So I made an Encounter Builder and Monster Index

[smartmonkey]

Mostly for my own use, but I thought some of you might see some use from an excel sheet that autocalculates encounter budgets and XP values.

The .xcl file is available via DropBox.

I left some example variables in place (a few PC's, and an encounter with 2 CR 1/2 critters) - just clear those away with your own input and it should work just dandy.

Let me know what you think!

I've also included my personal index of monster stats from the basic file - just CR, type, and a page reference. Useful for quickly building encounters without flipping around the book much!

 

[Tony Semana]

This looks interesting! Looking forward to playing with it.

Thanks for sharing!

 

[smartmonkey]

This looks interesting! Looking forward to playing with it.

Thanks for sharing!

Thanks! I'm looking forward to hearing what you think.

Some screenshots of the sheet in action.

PC's levels are input here - the sheet reads each characters level and indexes the proper XP value they provide to encounter building, then sums those values to give you budget totals for easy, medium, hard, deadly, and too much (an overflow category 2 * deadly, mostly so you can see just -how- far past deadly things have gone).

The encounter builder. Input monsters and their CR (fractional and 0 CR's fully supported) and the number of monsters of each type, and the sheet will calculate which multiplier to use, and tell you how much of your budget you've expended. In this example, I've built a simple medium encounter for a group of level 1 characters.

I've included an index of all the monsters in the basic PDF, sorted by CR rating - useful for encounter building.

 

[Tony Semana]

Fiddled around with it for a very short time last night and it's pretty straight forward. Only thing that jumped out at me was that it doesn't yet handle accounting for larger or smaller parties:

If you have one or two adventurers, use the XP multiplier for the next-largest number (so, when fighting a single monster, use the . 1.5 XP multiplier of a pair of monsters instead), and use a . 5 multiplier for Hordes. If you have six to eight adventurers, use the XP multiplier for the next-smallest number of monsters (so, when fighting a gang of monsters, use the . 2 XP modifier of a group of monsters instead), and use a . .5 multiplier for a single monster opponent.

Otherwise great work, it'll find use on my laptop!

 

[smartmonkey]

Fiddled around with it for a very short time last night and it's pretty straight forward. Only thing that jumped out at me was that it doesn't yet handle accounting for larger or smaller parties:



Otherwise great work, it'll find use on my laptop!

It should work fine with smaller parties - even a single PC. The way encounter budgets are assembled doesn't really care about numbers of PC's except as a +n value. There are 5 example PC's input - my old 4e party! - but they're only there as an example. All the blue highlighted cells in that area are there to take PC's names and levels.

I built the sheet to accomodate up to 8 PC's. It would be pretty trivial to expand that to 10 or 20 or whatever, but I'm not sure many people will play with that many characters.

 

[SidSad]

It should work fine with smaller parties - even a single PC. The way encounter budgets are assembled doesn't really care about numbers of PC's except as a +n value

I don't get what you mean with "+n value", but it seems you're ignoring what Tony quoted from the BasicDMG:

If you have one or two adventurers, use the XP multiplier for the next-largest number (so, when fighting a single monster, use the . 1.5 XP multiplier of a pair of monsters instead), and use a . 5 multiplier for Hordes. If you have six to eight adventurers, use the XP multiplier for the next-smallest number of monsters (so, when fighting a gang of monsters, use the . 2 XP modifier of a group of monsters instead), and use a . .5 multiplier for a single monster opponent.

 

[smartmonkey]

I don't get what you mean with "+n value", but it seems you're ignoring what Tony quoted from the BasicDMG:

Wellp! I missed that bit. Give me some time to see if I can get the sheet to take those into account.

 

[smartmonkey]

The sheet should be updated to accommodate larger or smaller parties, with the multiplier for encounter building adjusting based on being small (1-2), average (3-5), or large (6+).

I also added monsters from the Hoard of the Dragon Queen adventure to the index, which fills it out nicely. 5e should be pretty playable with the current selection!

 

[SidSad]

Cool, man! Thanks for sharing.

 

[sinned]

Very cool and nice work! Though it makes me lazy since I don't have to count myself . Will definitely use this!