Swarming Bats out for Blood
A skirmish followed the Grimlocks' appearance, with more enemies coming from other sides. Two Orcs rounded a corner to confront me, and a couple of Drow appeared from the opposite side, so we were attacked on three sides. One of the Drow had a hand-crossbow, from which it fired a bolt that flew unerringly in to a soft part of our Fighter. Drow are known to use poisons as well, and this bolt was smeared with something that caused our Fighter to collapse, unconscious, to the ground.
With our big hitter out of action, and the Ninja and myself trying to take care of the Grimlocks and Orcs, our Mage had the idea to use the Summon Swarm spell to summon a swarm of bats to distract the Drow before we could deal with them effectively. The swarm worked well, forcing one Drow, who seemed quite weak compared to what we were expecting, to flee. The other stepped forwards in to melee with our Ninja, trying to get him out of the way before the unconscious Fighter could be disposed of with a Coup de Grace. The swarm of bats pursued the nearest Drow, which was the one now in Melee, and again distracted him enough for us to kill him quite easily. With the Grimlocks now down, the fleeing Drow down from his bleeding wounds, one Orc down and the other held with a Hold Person from the Cleric, our party was no longer threatened.
Or so we thought.
The Mage stopped concentrating on the Summon Swarm spell, as it was no longer needed. Knowing that the swarm would linger for a little longer after he stopped concentrating on it he then tried to dismiss the swarm. Hmm, that didn't seem to work. 'We have a bit of a problem, chaps', said he, as he pointed out that the swarm of bats was going to be with us a little longer, and that they tended to move towards the nearest living creature, whereupon they would attack. The only living things left near to the swarm were us, which wasn't good. What followed was everyone moving away from the swarm as soon as they could. Well, everyone who could move. The poor Fighter, being unconscious, was blissfully unaware of the bats swarming around him, nibbling on him like some sort of flesh buffet.
Still, once the swarm had gone we were able to tend to the Fighter's poisoned wound and revive him. He didn't ask about where the smaller wounds came from and, for some reason, no one was going to volunteer the information.
28th October 2005 at 10.52 am
Two points:
First, when the swarm moved over the Fighter's body and the DM asked if the Wizard would like to roll some damage, he replied, 'Yes, I'd love to roll some damage!' Funnily enough, it was also the Mage's idea to let the bats nibble on the Fighter as a distraction for the rest of us to get away (although I'd like to point out that, in fighting the Orcs, I was all ready out of the way).
Second, this isn't the first time that the Fighter's player has effectively been out of a fight, or a whole session, from start to finish. The one difference is that the player wasn't available to play this week, so wasn't here to sit around while his character was unable to act. I think that's probably a good thing.
28th October 2005 at 12.04 pm
I'm sure things would have been no different had the player actually been there. He would still have rolled a '1' for inititative and a '2' for his poison save. In fact, by distracting the bats, his character was actually _more_ useful than normal :-)