Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Seems fine to me. If the creature was smart enough to realize there could be sightlines under the sleet storm then its bending down or going prone to check for such (and use them if found) makes perfect sense.So this happened in our 5e game over the weekend.
We had decided to go to a peculiar location and explore. There were some unique creatures we hadn't encountered before. The first few we fought were easy to kill but did fairly high damage - we quickly learned to AOE them. We next encountered a larger creature and some of the smaller ones we had fought before. The large one never ended up hitting us. One of the wizards blinded it and we were able to DPS it down in 2-3 rounds.
Then we shifted to a telegraphed more dangerous location. In exploring we drew the attention of an even larger creature = described as 40ft tall and taking about a 20ft square. We decided to wait on it to get close enough to engage, but it outranged us. It landed it's first attacks and they were strong. We could have tried to retreat at that point but decided to try and go for the kill. One of the wizards cast sleet storm 20 ft in the air to obscure it's vision while still giving our party the opportunity to get in range and attack it (dm ruled it possible and sleet storm is only 20ft tall). The other wizard rushed forward with a dash and misty step to try and hit it with a tasha's hideous laughter but still wasn't in range. The creatures next turn was spent standing up after being proned by sleet storm, backing out and starting to go around the outside of it. The rest of the party advanced again and the wizard going to use tasha's got just short of being in range to Tasha'a the creatures. This is when what happened was 'interesting'. The creature went prone to see what was under the sleet storm and shot a disintegration beam at the soon to be tasha's laughter wizard who failed the save and massive damage later and she was disintigrated. The rest of us retreated after that. *Note the party was only level 5, but fairly good magic item access.
*Also in case it is important the DM rolled a random encounter and essentially got 20,20 as the results.
I have no issues with what happened but I do think it makes a good case to talk about. There is a bit of a lingering question as to whether the creature was made to go prone because the DM knew the 1 PC wizard was in terrible position if he did that or if he would have had the creature do so even without that PC's position. But either way it was a justifiable move for an intelligent creature IMO.
Thoughts on this scenario?
Losing one character against a foe that tough is also kinda par for the course once the decision to attack it is taken.