behind some cover (furniture or junk) and use their bonus action to hide <s>in order to attack with advantage</s>, rinse and repeat [edit: actually I did not grant advantage... they went to total cover and could not be targetted from range, but no advantage to their own attacks]- the Rogue tactic continued to be about staying behind, shooting arrows and use sneak attack essentially all the time, while the Fighter, Cleric and Druid formed a line to protect the Rogue- the Fighter had a hard time with bad rolls and had to deplete all the short-rest resources i.e. Second Wind, Action Surge and 4 superiority dice for Precision Attack (the hobgoblins have very high AC 18) plus a magic potion to revive the Cleric who dropped to 0 HP- the Druid fought in melee for a while, until all monsters got free from the Entangle, then dismissed it in order to cast Moonbeam (they both require concentration), and spent the rest of the combat directing the latter- the Cleric also attacked in melee all the time after Blindness, except for casting a Cure Wounds- the Hobgoblin Captain entered the battle 2 rounds after the beginning; here I went very easy and make him waste another two rounds throwing javelins at the isolated Rogue (bad tactic, since he would have got a HUGE damage bonus for targetting someone in melee with his allies) while moving around the Entangle and closing to melee; I did however let him use the leadership feature, which doesn't say which action it uses so I went with no action requiredThe messy (but fun!) part came when the party finished off the hobgoblins and finally their captain, and only the goblins remained. The Druid still had the Moonbeam on and directed it to one goblin at a time, while the rest of the party tried to close up with the goblins, particularly to negate their half-cover AC bonus.Here is where I certainly didn't follow the rules correctly, but just tried to have things keep going... I had the goblins keep using their bonus action to Hide every turn. To avoid too many rolls, I used the PC's passive perception to determine which goblin managed to hide successfully, but rolled separate Stealth checks for each. As long as they succeeded, I had them practically change position to a different location within reach, then popup again next round, shoot and hide again. We were using minis, so I'd removed a goblin until next round to represend its hiding. Once they failed their Stealth check however (some PCs spent their action to actively use Investigation as a second chance) and a PC moved up to them, I did not let them use Hide anymore, although they could still use a bonus action to Disengage instead.I know this is largely a loose adjudication of the rules... mostly I was thinking that in order to Hide these goblins need to stay on the move so that the PCs would lose track of their position, and decided that this essentially required them to split their move, as in "attack, move+hide+move" or alternatively "merge" the move with the hiding, to represent the fact that they have to anyway jump behind something solid in the room (turned tables, sacks of food, tapestries... the room had enough junk everywhere). When they failed at hiding and a PC moved close, I decided that they couldn't try to hide on the spot and then move while hidden, but they needed to move away first, at least a little bit, and thus they would have provoked an OA, so a better decision for them was to disengage instead. All in all, I definitely think that any attempt at hiding may require a Stealth check and therefore it is always gated behind DM's adjudication on whether there are suitable condition to be granted such check in the first place.It was definitely unorthodox, and still quite complicated to run, but the result was actually quite a lot of fun... the Druid kept throwing around the Moonbeam randomly trying to guess a goblin's location, the Rogue (thanks to better passive perception) sometimes was the only one not fooled by the hiding and tried to at least pinpoint the location to others, and the goblins felt pretty pesky but not terribly threatening, it felt like hunting and swatting mosquitoes, although they also got some OA against the Fighter when he moved to attack a goblin without knowing that another had managed to hide just near him. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />So, how would you have run this scenario differently? <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=":)" /></blockquote>

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