D&D 5E Online encounter difficulty calculator

[marktm]

Fellow gamers,

As a kind of hobby project (and since I'm too lazy to use the big experience tables in the DMG every time I want to build an encounter) I've created a little online tool to calculate the encounter difficulty given the player's levels and the monsters.

It's still an early version, but I've wanted to put it in the open here for some early feedback. At the moment it can only be used to calculate encounter difficulty, but the next step will probably be to add an initiative tracker, and perhaps there are other neat ideas to add. There are probably tons of other tools for this already, but as I said, it's a hobby project and perhaps people are interested. Feedback, comments, questions, contributions, neat ideas and ice-cream are welcome.

https://github.com/marktermaat/dnd-5e-dm-tools

 

[Unwise]

Thanks for that, it was good to see just how horrible I am to my players. According to that I am not sure I have run an encounter less than epic difficulty so far in 5th. Then again I don't tend to run long work days, most adventures only have 1 or 2 combats.

 

[miniaturehoarder]

XP multiplier can be misleading. Sure on an empty battlmat a bunch of extra foes makes things hairy quickly, but the availability of cover or structures to channel foes makes an enormous difference.

 

[Elric]

The original encounter design guidelines are flawed and overstate encounter difficulty when you have monsters at very different CRs. I haven't looked at the update to the DM Basic Guide from November in detail, but it looks much the same.

I recommend Gobelure's thread on how to modify the encounter design guidelines to fix this problem, so that you don't need an "encounter XP multiplier." http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?367697-Encounter-difficulty-how-to-fix-it The key is that in Gobelure's new tables PC and monster power scales more slowly with CR/levels, so that you don't need the "fudge factor" of a multiplier. An online encounter calculator that had that as a built-in option would be nice.

Here's how I described the issue in that thread:

It seems to me that PC and monster power doesn't scale as fast in general as the XP numbers alone would imply (e.g., a CR 5 Hill Giant worth 1,800 XP is not as deadly as 4 CR 2 Ogres worth 450 XP each). So large numbers of lower CR monsters would be too strong relative to what the XP total suggests.

The encounter XP multiplier (basic DM guide, p. 57) helps to address that design flaw. However, the XP multiplier is itself flawed (as an encounter with an Adult Red Dragon and 3 Kobolds demonstrates).

My take is that some monsters are particularly dangerous in groups (e.g., with their own kind, like Intellect Devourers, or with any melee combatant, like Hobgoblins). Those should have been handled with special guidelines in their stat blocks (CR varies based on group composition), and XP should have simply scaled more slowly as CR increased (with the corresponding decrease in the XP budget encounter guidelines), thus obviating the need for a multiplier.