We've all been there at one point or another; You spend hours creating the perfect encounter that's going to be tough (but not too tough) and really make your players feel like they're fighting for their lives. But then either the dice gods are feeling malevolent or the CR for the fight doesn't match the reality of the situation and you end up with either an encounter that your players decimate, or one that makes a TPK inevitable after a single round of combat.
Enter the Encounter Simulator
We've been building an encounter simulator to help dungeon master's much like ourselves avoid the scenario described above. We aim to provide a tool that is easy to use and will provide you with useful information on how to better tune encounters.
Create a Character
Characters have the capacity to be very unique in this game, it makes the most sense for a simulator to account for some of these
Once you have a number of encounters created, the next step is to create an encounter. Right now the plan is to support all the monsters listed in the SRD but soon after the plan is to introduce a robust system for creating homebrew monsters so that users can both create new monsters and tweak existing ones to fine-tune encounters.
Finally, you'll choose a number of simulations to run on your newly created encounter. This will take a couple of minutes to complete but once it does you will be redirected to a page displaying some in depth statistics on the simulations run. As of now, these include:
Average damage per turn per character / monster
Average overall accuracy per character / monster
What percentage of the time the party actually wins the combat encounter.
A randomly selected combat is chosen and displayed turn by turn to give you an idea of what is going on in these simulations
We are still brainstorming more useful statistics to display on this page to maximize its usefullness so if you have any suggestions please comment them.
We've gotten the simulator to a point where martial classes are ready to be user tested and would like to get this into the hands of actual people to get feedback see where we can improve to make this as useful a product as possible. If you are interested, please fill out the form at the link below and we will shoot you an email with some temporary user credentials when we are ready for you.
Don't Kill Your Party
Enter the Encounter Simulator
Create a Character
Create an Encounter
Run Simulation
Alpha Signup