Hi!
I don't know if you guys have the same problem. I'm very used to resort to tools like kobold.club to manage the encounters I prepare for my players. But lately I noticed that the majority of the encounters I set using the raw rules of encounter creation from WotC are becoming less and less challenging as my players level up. I attribute it to the special conditions of my campaign (characters owning powerful magic items, their gold account slightly above average...), or maybe the PCs are good at preparing for fights... or simply I'm not aggressive enough with my harder monsters for fear of TPK in the middle of an interesting plot. Really I don't know. But what I know is that usually a combat that passes the "Deadly" threshold is more of a "Hard" one. And combats that pass the "Hard" threshold become finally a "Medium" challenge. Better I don't mention "Medium" encounters (they are usually a waste of time).
So I created a tool that aids me a lot, and I want to share it with everyone. It's an Excel spreadsheet. It's very similar to many you surely have worked with, but with the addition of two extra inputs for you to be able to change the PC thresholds proportionally, and tweak the numeric superiority multipliers, respectively.
You can download it via this link: Encounter calculator
For example, if you enter a 2 in "XP Threshold tweak", all XP thresholds are multiplied by 2, so an encounter needs the double of adjusted XP to show as the same difficulty as before. But if you set it to 0.5, it will be double easier for the players to defeat their enemies instead of it appearing as a difficult encounter. On the other hand, if you set the "Multipliers tweak" to 0, it won't count any addittional XP for a higher number of monsters. Of course you can also use it with standard rules by setting both values to 1.
In my personal experience, I prefer to set "XP Threshold tweak" to 1.5, because my players are able to fight encounters as if they were a tier below without any problem, and "Multipliers tweak" to 0.7, because usually, I don't see so much difference in the final result between fighting with one, two, four or six monsters as raw rules state (yes there is a little but it is really emphasized in the core rules, for me).
Hope you enjoy it. Good gaming.
I don't know if you guys have the same problem. I'm very used to resort to tools like kobold.club to manage the encounters I prepare for my players. But lately I noticed that the majority of the encounters I set using the raw rules of encounter creation from WotC are becoming less and less challenging as my players level up. I attribute it to the special conditions of my campaign (characters owning powerful magic items, their gold account slightly above average...), or maybe the PCs are good at preparing for fights... or simply I'm not aggressive enough with my harder monsters for fear of TPK in the middle of an interesting plot. Really I don't know. But what I know is that usually a combat that passes the "Deadly" threshold is more of a "Hard" one. And combats that pass the "Hard" threshold become finally a "Medium" challenge. Better I don't mention "Medium" encounters (they are usually a waste of time).
So I created a tool that aids me a lot, and I want to share it with everyone. It's an Excel spreadsheet. It's very similar to many you surely have worked with, but with the addition of two extra inputs for you to be able to change the PC thresholds proportionally, and tweak the numeric superiority multipliers, respectively.
You can download it via this link: Encounter calculator
For example, if you enter a 2 in "XP Threshold tweak", all XP thresholds are multiplied by 2, so an encounter needs the double of adjusted XP to show as the same difficulty as before. But if you set it to 0.5, it will be double easier for the players to defeat their enemies instead of it appearing as a difficult encounter. On the other hand, if you set the "Multipliers tweak" to 0, it won't count any addittional XP for a higher number of monsters. Of course you can also use it with standard rules by setting both values to 1.
In my personal experience, I prefer to set "XP Threshold tweak" to 1.5, because my players are able to fight encounters as if they were a tier below without any problem, and "Multipliers tweak" to 0.7, because usually, I don't see so much difference in the final result between fighting with one, two, four or six monsters as raw rules state (yes there is a little but it is really emphasized in the core rules, for me).
Hope you enjoy it. Good gaming.
