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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6206031" data-attributes="member: 4937">The really salient point to how I would run this encounter is the issue of concealment.  I concur that visibility is below 40' since it is night and foggy.Since each Stirge can enter the fight from within its movement while concealed, I had have each Stirge entering the fight would roll separately to surprise the PC it was attacking (probably move silently vs. listen).  This would make them much more dangerous, since the main thing that makes stirges bearable is the fact they give an AoO when they try to attack PC's.  At least some PC's are going to have some stirges clinch them before the PC can respond to it, which massively increases the danger.Personally, I'd choose to not run this fight in a fashion optimal for the stirges, and instead optimize this fight for creating player panic rather than striving to kill and injure PCsTo do that I'd use slightly more stirges, but break them out into waves.  I'd also use stirges as color - some stirges from later waves would first appear zipping by in the fog outside of melee range.  The idea here is to give the players doubt as to how many stirges there are and how long the combat is going to last.  Depriving players of concrete information about what they are facing is the best way to create player panic.   Also by breaking the stirges up into several waves that appear on subsequent rounds, while you are giving the players more AoO and more time to respond to clinched stirges, you are also ensuring that a single area attack doesn't render the entire encounter anticlimactic.</blockquote>

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