A swarm of doubts!

[Seekergeek]

So: A swarm of insects or rats pile on to the PC; he wants them off.

While I haven't found anything in the rules or in sage advice on this, I'm wondering if there are penalties for a party member trying to attack the swarm (or indeed for the PC himself trying to attack the swarm). You know, since trying to stab a rat that is on your chest seems to come along with certain risks, much less shooting an arrow at a rat crawling on your buddy's face.

Am I missing something/overthinking the whole thing?

[LVOD]

I can't recall any rules for it, but I'd probably argue something like "if you swing at the rats and miss, roll an attack against the PC." Or you could play it simple and just inpose disadvantage on all their attack roles.

[poolio]

Encountered this situation before, My DM would rule it as just a regular attack for anyone being attacked by the swarm, and giving disadvantage to anyone trying to attack the swarm that's on their buddy , cause like you said, it's kinda hard to whack a rat without hitting what's underneath it :tongue:

[RickAllison]

I would say disadvantage if they didn't want to risk hitting their ally. If they didn't care (Raging barbarian, for example), then a miss that hits above 10 hits the person.

[Sir cryosin]

My dm throw a swam of insects at us. So I got the bright idea of jumping as high as I could and body slamming on them then rolling around to squash any of the ones that I missed. My roll for the body slam was a nat 1 I was stunned for the rest of my turn. The rest of the party was burning there swarm the ranger was having a hard time shooting them with her bow.
While me a monk at the time was rolling on the floor. The dragonborn EK got done burning hand his swarm. Decided to come over and give me a hand. By standing on me and used me like a log rolling around the ground.