Tonight my players will fight a Chuul: lets say that the Chuul grapples a party member and transfer him or her to its paralytic tentacles.
The player fails his or her save and is paralyzed.
If the rest if the party wants to attack the Chuul - melee or otherwise - is there a risk for them to hit their friend rather than the Chuul?
I can´t find anything about this in the Core Rule Book.
You can no longer accidentally hit an ally. Fire at will.
I would still consider that the Chuul is engaged in melee for purposes of shooting into melee (-4 penalty to ranged attack rolls).
So Call Me Tim, has it right, the question pretty much answered.
Though, while we are one the subject, I had a game where part of the party slept on the beach at night after a terrible shipwreck.
Chuuls came up on to the beach to eat at the bodies that had yet to be buried and the wizard and the halfling rogue were nearly pulled paralyzed beneath the waves. The battle was fierce and damage inflicted was great. Needles to say, the party moved camp further inland.
Since then, my players have had a great amount of fear for Chuuls. While I have not used them in a meaningful encounter since those years ago, they remain one of my most memorable encounters of my DMing carrier.
Does the paralytic secretion from paralytic tentacles count as a poison or as something else? I have a gnome alchemist with poison resistance as one of my players and they are really gonna want that secretion to be a poison.