Hello everyone! We wanted to go ahead and open up a forum where people can start talking about encounter building and give a place where people can discuss what they would want to see / need in an encounter builder.
When will we get our hands on an Encounter Builder? The Encounter Builder is in full active development right now. However while working on the Encounter Builder we are also changing up some of the infrastructure of monsters and DDB as a whole. This is a large (but needed) effort that will extend a bit of upfront time of the Encounter Builder at first, but allow faster and better development of features going forward. We hope to have our first users hitting the Development Alpha in the coming months, but don't have an exact date at this time. We will provide another update as we get closer.
What is a Development Alpha? In our case the Development Alpha of the Encounter Builder will be the earliest we have ever let users use a work in progress feature. This is a stage where we are normally only deploying to local environments for testing and prototyping internally. At this point the Encounter Builder is still missing many key features of an Encounter Builder as we keep adding more and more features weekly. There may be some weeks where the Encounter Builder will simply not be working as we re-work some things based on feedback.
Who will be a part of the Development Alpha? Currently Hero and Master Tier subscribers will have access to the Development Alpha when we start it. This assures we have some of our most involved and dedicated users using the Encounter Builder at a stage where feedback is vital. We also do not want people mistakenly stumbling into the Encounter Builder while it’s this early in development without knowing that it is nowhere near a completed feature set. When we enter the Encounter Builder Beta we will open this up to all registered users.
How can you help before the Development Alpha Starts? Right now feedback is the most valuable resource we can use.
Let us know what you are looking for when making or running an encounter.
Let us know how you currently build encounters for your home game.
Let us know how you use / modify official encounters for your home games.
Anything else you want to share with us about encounter building!
I would like to choose monsters based on environment or plane. When I build my encounters, I like to know what sort of monsters belong where the PCs will be, so the first thing I do is check their environment. Sometimes it's as easy as browsing D&D Beyond and filtering monsters by environment. However, there is a severe lack of planar locations that I feel would be very beneficial. If my PCs are romping through Hades or the Plane of Earth, I don't like having to browse the DMG or other sources to find all the potential monsters I could use.
It'd be nice to be able to have random encounters at the click of a button. If I don't have a specific monster in mind already and browsing the list of monsters within an environment isn't helping and I am wanting a quick mini-encounter to keep my PCs on their heels, sometimes I may turn to a table in the DMG or XGtE with preset encounters and either roll or pick one that makes sense in the current situation.
I would like to be able to quickly calculate the thresholds from the DMG or XGtE when determining difficulty. I don't necessarily live and die by the thresholds, but it's nice to get an idea of what the experts felt was a proper encounter level for the number and level of my PCs.
I would like to be able to calculate the total xp my PCs will receive (both adjusted and actual) and how much xp each PC should receive without having to calculate it myself. I like to let my PCs know how much xp they earn at the end of a session and most of the time we're all in a hurry to get back home, so it'd be nice to have that information ready instead of having to whip out a spreadsheet or calculator.
I would like the encounter builder to work seamlessly with whatever initiative or encounter management tool that is coming later. I currently use Improved-Initiative in combination with Kobold Fight Club's encounter builder and it has saved me plenty of time. I know this isn't on the agenda currently, but I'd love it if you guys were already prepping the encounter builder to import directly into some sort of initiative or encounter manager.
Let us know what you are looking for when making or running an encounter.
I want to be able to use the campaign screen to select active players for a session and to then open an encounter tab.
I want to then be able to (from within the tab) populate the encounter with monsters from the monster database and for the system to show the key stats for all monsters added to the encounter.
The system should use the player number and level along with the monsters that have been added to determine encounter difficulty to inform the DM of what to expect
There should be an initiative tracker ideally with an auto roll for monsters to populate said tracker... maybe with an option for all monsters attack at once or individually. I prefer individually but I know some people prefer a single initiative slot.
It would be nice to have a "Next" button so that turns can be tracked using the initiative tracker so nobody gets missed (we all know it happens sometimes).
I would also like to have the ability to control the HP of the monsters being fought so it can be tracked the same way players do in combat.
It would be useful to be able to click on monster attack options and to have a virtual dice roll eg.
You attack with "Greatsword"
click to hit "You rolled (d20)13 + (mod)5 = 18"
Select the player targeted. "Player has AC 15" ok, it hits,
click for damage "(d6)5 + (d6)2 + (mod)2 = 9"
The system updates player HP accordingly.
Ideally I would like the system to then calculate the XP gained for the encounter and allow me to allocate directly to players
Let us know how you currently build encounters for your home game.
I currently use an encounter builder spreadsheet I built (https://www.dmsguild.com/product/259508/Combat-Encounter-Calculator-and-Tracker). It's not exactly super intuitive doing it this way but at least I am able to track initiative orders, monster HP, combat difficulty, xp gain, key stats and skills from a single sheet that does the maths for me,
Let us know how you use / modify official encounters for your home games.
Generally I know that my players are creative with spells and attacks so I will ramp up the difficulty to compensate
Anything else you want to share with us about encounter building!
With the pre-built adventures, having a button to "trigger this encounter" would be incredibly convenient but as that would involve going through all the books to pre-build the encounters manually I don't see this being viable lol
Yeah, I know this is a lot of stuff I'm after but you did ask ;)
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Plays Leo weekly on Chaotic Fabulous. Watch us weekly on twitch chaoticfabulous.com
Making an encounter: Currently I will use the XGtE encounter-building guidelines because I find them more intuitive to use for encounters that can be adjusted on the fly depending on how many of my players actually show up to D&D night. So I want to be able to quickly adjust the number of monsters in an encounter. I do sometimes use Kobold Fight Club to plan encounters, usually as a sanity test when I'm throwing something together. I also want to be able to provide custom name overrides for monsters fairly easily. This way I can grab a goblin boss and change her name to Karmaraak so I don't forget who I'm talking about in the middle of the fight. Plus I can give her underlings labels like "Goblin 1" or "Blue-haired goblin", or whatever else I need to do.
Running an encounter: When I start an encounter, I want to be able to automatically roll initiative for all monsters and sort them by their rolls, then keep track of whose turn it is. This also means tracking player initiative, which should be as seamless as possible. If the characters are part of a campaign on D&D Beyond, then great, I can add them from that, but if they're not, I basically want to be able to do something like [Type name] -> [tab] -> [Type initiative] -> [enter] for each character. I should be able to run a seamless encounter regardless of whether some or all of my players use D&D Beyond.
Once the setup is done, I should be able to see:
Full stat block for the monster whose turn it is.
HP/max HP, temp HP, and AC for monsters when it is not their turn
The ability to pull up a stat-block for a monster whose turn it is not
Adding new monsters in the middle of the fight
Other things that would be nice:
A lair actions block at initiative count 20 for monsters with lair actions
An icon indicating that a creature has reactions or legendary actions so I don't forget
Live tracking of HP/AC of PCs who are using DDB.
Auto-roll hit points for monsters for variability.
Roll hit points for some but not all monsters in an encounter.
Change hit point maximum on the fly when I realize I've made it too easy or too hard.
Track conditions and concentration for PCs and monsters (tool-tipped so I don't forget how they work)
Add quick notes to monsters like "takes 2d6 acid damage at end of next turn"
Show HP as percentage as well, so it says something like "HP: 12/36 (33%)" (this is to help me decide whether a monster has taken enough damage to break its morale)
Death save trackers if I want to let a monster make death saves
Option to automatically roll the death saves digitally if I don't feel like doing it.
Divide monsters into squads and enable squad initiative
Group initiative mode
For the last two, I'd like to be able to check off which monsters have acted this round so I'm sure that each one gets their turn, since it's a little bit more fiddly with squad and group initiative.
EDIT:
I've remembered more things! I want to be able to save an encounter, either associated with a campaign or on its own, and use it later. I want to be able to archive an encounter once it's used, so it's not cluttering my list of saved encounters, but I can still un-archive it later if I want to re-use it.
I want to be able to share my created encounters with notes! It'd be great to be able to grab one of James Haeck's Encounters of the Week, copy it, and modify it.
Not asked, but features I would hope for in an integrated tool here on D&DB:
After building an encounter, having the ability to level it up or down with the click of a button would be great. Even if this is only limited to a certain threshold (+- 3 levels for example) so as to avoid having a level 2 monster being a challenge for level 10 characters, as PCs can often avoid something neat that I've built, having the ability to use the encounter later on without having to go and rebuild the whole thing would be great.
Being able to list/link the encounters in the current campaign manager, i.e. build then separately so that if I build something I could potentially move/use an unused encounter with the same group in a different campaign or reuse an encounter with a different group.
Ability to tweak monsters in the encounter builder and save them as custom would be wonderful so that the difficulty can be tweaked on the fly.
Ability to create a non-creature based encounter (social, trap...) with "victory conditions"
As for building my own encounters, as others have mentioned, filtering creatures by environment is usually a starting point for me. From there, the location/environment comes next, including environmental dangers. Then the creatures are tweaked, if required to make the encounter a bit more unique (instead of a room full of skeletons, a giant skeleton with a bone storm aura for a higher level party as an example). If I have one on hand/available, a map is linked the the encounter, if not a rough detail of room sizes, etc is worked out. I then work out a rough narrative for the encounter (are the creatures going to charge, start hidden, flee if below 20%, open to bribery or intimidation, etc). Then I go over the DCs, ACs and HPs of the participants, PC and NPC alike, to ensure things are good. My current party consists of 2 rogues, a bard and a barbarian so HPs are pretty slim, though their damage can be quite nice. As the campaign evolves, I go back and review encounters based on previous ones to ensure that I'm not lining them up for a TPK when it's just supposed to be a light encounter to use up some resources.
In books that have random encounter tables, whether an adventure or XGtE, the ability to click "generate encounter" on the table would be aces. And where there are fixed encounters, being able to quickly convert them to runnable encounters would be double aces.
I know it's probably not feasible (but maybe it is with all the content built in to the site) but my dream is to have the encounter builder be able to account for magic items the party might have. i.e. I'm building an encounter, I know the magic items my PCs have and I can input AC or other relevant features (assuming this is more dynamic than kobold fight club, which is a solid tool but I'm excited to see what y'all come up with) and it'll tell me what that encounter might be like (i.e. easy, hard, etc) based on that information. Because magic items are really gonna turn the tide, especially if they have some lucky good rolls.
I would like to not only filter creatures by their monster type but subtypes. Currently my players are dealing in small parts with the Blood War. I'm having both Devils and Demons spawn to the Material Plane to seek out new sources for their war. I tend to separate the two when they do encounter them so It would be nice to group demons together when building an encounter.
I'd like to be able to track my monsters' limited-use and spell-slot abilities in the encounter runner. To the point that I'd be willing to manually configure them.
I currently use HeroLab for Encounter building and combat tracking. This gives me all the features I'd like to see in DnDBeyond eventually, except VTT which HL doesn't have either.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Watch your back, conserve your ammo, and NEVER cut a deal with a dragon!
I have only recently even looked at 4th edition, and one of the things I did like about it was the layout of combat encounters. That being said, there are noncombat encounters to consider too, but I think they could fit within whatever framework we come up with. I envision a link under My Content where my Encounters are located. From there I can build an encounter by naming it. It would be nice to have a section to add monsters and NPCs by search.
It would also be excellent if while I am searching the Monsters listing and/or the Monster details page, I could click a button to Add to Encounter which then lets me choose or create an encounter to add it to. When adding monsters, it would be nice to be able to add a nickname to each one. Then I can set the leader's name, can number the minions, etc.
I would like to see a Notes section to remind me of special circumstances of which I should be aware while the encounter is playing out. I would like to see a Treasure or Loot or Equipment section for when the party searches through the aftermath. And it would be nice to have a place where I can drop an encounter map.
It would be great for the XP value of the encounter to be automatically figured, but with the potential for me to add XP for less concrete accomplishments. I'd like to be able to add characters from a campaign into the encounter as PCs so the builder will calculate the difficulty level of the encounter based on those characters, but I would also like it to be able to figure the difficulty based on abstract character levels I can enter.
It would be great if encounters could be shared like homebrew.
I would like several features. One of what I consider the most important is the ability to "balance" an encounter or, as you add monsters to a fight, automatically calculate the challenge rating of the entire encounter so that you can make sure the fight will feel intense to the players without the risk of killing them without realising it. I will expand this post once I find more time.
For building Encounters I simply use a spreadsheet that calculates the Difficulty level based upon standard DMG XP Thresholds. The spreadsheet returns the standard Easy, Med, Hard, Deadly, but more important to me is the % deadly. It's one thing to have a deadly battle where the XP = 100% of the Deadly XP Threshold, but 200% Deadly may sometimes be more appropriate (or important to know). The % XP Threshold is a key for me. In addition the XP earned per character is also calculated. I don't want my hands tied with choosing creatures, the filters in the DND Beyond monster tables are already really good for me.
The ability to create and save for staging purposes multiple encounters is important. I can prepare my Beholder Lair with his minions in advance and then as the party enters each section I can quickly pull up all the creatures that they're about to face.
Running encounters I rely heavily upon improved-initiative.com and it does everything I need (except give me the stats for all the creatures in DND Beyond.)
Most of the things I need are standard tracking of HP, conditions etc but a couple great things to add:
Ability to apply custom names to each creature on the fly. Goblin1, 2 and 3 works but I prefer to track with some more descriptive options associated with my miniatures.
Ability to track Concentration when a spell-caster casts a concentration spell. Also it's great to have an auto prompt when the Spell-caster then takes a hit that shows the DC needed to maintain concentration.
Ability to track creature spell slots used and legendary actions.
nice to have: ability to show the image of a creature / PC on a secondary monitor when its turn is up in combat (and below that name of the next PC who will be up.)
nice to have: ability to show the image of a creature / PC on a secondary monitor when it's turn is up in combat (and below that name of the next PC who will be up.)
God yes! A "player screen" that either they can see on phones/tablets or that I could open on a second display would be incredibly useful!
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Plays Leo weekly on Chaotic Fabulous. Watch us weekly on twitch chaoticfabulous.com
I feel that many of the posts prior to mine have gone way beyond "Builder" and into Encounter Execution. From what I've been able to glean, what is being designed is a builder (at first). With that in mind, here is what I would like to see:
The ability to pull player characters from a campaign into the builder as well as add friendly NPC's to the roster.
The ability to pull monsters (filtered as needed) into the encounter and have all their information available in that single encounter tab in my browser
Include a small section to write notes about individual monsters
Calculate the difficulty of the encounter using the documented methods (Easy/Medium/Hard/Deadly), but add an extra variable called "DM fudge factor". The DM can play with this number to account for player experience, magic items, terrain, etc...
(wishlist) Calculate the difficulty of the encounter based on action economy between the combatants, as well as raw damage output vs. raw HP. (I try to do this as a sanity check.)
Have the ability to populate the monsters with loot, or auto-generate loot based off CR.
Allow the DM to drag some or all of the loot into a table representing a perception/investigation DC's. ex:
Automatic: Weapons, armor and items
DC 5: 5 copper
DC 10: above + 10 sliver
DC 15: above + 10 gold
DC 20: above + 10 platinum
DC 25: above + rare magic item
DC 30: etc..
Generate awarded XP per player
Include a section to write notes for the entire encounter.
(wishlist) An encounter that consists of smaller encounters. So in a day of adventuring consisting of 2 short rests between long rests, I can build 3 encounters that are say, medium-medium-hard.
Right now, for most encounters in my home game and AL League play, I take screen shots of the various monster stat blocks that the published adventure requires, and then compile those by encounter in Word, and then print those out for quick reference.
What I would like to do is just be able to build these encounter groups in Beyond and have a running list of encounters that are sorted by names like "Mad Mage, Floor 1, Area 4" and so on, so that I can just click on a tab and have all of the monsters I loaded into that encounter populate on one screen for easy viewing.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"The mongoose blew out its candle and was asleep in bed before the room went dark." —Llanowar fable
Encounter Builder - Feedback & Development Alpha
Hello everyone! We wanted to go ahead and open up a forum where people can start talking about encounter building and give a place where people can discuss what they would want to see / need in an encounter builder.
When will we get our hands on an Encounter Builder?
The Encounter Builder is in full active development right now. However while working on the Encounter Builder we are also changing up some of the infrastructure of monsters and DDB as a whole. This is a large (but needed) effort that will extend a bit of upfront time of the Encounter Builder at first, but allow faster and better development of features going forward. We hope to have our first users hitting the Development Alpha in the coming months, but don't have an exact date at this time. We will provide another update as we get closer.
What is a Development Alpha?
In our case the Development Alpha of the Encounter Builder will be the earliest we have ever let users use a work in progress feature. This is a stage where we are normally only deploying to local environments for testing and prototyping internally.
At this point the Encounter Builder is still missing many key features of an Encounter Builder as we keep adding more and more features weekly. There may be some weeks where the Encounter Builder will simply not be working as we re-work some things based on feedback.
Who will be a part of the Development Alpha?
Currently Hero and Master Tier subscribers will have access to the Development Alpha when we start it. This assures we have some of our most involved and dedicated users using the Encounter Builder at a stage where feedback is vital. We also do not want people mistakenly stumbling into the Encounter Builder while it’s this early in development without knowing that it is nowhere near a completed feature set. When we enter the Encounter Builder Beta we will open this up to all registered users.
How can you help before the Development Alpha Starts?
Right now feedback is the most valuable resource we can use.
I do stuff, sometimes.
I would like to choose monsters based on environment or plane. When I build my encounters, I like to know what sort of monsters belong where the PCs will be, so the first thing I do is check their environment. Sometimes it's as easy as browsing D&D Beyond and filtering monsters by environment. However, there is a severe lack of planar locations that I feel would be very beneficial. If my PCs are romping through Hades or the Plane of Earth, I don't like having to browse the DMG or other sources to find all the potential monsters I could use.
It'd be nice to be able to have random encounters at the click of a button. If I don't have a specific monster in mind already and browsing the list of monsters within an environment isn't helping and I am wanting a quick mini-encounter to keep my PCs on their heels, sometimes I may turn to a table in the DMG or XGtE with preset encounters and either roll or pick one that makes sense in the current situation.
I would like to be able to quickly calculate the thresholds from the DMG or XGtE when determining difficulty. I don't necessarily live and die by the thresholds, but it's nice to get an idea of what the experts felt was a proper encounter level for the number and level of my PCs.
I would like to be able to calculate the total xp my PCs will receive (both adjusted and actual) and how much xp each PC should receive without having to calculate it myself. I like to let my PCs know how much xp they earn at the end of a session and most of the time we're all in a hurry to get back home, so it'd be nice to have that information ready instead of having to whip out a spreadsheet or calculator.
I would like the encounter builder to work seamlessly with whatever initiative or encounter management tool that is coming later. I currently use Improved-Initiative in combination with Kobold Fight Club's encounter builder and it has saved me plenty of time. I know this isn't on the agenda currently, but I'd love it if you guys were already prepping the encounter builder to import directly into some sort of initiative or encounter manager.
I would like to include a name and notes for the encounter as a whole and for each individual creature in the encounter.
Yeah, I know this is a lot of stuff I'm after but you did ask ;)
Plays Leo weekly on Chaotic Fabulous. Watch us weekly on twitch chaoticfabulous.com
Making an encounter: Currently I will use the XGtE encounter-building guidelines because I find them more intuitive to use for encounters that can be adjusted on the fly depending on how many of my players actually show up to D&D night. So I want to be able to quickly adjust the number of monsters in an encounter. I do sometimes use Kobold Fight Club to plan encounters, usually as a sanity test when I'm throwing something together. I also want to be able to provide custom name overrides for monsters fairly easily. This way I can grab a goblin boss and change her name to Karmaraak so I don't forget who I'm talking about in the middle of the fight. Plus I can give her underlings labels like "Goblin 1" or "Blue-haired goblin", or whatever else I need to do.
Running an encounter: When I start an encounter, I want to be able to automatically roll initiative for all monsters and sort them by their rolls, then keep track of whose turn it is. This also means tracking player initiative, which should be as seamless as possible. If the characters are part of a campaign on D&D Beyond, then great, I can add them from that, but if they're not, I basically want to be able to do something like [Type name] -> [tab] -> [Type initiative] -> [enter] for each character. I should be able to run a seamless encounter regardless of whether some or all of my players use D&D Beyond.
Once the setup is done, I should be able to see:
Other things that would be nice:
For the last two, I'd like to be able to check off which monsters have acted this round so I'm sure that each one gets their turn, since it's a little bit more fiddly with squad and group initiative.
EDIT:
I've remembered more things! I want to be able to save an encounter, either associated with a campaign or on its own, and use it later. I want to be able to archive an encounter once it's used, so it's not cluttering my list of saved encounters, but I can still un-archive it later if I want to re-use it.
I want to be able to share my created encounters with notes! It'd be great to be able to grab one of James Haeck's Encounters of the Week, copy it, and modify it.
Not asked, but features I would hope for in an integrated tool here on D&DB:
As for building my own encounters, as others have mentioned, filtering creatures by environment is usually a starting point for me. From there, the location/environment comes next, including environmental dangers. Then the creatures are tweaked, if required to make the encounter a bit more unique (instead of a room full of skeletons, a giant skeleton with a bone storm aura for a higher level party as an example). If I have one on hand/available, a map is linked the the encounter, if not a rough detail of room sizes, etc is worked out. I then work out a rough narrative for the encounter (are the creatures going to charge, start hidden, flee if below 20%, open to bribery or intimidation, etc). Then I go over the DCs, ACs and HPs of the participants, PC and NPC alike, to ensure things are good. My current party consists of 2 rogues, a bard and a barbarian so HPs are pretty slim, though their damage can be quite nice. As the campaign evolves, I go back and review encounters based on previous ones to ensure that I'm not lining them up for a TPK when it's just supposed to be a light encounter to use up some resources.
In books that have random encounter tables, whether an adventure or XGtE, the ability to click "generate encounter" on the table would be aces. And where there are fixed encounters, being able to quickly convert them to runnable encounters would be double aces.
I know it's probably not feasible (but maybe it is with all the content built in to the site) but my dream is to have the encounter builder be able to account for magic items the party might have. i.e. I'm building an encounter, I know the magic items my PCs have and I can input AC or other relevant features (assuming this is more dynamic than kobold fight club, which is a solid tool but I'm excited to see what y'all come up with) and it'll tell me what that encounter might be like (i.e. easy, hard, etc) based on that information. Because magic items are really gonna turn the tide, especially if they have some lucky good rolls.
My Homebrew Backgrounds | Feats | Magic Items | Monsters | Races | Subclasses
I would like to see somethink similar to dice rolling described by Welsh_Grifter.
On active monster its avaliable actions are shown. One click on an action will trigger rolling of all dice. e.g
For https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/giant-poisonous-snake
Click on Bite, then
Hit 5(13) + 6 = 11(19) Dmg 6(piercing), 10 poison(DC 10 Con save)
or
Hit 20(13) + 6 = "Critcal Hit"(19) Dmg 8(6)(piercing), 10 poison(DC 10 Con save)
Small values in hit section are in case of advantage or disadvantage. In damage section they are shown only on possible critical hit.
I would like to not only filter creatures by their monster type but subtypes. Currently my players are dealing in small parts with the Blood War. I'm having both Devils and Demons spawn to the Material Plane to seek out new sources for their war. I tend to separate the two when they do encounter them so It would be nice to group demons together when building an encounter.
I'd like to be able to track my monsters' limited-use and spell-slot abilities in the encounter runner. To the point that I'd be willing to manually configure them.
I currently use HeroLab for Encounter building and combat tracking. This gives me all the features I'd like to see in DnDBeyond eventually, except VTT which HL doesn't have either.
Watch your back, conserve your ammo,
and NEVER cut a deal with a dragon!
I have only recently even looked at 4th edition, and one of the things I did like about it was the layout of combat encounters. That being said, there are noncombat encounters to consider too, but I think they could fit within whatever framework we come up with. I envision a link under My Content where my Encounters are located. From there I can build an encounter by naming it. It would be nice to have a section to add monsters and NPCs by search.
It would also be excellent if while I am searching the Monsters listing and/or the Monster details page, I could click a button to Add to Encounter which then lets me choose or create an encounter to add it to. When adding monsters, it would be nice to be able to add a nickname to each one. Then I can set the leader's name, can number the minions, etc.
I would like to see a Notes section to remind me of special circumstances of which I should be aware while the encounter is playing out. I would like to see a Treasure or Loot or Equipment section for when the party searches through the aftermath. And it would be nice to have a place where I can drop an encounter map.
It would be great for the XP value of the encounter to be automatically figured, but with the potential for me to add XP for less concrete accomplishments. I'd like to be able to add characters from a campaign into the encounter as PCs so the builder will calculate the difficulty level of the encounter based on those characters, but I would also like it to be able to figure the difficulty based on abstract character levels I can enter.
It would be great if encounters could be shared like homebrew.
I would like several features. One of what I consider the most important is the ability to "balance" an encounter or, as you add monsters to a fight, automatically calculate the challenge rating of the entire encounter so that you can make sure the fight will feel intense to the players without the risk of killing them without realising it. I will expand this post once I find more time.
I posted about this same thing about 6 months ago, (https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/d-d-beyond-feedback/19300-session-builder) and I was just wondering if the encounter builder is going to have a similar feel or appearance to what I had questioned originally.
The question was (basically:) Will you be able to add different creature stats to one page location, to avoid having multiple pages open?
Ryan | Session Zero
Session Zero Clothing
For building Encounters I simply use a spreadsheet that calculates the Difficulty level based upon standard DMG XP Thresholds. The spreadsheet returns the standard Easy, Med, Hard, Deadly, but more important to me is the % deadly. It's one thing to have a deadly battle where the XP = 100% of the Deadly XP Threshold, but 200% Deadly may sometimes be more appropriate (or important to know). The % XP Threshold is a key for me. In addition the XP earned per character is also calculated. I don't want my hands tied with choosing creatures, the filters in the DND Beyond monster tables are already really good for me.
The ability to create and save for staging purposes multiple encounters is important. I can prepare my Beholder Lair with his minions in advance and then as the party enters each section I can quickly pull up all the creatures that they're about to face.
Running encounters I rely heavily upon improved-initiative.com and it does everything I need (except give me the stats for all the creatures in DND Beyond.)
Most of the things I need are standard tracking of HP, conditions etc but a couple great things to add:
God yes! A "player screen" that either they can see on phones/tablets or that I could open on a second display would be incredibly useful!
Plays Leo weekly on Chaotic Fabulous. Watch us weekly on twitch chaoticfabulous.com
I feel that many of the posts prior to mine have gone way beyond "Builder" and into Encounter Execution. From what I've been able to glean, what is being designed is a builder (at first). With that in mind, here is what I would like to see:
Right now, for most encounters in my home game and AL League play, I take screen shots of the various monster stat blocks that the published adventure requires, and then compile those by encounter in Word, and then print those out for quick reference.
What I would like to do is just be able to build these encounter groups in Beyond and have a running list of encounters that are sorted by names like "Mad Mage, Floor 1, Area 4" and so on, so that I can just click on a tab and have all of the monsters I loaded into that encounter populate on one screen for easy viewing.
I would like to have option to export my encounter to pdf and print it for offline play. With all monster stats included.