[RPG] With Spirit Guardians up and someone casts Insect Plague on your group, do the locusts die before they bite you

dnd-5espells

If you have Spirit Guardians up protecting your party and your enemy casts Insect Plague to attack your group. Since it says that creatures are attacked when first entering the area, will all the Locusts die before they can bite you or your party? (this assumes the locusts only have a few hit points) Would this nullify the Insect Plague attack? Another concern is, if the ratio of locusts to spirits is high, say 50 locusts per 1 spirit (there is no count listed for either creature in spells description). Would the spirits be able to kill the locusts fast enough to stop them from attacking my party? (Perhaps the spirits us AOE damage?) Hopefully the insects get unsommoned when they die or it would be a slimy slippery mess on the floor afterward, which could be a movement hazard.

Best Answer

The insects from insect plague are a spell effect, and the spell clearly does not intend them to be treated as monsters (spells that do create items with stats clearly explain what they are and what the impact is of doing damage to them). Therefore, they are not stopped by damage to the swarm of any kind. In this regard they are similar to the Spirit Guardians and you could equally ask whether the insects kill the spirits - after all Insect Plague is a higher-level spell.

If it helps with scene description, you might consider that the spell continuously generates the swarm in its area for the duration, so that effects that could destroy small physical creatures are so fleeting as to not have any impact on the spell.

A way to use damage to stop Insect Plague is to break concentration of the caster.