I'm running rise of the runelords at the moment, and the PC's are about to assault the seven's sawmill. justice ironbriar has two nasty tricks up his sleeve once he summons his lemures to flank the PCs with his 2 cultists. confusion and Hold person. I am a new DM, and the players are all new too.
I guess my concern is that if i use hold person on one of them, they will be frustrated and not enjoy the game because they will basically just be sitting there watching as the other players go through the next several rounds of comnbat. confusion is less of a concern because its an AOE and the enemies would be just as troubled by it as the PC group would be if ironbrior threw it into the melee.
how have you guys handled this in the past? should I opt to trade out hold person for some sort of damage spell or is there a more interesting idea you guys can come up with.
Sometimes it sucks. I've run an encounter where one PC spent the entire game sitting on the balcony waiting for his newest bestest friend ever to come out to meet him from lunch (friend was a witch that just charmed person and told him to go wait for her on the balcony and then she proceeded to try and kill the other PCs). There was also the time the bard was dominated and told to go back to the inn to sleep.
Dominate gives them something else to do, assuming you can trust them to be fair with playing the character and not just soft ball it.
Hold person means the other party members will have a need to protect the player being held lest some enemy come by and cut their throat. It you focus on that, then the excitement will remain around that character.
Alternatively, the players leave their buddy behind and you pass him notes on things he sees, monsters and such, getting into position or moving up. This way, once he does break the hold (saving throw every round), he'll have something important to tell his party and will, at least retroactively, provided benefit. He may even choose to follow one of the bad guys and try to take them down himself.