Does the Warlock's Taunting Step Affect Allies?

The text says:

Taunting Step. Creatures within 5 feet of the space you left must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw against your spell save DC or have Disadvantage on attack rolls against creatures other than you until the start of your next turn.

Player characters are creatures (as I understand it?), so therefore an ally with 5' is at disadvantage, assuming he does not attack the mage. Am I missing something here?

How do people play it? Is it just generally understood it only applies to foes?

I would definitely not make it affect your allies, even though RAW says it would. That's just not fun.

Quote from DrPix >>

The text says:

Taunting Step. Creatures within 5 feet of the space you left must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw against your spell save DC or have Disadvantage on attack rolls against creatures other than you until the start of your next turn.

Player characters are creatures (as I under it?), so therefore an ally with 5' is at disadvantage, assuming he does not attack the mage. Am I missing something here?

How do people play it? Is it just generally understood it only applies to foes?

Under the rules as written, it does affect allies. The intent of this ability is that you'd use it when you're surrounded by enemies.

There are lots of area-of-effect abilities and spells that can affect your allies. It's just something you have to be careful of. One could certainly house-rule it such that it only affects enemies, but that sort of thing can be a dangerous "slippery slope" for a DM, because you do have to a draw a line somewhere; if you start taking away the potential for friendly fire from things, it could throw off the balance on a lot of stuff.

Yeah, I might give one or two freebies when they just leveled into the feature, but it’s easy enough to work around that I don’t think it needs to be houseruled as friendly fire-proof.