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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 6595836" data-attributes="member: 5834">Now that I'm not coming off a 16 hour day and feeling irritated, I'll comment a bit more. Sorry if I was a bit curt and snarky earlier. I'll explain some of the encounter I remember. It's been a few weeks and my memory isn't perfect. I'm not interested in an argument. Use the tactics as you wish.There were 23 total gnolls in the gnoll area. A Fang, two packlords (his sons), and twenty regular gnolls (his small tribe including his mates that could fight).1. We scouted the area with stealth noting the layout. Rogue/Monk, Eldritch Knight Archer, and Deep Gnome wizard (yeah, wizard's can stealth without magic pretty well in this edition). 2. We decided to take out a room. Five gnolls. We killed four and let one run. (23 to 19 gnolls).3. We set up near the entrance to the cave. It was an L-shaped hallway/corridor. The short perpendicular area of the hallway leading into the entrance room was 20 feet on the long half and 10 feet on the short half leading to a 10 foot wide passage. The rogue/monk and warlock/fighter set up 5 feet inside the passage leaving about 15 feet of space for the gnolls.4. Gnome wizard hid at the corner and watched for the gnolls giving us advance warning so we can start buffing. 5. Gnolls are a coming with their Fang leader and his sons in front.6. Archer fires at front wounding gnoll leader, falls back.7. Gnome sets up flaming sphere on corner point of the L. That means any gnoll standing in the 10 foot area at the back of the passage including around the corner is going to get burned. This requires the gnolls to make a choice. We purposefully left a space that wouldn't burn them to encourage some of the Chaotic Evil gnolls to step up and fight away from the fire.8. The DM determined the gnoll leader and his sons being the alpha were going to prove their strength, so they stepped up and took the space. I don't see this as a out of character for gnolls.9. The conga line: We actually did have the conga line of archers give firing a shot moving back and forth. But they could not all move back and forth. Page 191 of the PHB makes it difficult terrain to move through the space of another creature whether friendly or hostile. So moving back and forth through each other would half their movement. Also who sacrifices themselves to get burned when their movement ends near the flaming sphere? After a few rounds of getting burned, the gnolls did retreat hoping their leaders would kill the front line and call for the advance.10. We focus fired the leader including the warlock using Hellish Rebuke when he was hit bringing him down in two rounds. The cleric focused on healing the monk and used aid on the frontline martials and archer to keep them up. The warlock was able to withstand the assault. The monk flurried on the Fang. We took him out fairly quickly.11. Once the leader was down we wore the gnolls down in a prolonged fight. The wizard used more spells. I don't remember them all. The Eldritch Knight archer threw in a thunderwave at a key time when the warlock fell for a round. He was the one that I know received at least one cure wounds and some potions (yes, did we use potions). Overall, a good fun fight that took quite a while. If some find it the tactics by the gnolls poor, I can only say I disagree. I don't think gnolls would have pushed past their leader in the initial fight. It was two rounds of battle. I see no reason to believe they wouldn't give their leaders a couple of rounds to take out the frontline. I don't think they would have ran into a flaming sphere taking the fire damage to mass into an area they couldn't see what lay there. Giving up a damaging attack to do a Shove that may or may not work didn't seem like the most intelligent use of the Fang and his sons actions considering they wanted to kill the party members. I feel we did an excellent job of stopping them from massing into a jostling mob that would have pushed us out of the way. Flaming Sphere is extremely effective at shutting down a hallway and forcing the creatures to choose to take damage or stay back. That's all we needed it to do to get the job done.In this particular instance, the low level wizard was highly useful.</blockquote>

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