Given how little love the encounter builder has gotten over the last 3 years this seems unlikely but I wondering if there's a way to take a character built in the character creator and use it as a monster in the encounter builder. I have an player who left the game and his character has now become something of a nefarious villain that's plaguing the party and it's building up to a boss encounter and I thought it might be easier to bring the character in than try and build it over as a monster.
There's not a way currently, other than rebuilding as a monster. Part of that is because there are no official rules for assigning PCs/NPCs built as PCs a CR, so it would throw off the difficulty calculation. If the other characters know who the villain is, you could add the character to the campaign after setting the character to private. Then it would show up in the builder, but it would throw off the difficulty calculations, because the system has no way to determine which characters and PCs and which are NPCs, and no way to set an NPC or a monster as being on a particular "side" of the combat. The assumption is that characters are all on one side and monsters all on the other. But at least you would have everyone listed for combat. (I have to do that in the other direction, for example, with a wolf sidekick of one of my players.)
As an aside, there are two main reasons the encounter builder & combat tracker "haven't gotten a lot of (user visible) love" lately: 1) The immense about of new mechanics in Tasha's required "all hands on deck" to prep it and 2) one of the next major steps is pulling PC data into the tracker. They had a system designed, and maybe even built as an alpha or beta to do so, and then discovered in testing that using it would crash the entire database because of the very large number of data calls it requires. So they are having to build a "simplified character data" system in order to do so. None of that work is stuff we can see, but it doesn't mean progress isn't made.
Oh, and in the February 11 developer's update, they said that dice rolling on monster statblocks in the combat tracker are coming soon.
Given how little love the encounter builder has gotten over the last 3 years this seems unlikely but I wondering if there's a way to take a character built in the character creator and use it as a monster in the encounter builder. I have an player who left the game and his character has now become something of a nefarious villain that's plaguing the party and it's building up to a boss encounter and I thought it might be easier to bring the character in than try and build it over as a monster.
There's not a way currently, other than rebuilding as a monster. Part of that is because there are no official rules for assigning PCs/NPCs built as PCs a CR, so it would throw off the difficulty calculation. If the other characters know who the villain is, you could add the character to the campaign after setting the character to private. Then it would show up in the builder, but it would throw off the difficulty calculations, because the system has no way to determine which characters and PCs and which are NPCs, and no way to set an NPC or a monster as being on a particular "side" of the combat. The assumption is that characters are all on one side and monsters all on the other. But at least you would have everyone listed for combat. (I have to do that in the other direction, for example, with a wolf sidekick of one of my players.)
As an aside, there are two main reasons the encounter builder & combat tracker "haven't gotten a lot of (user visible) love" lately: 1) The immense about of new mechanics in Tasha's required "all hands on deck" to prep it and 2) one of the next major steps is pulling PC data into the tracker. They had a system designed, and maybe even built as an alpha or beta to do so, and then discovered in testing that using it would crash the entire database because of the very large number of data calls it requires. So they are having to build a "simplified character data" system in order to do so. None of that work is stuff we can see, but it doesn't mean progress isn't made.
Oh, and in the February 11 developer's update, they said that dice rolling on monster statblocks in the combat tracker are coming soon.
Trying to Decide if DDB is for you? A few helpful threads: A Buyer's Guide to DDB; What I/We Bought and Why; How some DMs use DDB; A Newer Thread on Using DDB to Play
Helpful threads on other topics: Homebrew FAQ by IamSposta; Accessing Content by ConalTheGreat;
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Reason 3) Neither the Dice Roller nor Combat Tracker were even a thing 3 years ago, they’re both fairly new.
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DDB Buyers' Guide
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