Natural Habitat
If you think we’re going to introduce swashbucklers and not do any chandelier swinging, you severely underestimate our tropesmanship. Death-defying acrobatics aside though, I think we can all stand to learn something from Swash and Buckle. And I’m not talking about their personal finance skills.
When you’re dropped into an imaginary environment and told to fight fantasy critters, you want every advantage you can get. You want the high ground. You want cover. You want energy barriers, deadly traps, and slippery banana peels standing between your precious hit points and certain doom. I’m talking about battlefield control, and it’s a skill that everyone can learn.
Take your typical BBEG. If you happen to be an evil skeleman, turning the environment to your advantage is your your whole MO. That’s why dungeons exist after all. Same deal with PCs and their strongholds. When you put the time and effort into building a base, you secretly hope that a rampaging army will try to assault the walls of Fort Kickass. How else are you going to test out those murder holes and trebuchets?
It’s fairly obvious stuff, right? Everyone wants favorable battlefield conditions. But when you’ve got to improvise and build your own battlefield on the spur of the moment, there’s this weird tendency to say “that’s the wizard’s job.” Sure they’re better at it, what with their hungry hungry Hadars and painbows and such. That’s no reason for the rest of us to ignore the environment though. I’m talking about turning tables over for makeshift barricades. I’m talking about spiking doors so that reinforcements can’t show up. Grapple builds can shove dudes off parapets; roguish-types can reset traps; archers can see to their own high ground. Even if you’re a bog standard big dumb fighter, you can plop your heavily-armored butt into a narrow opening and make yourself a wall. It may not be as obvious as “I cast wall of stone,” but these are all elements of battlefield control. And even if battlefield control isn’t your job, that’s no reason to ignore it.
So for today’s discussion, what do you say we share some of our finest battlefield control moments? When did you turn the mundane environment to your advantage? Did you set up a sniper’s nest? Maybe you went nuts bull rushing dudes into industrial equipment? Or perhaps you stuck to the classics and actually pulled off the chandelier swing. Whatever you genius play, let’s hear all about it down in the comments!
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In my pathfinder Spheres of Power game, I am a simple illusionist whose illusions can actually have their own minds (about Int 8-11). We knew the BBEG was coming and he would likely have a mix of all the previous minions we’d fought in the last 4 waves. We were tired and running low on spell points. So proposed we bunker down. I would use the last of my spell points to build a fortress we could defend and fall back into using a mix of illusions and shadow stuff so it’d be partly real.
The base was wooden walls 7 ft high with murder holes to either stab or shoot through. It had support pillars for a roof in case of more weather effects and those pillars also neatly blocked charges. All of this shielded a portal to an extra dimensional space we slept in, thus funneling all of them together.
The entire fortress then got cloaked in an illusion that was sentient; it would open up firing lines, adjust itself to look like we were at other locations, etc. Truly this was a great place for a last stand!
So we abandoned it immediately in favor of invisibly sneaking up on the BBEG while my sentient fortress just moved itself away from us, drawing the horde after it. We stuck the door to the sleeping place on a rock and then I made the rock invisible while another person cast levitation and then a weather effect to steer us over the BBEG while his zombie velociraptors tried to chew on my fortress.
We took the necromancer down in 1 turn after like 3 crits on his living form. His minions died with him. That fortress managed to maintain the illusion we were inside and fighting back for like 3 in game turns, severely weakening his defenses, so spell points well spent.
Also, for practical battlefield control I have a teleport thing. Anyone I place the buff on can teleport to any of my illusions if its within 50 ft away. This takes the form of an illusionary buff, so we’re all constantly jumping 50 ft to one another. Earlier in that same battle, I summoned the max number of illusions I can as sentient figures and told them to get about 45 ft apart and those set up a teleportation grid across the battlefield.
Good on your GM for letting all that work. Illusionists are masters at battlefield control…. Provided that GM allows any of their spells to actually work.
As a fan of illusions I particularly like efforts in PF2e to elucidate what allows attempts to disbelieve as well as limiting the power of the Detect Magic cantrip in relation to illusions. Makes them a little less GM dependent.
As a GM I’m quite permissive and encourage illusions etc. I often recommend making illusory barriers and the like look obviously magical and weird so it becomes harder to determine if they’re illusions. For example the bard created an illusory barrier of demonic maws, spines etc. when the orc leader kicked an underling at the “wall” they harmlessly passed though. The party on the other side killed the underling with fire and threw the corpse back out, so I declared that this had the effect of proving to the remaining orcs that the demon wall was definitely real and very dangerous.
D&D 5th is decent for these kinds of tricks, as any ‘advantage/disadvantage’ is easy to justify or explain and had significant tactical impact due to how simple the mechanic is. It allows for cinematic combat
Battlefield control in Pathfinder, on the other hand, is iffy at the best of times. It ranges from being ‘win the fight instantly (via wizards and spells)’ or ‘spend actions getting a insignificant bonus instead of doing damage and winning the fight (martials, maneuvers that aren’t trip)’ to ‘put yourself at a disadvantage outright for no benefit’ (maneuvers that you didn’t optimize, interacting with the surroundings).
As an example, there’s difficult terrain. When it comes to difficult terrain, our group… Ignores it entirely, both PC and DM. It’s something you have to mark out on a map specifically to remember, it’s annoying, and it becomes a non-issue once the party gains access to flight, which is usually fairly early. PCs can’t generate difficult terrain easily or in a way that’s useful, outside of a witch with a specific hex, meaning it’s exclusively a DM tool to make PCs or their own encounters more difficult via mobility. But any such encounters tend to be death traps in themselves.
A height advantage is a logical benefit when attacking from range or even melee, but it doesn’t exist in the mechanical rules, so it can be anything from +1 to +4 to not being a thing. Instead, you need to be flanking instead.
Trying to swing off that chandelier in Pathfinder? Your reward in the best case scenario is a prone enemy who took damage, along with you being prone and similarly damaged. Worst case, you spent 20 minutes on one turn trying to figure out what to do and promptly failed the first check, falling like a brick.
Fog spells are good in theory, blocking vision from the enemy… But then you remember your party also can’t see anything either and they berate you for making things harder. And the miss-chance being percentage based, luck determines if you end up actually profiting from it overall.
Unarmed? Luckily, you can grab an improvised weapon! You still suffer a high penalty to hit, your damage is still pitiful if not outright DR’d away, the weapon might break on a bad roll… Yeah, you might be better off just running or getting your proper weapon back.
The REAL battlefield control of Pathfinder is either spells that disable/immobilize the enemy, let you fly out of their reach/spells, get into flanking for the class features that demand it, or corner the caster so they can’t cast without AOO provoking. Everything else is usually not worth bothering with due to the crunch involved.
Hard disagree on this one.
If we’re just talking about a system’s crunch (e.g. combat maneuvers are bad for non-specialists), then I wouldn’t be too excited either. But I’ve got a Pathfinder paladin who built defensive walls for the town that have come up multiple times. I’ve got an alchemist who’s learned to grow plants-vs-zombies style plants. These are both defensive choices that involve planning rather than dungeon delving, but depending on campaign style they can be extremely important.
More generally, reach weapons affect charge lanes. Animal companions are living walls. And the “corner the caster” strats you mention tend to work a lot better when you’ve got mage-hunters like monks and swashbucklers in the party. It’s a lot easier to threaten that evil wizard when you can successfully swing on the chandelier and get to him.
As for my own play history, I was very proud of my melee occultist using legacy weapon + the anchoring enchant to stick a BBEG in place. I even used fly + enlarge + a reach weapon to make sure that I stayed outside of their grapple range. For me, this is more interesting than “I cast a wall spell,” but just as much a part of battlefield control.
I should also point out one specific issue:
You get +1 for being on higher ground: https://www.d20pfsrd.com/Gamemastering/Combat/#Combat_Modifiers
I find it strange that you don’t find difficult terrain or fog spells useful. I’m playing in a party with a druid, cleric, and summoner and we all use those to great effect nearly every encounter.
Namely, the druid has a Rime Spell enhanced Winter’s Grasp, which makes a 20ft. radius of difficult terrain and also entangles those inside without a save to halve their movement speed again.
The cleric has the earth variant domain channel which makes 10 ft. of difficult terrain centered around him, which is great when paired with his reach and tripping tactics, by forbidding the opponents from making five foot steps.
The summoner gets Black Tentacles early, which is 20 ft. of difficult terrain which he uses in conjunction with his summons to restrict the enemies movements very well.
As for fog spells, I think the negative perception towards it stems from a misunderstanding of the cover rules. To determine if you have line of sight against someone, you choose a corner of your square and draw a line. Similarly, when determining if someone has line of sight against you, you choose the best possible corner. Therefore, if you are on the very edge of an Obscuring Mist, you can choose the corner at the end of the mist and suffer no miss chance, while anyone making a ranged attack inside will suffer a 20% miss chance against you. Essentially, you are ducking out of cover when making an attack but ducking back in when being attacked. If you are further inside the mist, the enemy will have a 50% miss chance, be unable to target you with spells, and might not know your exact position, all at the cost of a 20% miss chance.
Of course, if the opponents are inside the mist or if your party refuses to take advantage of it, you can always just cast Ashen Path once and have everyone see through it.
Plenty of examples of battlefield control in my AP games, both good and bad.
Casting wall of fire to force a wave of enemies to crawl through a ‘hallway’ of hurt, or otherwise discourage advancing.
Using wall of fire to completely wreck an undead BBEG, by combining it with Pyre Salt and causing it to do FOUR times the normal damage and eliminating almost half of its hp with one spell.
Using a wall of force to stop enemies from flanking us during a perilous fight.
Trapping an incorporeal undead in another wall of force with a mage sword, winning the fight via it getting consistently smacked whilst the enemy was unable to do anything.
Abusing time stop, antimagic zone and polymorph any object to capture a high-level tiny caster in bag and cause its bodyguards to get caught in a cave collapse.
Encasing enemies that were dormant in mud within steel with polymorph any object.
Using telekinesis to win a fight where we needed to interact with an object to win.
Using summon monster and an archon’s natural ability to fly/teleport/carry objects to apply a rod of cancellation on a mcguffin, winning us the fight.
Casting ‘create pit’ to trap enemies in a hole. Which the party immediately complained about, being unable to attack said enemy properly anymore and making the party wait or jump into the whole (and injure themselves) to attack the enemy. I stopped using that spell afterwards.
Using dimension door to get a party member out of a dead-next-turn grapple by teleporting them out of the monster’s grip and into a better fighting position.
I wonder if dimension door has saved more grappled PCs than freedom of movement over the years?
Don’t forget stunning, paralysis, dazing, nausea, charms and other compulsions/conditions that force the grappler to drop what they’re carrying or be unable to maintain a grapple.
Liberating Command is statistically the winner though, being early level and easy to cast, and scaling into the endgame.
Silly Swashbucklers, they dont seem to have realized that it is the domain of the enemy to have conveniently-swingable expensive objects littered about their lair.
Anyway, we were playing a short mini-campaign to give somebody new a small taste of the DM chair, and we were hunting down an old beholder in his lair. I was a Gloomstalker Ranger, and a dwarf, which meant i was basically as equipped to walk into this guy’s home and tell him that i lived there now as any of us could be, and i had a wizard giving me special arrowheads with glyphs of warding storing various spells to boot (this was before the spell got clarified so that objects had to remain within 10′ of the casting area in 5e).
So we go into the room that mr Beholder sleeps in and keeps all his stuff, and as soon as combat breaks out, the first thing i do is find myself some nice cover, and shoot an arrow loaded with “Conjure Elemental” at the ceiling above him. Gravity happens, as expected, and neither the elemental nor the beholder were terribly happy with that, so naturally i do it again.
At that point, the battle devolved into a game of “protect the ranger while he annoys the living crap out of the eyeball monster” which was by far the most dicey combat i have ever had, because beholders have a LOT of save or suck abilities that i wasnt especially well equipped to counter on my own. The fight ended when i shot him dead on with an arrowhead specially built to shatter into fragments which will have Animate Objects cast on them… while they were inside the beholder. Insert “Not the bees!” joke.
The important lessons learned by the DM that session were “dont let players use glyph of warding to get around spell limitations” and “dont let Kelthar have any more toys to play with than you can get away with..”
You’ve gotta decorate the pirate ship somehow!
I always appreciate have a crafter wizard in the group. The glyph of warding business does indeed sound OP, but in general I’m a fan passing out “more options” type items to the group. Were you guys using the custom crafting rules?
Yes we were, but in this case its just a function of the spell. In 5e, Glyph of Warding can either be used to trigger an Explosive Runes effect or to store another spell that you have prepared (which expends the spell at the time, but lasts forever until the glyph is triggered).
This bug was well known enough that it got errata-ed out of the game, specifically to avoid doing things like loading up a sword with 10 glyphs of disintegrate to trigger on hitting something.
Heh. Something similar in my Pathfinder experience. Look at this silliness:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/n/node-of-blasting
So… You’re saying I can give an enchanted copper piece to my mindless skeleton minions and have them run at the enemy? Wait… I can give them multiple nodes of blasting? Wait… VIRTUALLY UNLIMITED NODES OF BLASTING!?!?!?
My GM had to hit that breaks on that business, lol.
How do you put a chandelier on a boat? The cabins are too small for any decent swinging.
You know all the ropes and rigging on a boat? No imagine if they were FABULOUS!
Allow me to regale you of the tale of Irene Ostara, My 2nd level druid.
To set the stage, we were fighting a villainous inventor type-of-character, Every couple of turns, a machine in another room (connected to the entrance room by two seperate 5-foot-wide tunnels) would activate and cause more robots to spawn from holes in the first room.
Irene, simple soul that she was, walked into tunnel #1, and cast “mold earth” at the exposed dirt behind her. creating a thick wall of dirt that blocked the evil artificer from following, she then walked about a third of the distance towards the steam-machine.
Discount Dr. Robotnik then spent his turn trying to walk to the second tunnel, only to run out of movement at its entrance.
The look on his face when he realised “mold earth” had 30 ft of range, and as such covered the entrance to the SECOND tunnel was hilarious.
2 thunderwaves later his evil contraption was no more.
My next Mutants & Masterminds character is a super-intelligent rat with psychic powers. These powers manifest as transparent walls. His main strategy is to trap enemies inside giant mazes, then crush them between corridors. Dude’s name is Rat Race.
Can’t wait for this campaign to start. 😀
We got told we’re going to be holding off a clockwork army from destroying a flying citadel – this was a whole community event, so my party got assigned to the east caverns. We spent about an hour in-game setting upbarricades, explosive traps to cover fighting retreats, and killzones. We were making good progress, they were nearly out of reinforcements by the time we were back on the walls, with no hitpoints lost that weren’t Healed – and thats when we realised that half the entire army had been sneaking across the ceiling over us.
In the end, we were forced to collapse the entire cavern ontop of ourselves, and my character fled beforehand because they still had other things they needed to get done, which they totally wouldn’t still feel guilty for if the campaign hadn’t crashed for me after moving to a party of murderhobos lol
Love these tower defense moments. They can be daunting to run too often, but every once in a while it’s fun to let your inner Kevin McCallister out to play.
Also, prop to the GM for 1) making the traps useful while 2) still making the enemy threatening. It’s fun when the traps work, but if they work too well you run into anticlimax. Killing half the army before threatening you with sneaks seems like a nice way to split the difference.
Myself (a monk) and our barbarian were doing exactly what our roles required against our parties first ever dragon encounter (white in a flying castle made of ice), aka standing right next to that mutha fatha, flanking it so both of us gained advantage on our hits. And when it tried to use its big bad legendary action to try and fly away from us… both of us had taken Sentinel. It is a beautiful thing as a monk to have the DM describe an animanga situation as my monk hooks an ankle around the ankle of the dragon and pulls it back to the ground where it can’t move out of our range. Does it make physical sense? No. But was it cool AF? Yes it was.
Our group’s second big tactical moment was fighting two fire giants. We have a bard, a wizard, and a druid in our party, and all three took Polymorph when they hit the level to take it. Two Polymorphs later and we very carefully set ourselves up to readied actions and annihilated the giants one at a time, very methodically.
Those two instances are the ones we most fondly remember for obvious reasons, but against the rest of our group’s “plans”, most of our tactical thoughts go flying out a window without Feather Fall prepared as we just do our best to adapt to whatever situation the DM has tossed us into (or we have tossed ourselves into… on purpose or not). I think that is when D&D (or any game) is at its most fun, even if at the time it might seem frustrating. Obviously if the result is TPK, that can be less fun, but when the end result is everyone survives (or at least everyone can be revived), then the cheering over victory in the face of insurmountable odds deserves the biggest of ale flagons to celebrate!
Gotta love Sentinel. Nothing says battlefield control quite like “you don’t get to move.”
Shadow Dancer uses Shadow Conjuration to create Stinking Cloud to slow enemies down with. Plus a Handy Haversack has plenty space for Caltrops.
Hunter has a 15ft wide Wall of Attack of Opportunity in the shape of a Tiger which will grow to 30ft wide at Lvl 7.
That’s what I’m talking about! Thinking in those terms makes your options more interesting than “I’m the DPS.”
nothing spells „thou shall not pass“ as surprisingly as 6 AoO and 3 primary attacks with the Grab special ability.
plus Blind Fight in case of wizard.
Gandalf should have had a tiger.
with fire resistance
Gwent. Before the times when it was released you got the monsters weather deck. You chocked the opponent board on bad weather. How fun it was. Only now, with Master Mirror expansion, something like that has come back, mainly on a Wild Hunt deck. Good i like that guys 🙂
By the way, if you are gonna talk about swinging on chandeliers you should add the “Children, don’t try this at home ” warning. Swinging on chandeliers may seem fun, but it’s not. And getting the shard of glass out of your body is painful, boring and time consuming 🙁
I believe that experience is the best teacher. It’s also the fastest way to level-up.
Yep, i got several levels once that way. I used the time while my mother took out the glass from my arms and wrists to decide how to spend my skill points 😛
I’ve never gotten to actually do it and it remains the reason I am not allowed Immovable Rods.
It’s simple, really. Paint the rod black, and click it into space so it becomes immobile. Take one 5ft step back. Taunt someone who looks about 2-3 seconds from frothing at the mouth and blowing a charge of rage.
Wait for reality to ensue. Laugh hysterically.
I actually DID manage this with a strategically placed wall of force against a group of giants, however. And I reasoned that since they were looking down at us, it would be a really high spot check for them to see that wall of force just above their eye level.
Errol Flynnbeaux, is that a reference? And what’s the tiny print under it?
There isn’t enough resolution when I zoom in, but I believe it says “Piece upon request”.
It’s a portmanteau of flambeaux and Errol Flynn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iA1VxAsBQ8
The print is “price upon request.”
Credit today goes not to myself, but a fellow player.
Just today, we were set to enter a dungeon. It had been hours, but we’d found the secret ways underground thanks to Speak With Animals, a friendly mole, some knowledge dungeoneering and nature rolls, and hours of digging. We were in a room with several statues of beautiful swordswomen, and a hole in the floor that led to a shaft leading straight down into the dungeon.
As is to be expected, the statues attacked us.
These were no mere animated objects, or anything else so kind, however… These were caryatid columns! They’re a nasty magic-immune, weapon-breking type of monster who’d wreak havoc on our newly-bought magical weapons if we hit them in melee.
Our gunslinger and my fighter were backing up and shooting as hard as we could. The spiritualist’s phantom, as the only one who could safely engage the things in melee, was putting up a good fight. Our druid, however (who was of an archetype that trades wild shape for some wizard spells) was looking likely to be useless in this particular fight.
…Until she ran around behind them, cast Stone Shape to turn the floor under their back line into a step incline, and dumped half of them down the shaft into the dungeon!
We did still have to deal with them afterwards, sure. It turned out that the shaft had a Feather Fall effect on it, and so they took no damage from their descent, but it kept them from all coming at us at once. It was great!
Heh. When you don’t have “create pit” prepared, you just have to improvise!
So whenever I play a strength character, I have to throw in some grappling.
I’ve done the “Silent smackdown” a couple of times where I grapple a caster and then after I get my one-liner in a teammate casts Silence. “This is you belong: Beneath my heel.”
My ToA Dwarf Paladin developed a weird habit of shoving people into fires. First a pterafolk, then a yuan-ti. He also shoved an evil priestess into her well of psychic-pain-juice, and shoved one Golem that happened to be chained to another golem off a balcony for maximum slapstick.
This all built to the final battle where he suplex’d a lich into lava, (He was under a Fly spell so he caught himself before he went in too) had the Wizard Cone of Cold to flash-solidfy said lava, had their Dao ally use Stone shape to extract said entombed Lich, and Kobiyashi-Maru’d an adventure that seemed pretty convinced that Acererak would escape. Entombed in stone he couldn’t speak or move, so no casting. As a Lich he couldn’t starve, suffocate, thirst, or tire. Since he couldn’t sleep he couldn’t even dream. All he could do was dwell on the last words of that smug dwarf until his phylactery ran out of fuel and he withered into nothingness: “‘Ow doez it feel Asscrack; tah kno’ dat yeh brought ‘very paht ‘f dis upahn yehself? ‘Ow doez it feel ta be stoopid?!” (To accurately replicate a ~~cartoonish New York~~ Dwarven accent, start with a Bugs Bunny, then pitch it down a couple of octaves, and remove his unique mannerisms doc.)
My current Warlord (It’s more deserving of being a class than 2 PHB classes and the Artificer damn it!) has had two fun shove-incidents so far. The first one involved standing at the top of some stairs the bandits were charging up, shoving the lead one down the stairs, and watching a giant slapstick pileup. It was even funnier the second time in the same fight.. Shoving a human opponent who was relying upon a torch over while they were wading through poo-water both blinded, and humilated him.
Rearding silence, I’ve always been a flan of the “silence as opening volley” gimmick. If you’ve got the drop on your enemy, throw silence on an arrow, then get your ranger bro to pin it to an enemy caster.
5E Silence is cast on an location rather than on an object, so no impaling it into your enemy, but you can wrassle them to stay in it.
The first “session” I suppose you could call it of my most recent campaign just finished and during our daring escape from the slaver ship’s brig, we threw out darkness, gust of wind, thunderwave, and the monk grappled the BBEG so the fighter could go to town on him while the artificer and warlock were knocking people of the side of the ship with their default blasty attacks. We really took advantage of the chaos of a three sided fight. And the fact that we were on a ship.
I even charged through the darkness at one point to shout down a lunatic trying to light everything on fire in their panic because I figured the enemies wouldn’t know to take opportunity attacks on me.
We’ve used a lot of chokepoints and some darkness and entangles in the Baldur’s Gate the videogae the tabletop RPG I’m playing in too. I Shadow of the Colossus style stab-climbed up a colossal demon gnoll and swung around on it’s giant flail so I could stab it in the glowing weak points too! (It’s eyes were firey. I think that’s about as close as you can get to that particular video game trope. =P )
Grappling is no joke in 5e. I’ve got a Dungeons & Doggies PC taking advantage of Grabbing Bite on page 11:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56728f72a128e6b1e548ec55/t/5ca1d631c83025bf8a26e1cd/1554110019688/D%26D-Rules-Companion+%281%29.pdf
It’s pretty bonkers how much you can control the tempo of a fight like that.
Yeah, they did a good job with grappling in 5e I think. It’s not a crazy rules labyrinth so everyone can get in on it and it’s not “omg no!!!” when monsters do grapple stuff. There’s just enough you can do with it to be a bit flexible, but not so much that nobody can hope to remember it.
That thing you linked is delightful. And reminds me very much of this other webcomic I greatly enjoy: https://dndoggos.com/
My go-to for chandelier swings (or tapestry swings, or balcony dives, or.. you get the point) is “ok make a charge attack with the high ground bonus and make an acrobatics check to stick the landing.”
This may be about creating advantageous environments, but all I can think about is the thousands of gold my rogue spends on mechanically worthless but pretty things, especially clothing.
Well if grappling counts as battlefield control.
My (quite literal) murderhobo halfling ranger was of the UA revised variety. I built him with the ape companion in mind. Thanks to my great Stealth bonus and advantage on Initiative we could ambush just about anybody.
And then my pet giant long-nosed ape would wrestle the surprised quarry to the ground and pin them with Athletics +7, while I hacked them apart with my Humanslaying Cleaver.
It was quite cathartic. I was shocked that I had (unintentionally) built the most effective and consistent damage dealer of that group.
My absolute best moment was when the group I was part of had gone into a prison to interrogate someone who was supposed to know who was responsible for the various disappearances in town. In reality, the prison itself had been taken over by some sort of succubus who had mentally ensnared the majority of the building.
Suddenly all the doors swung open and all the prisoners were let loose to rampage, it was going to be a free for all, mass carna- I cast spiritual weapon, spirit guardians, and shut the door.
The rest of the party focused on blocking the door while the enemies got shredded by my spells, and even when they managed to force their way in, there was only room for 1 or 2 of them to come in at a time