Today's session was a lesson in getting the heck out of the way.
There's a cult of Talos that our party has cheesed off in the past. We found some evidence that they were active in Phandalin, and weren't too happy about it.
Thus, our party, just innocently preparing a shipment of goods we are going to escort to another settlement, gets ambushed. And by "ambushed" I mean, "we telegraphed where we'd be, hoping that the bad guys would show up to stop us." Our miscalculation was that we didn't know that there was also a cult of Myrkul looking to flex in Phandalin, and that they decided to show up too.
Rock and a hard place - where the rock is a vampire and a bunch of ghouls, and the hard place is a really fast and violent elf assassiny type, and her flock of buffed up kobolds. Our only real asset is the fact that these two bunches seem to have no love lost between them. By which I mean they are in competition, and hated each other's gust.
Our barbarian... doesn't care a whole lot about tactics. She runs off to engage the kobolds. Which means that there's nothing between my artificer and our Warlock and the undead
Long story short, we polish off the minions with area of effects, and my gnomish artificer (who isn't really tops in melee) has had many chunks taken out of him. The warlock takes to the air with wings of flying, leaving me... right between a vampire and an assassin.
With 18 hit points left, I choose the better part of valor, and withdraw the whopping 25' my little gnome legs will take me towards our barbarian, and hoping the GM was trying to telegraph something earlier. The vampire and the assassin are now closer to each other than they are to me, and, as I had hoped, they decide to attack each other.
The party spends two rounds munching popcorn (okay, actually, I was chugging healing potions) while these idiots beat on each other. We remark to each other about how nice it is when the enemy chews up its own hit points, but otherwise don't do anything to break their focus. We figured on the third round of this they might realize that maybe they should pay attention to us, so that's when we laid into them with a fusillade of ranged attacks, obliterating them.
Always use the enemy's foibles against them...
There's a cult of Talos that our party has cheesed off in the past. We found some evidence that they were active in Phandalin, and weren't too happy about it.
Thus, our party, just innocently preparing a shipment of goods we are going to escort to another settlement, gets ambushed. And by "ambushed" I mean, "we telegraphed where we'd be, hoping that the bad guys would show up to stop us." Our miscalculation was that we didn't know that there was also a cult of Myrkul looking to flex in Phandalin, and that they decided to show up too.
Rock and a hard place - where the rock is a vampire and a bunch of ghouls, and the hard place is a really fast and violent elf assassiny type, and her flock of buffed up kobolds. Our only real asset is the fact that these two bunches seem to have no love lost between them. By which I mean they are in competition, and hated each other's gust.
Our barbarian... doesn't care a whole lot about tactics. She runs off to engage the kobolds. Which means that there's nothing between my artificer and our Warlock and the undead

Long story short, we polish off the minions with area of effects, and my gnomish artificer (who isn't really tops in melee) has had many chunks taken out of him. The warlock takes to the air with wings of flying, leaving me... right between a vampire and an assassin.
With 18 hit points left, I choose the better part of valor, and withdraw the whopping 25' my little gnome legs will take me towards our barbarian, and hoping the GM was trying to telegraph something earlier. The vampire and the assassin are now closer to each other than they are to me, and, as I had hoped, they decide to attack each other.
The party spends two rounds munching popcorn (okay, actually, I was chugging healing potions) while these idiots beat on each other. We remark to each other about how nice it is when the enemy chews up its own hit points, but otherwise don't do anything to break their focus. We figured on the third round of this they might realize that maybe they should pay attention to us, so that's when we laid into them with a fusillade of ranged attacks, obliterating them.
Always use the enemy's foibles against them...