D&D 5e · Free DM tool

Encounter Builder

Built on the 2024 rules, with the 2014 math a click away. Set your party, search the bestiary, and stack monsters into a fight. Difficulty and total XP update with every monster you add.

Dragon Fight Club

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The method

Build a balanced fight in three moves

Three columns, left to right: who is fighting, what they are fighting, and where that leaves the night.

Party

Set who’s fighting

Pick your rules set, then enter how many players and at what level. Add multiple groups for mixed-level tables. Your XP goals update instantly.

Roster

Search & add monsters

Filter the SRD bestiary by challenge rating, size, type, or alignment. Each creature is tinted by how dangerous it is to your party. Hit Add.

Read the bar

Tune the difficulty

The word is Trivial below the lowest budget line, then Low, Moderate or High for the highest line the fight has cleared, and Brutal half again past High. The bar underneath is labelled with the budget lines themselves, so Brutal gets no label: the 2024 book prints no such line and this page drew it. The 2014 rules print all four of theirs, so the bar carries four words and the verdict reads Trivial, Easy, Medium, Hard or Deadly. Push the fight until it reads the way you want the night to go.

Now somebody has to run it.

Prep ends here. The rest of it happens at the table, and that is where the app lives.

Open the app

Questions

About the builder

How do I build a balanced D&D encounter?

Set your party’s size and level, then add monsters until the total XP lands in your target band. The builder sums each character’s XP budget into goals and compares your monster XP against them live. So you always know where the fight sits before your players ever roll.

Where do the monster stats come from?

A hand-picked slice of the D&D 5e System Reference Document rather than all of it: the creatures a table meets most, each with its challenge rating, size, type, and alignment, and you can filter by any of those. Most come from SRD 5.2, the 2024 release, and the rest from SRD 5.1, kept for the creatures that release does not print under the same name. The full bestiary, with custom and homebrew creatures, lives inside the app.

What does adding an ally do to the difficulty?

It moves the fight in the party’s favor. Every roster row carries a second add button with a handshake on it, and that one puts the creature on the party’s side instead of against them. An ally adds nothing to the monster XP. It joins the party as one more member at a level read off its challenge rating, so your XP goals rise and the same monsters read easier. That step is this page’s own reckoning rather than a rule the book prints, so treat a big ally as a rough discount and not a measurement.

What do the colors on each monster mean?

The color on a creature’s CR grades what one of it would do to your current party: gray for trivial, green for low, amber for moderate, crimson for high and brutal. The same four colors grade the 2014 words. Gray is still anything under the Easy threshold, green is easy, amber is medium, and crimson covers hard and deadly. One glance tells you whether a lone specimen even threatens them.

Which edition’s math is this?

Whichever you pick. The rules-set toggle above the party switches the whole page between the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide budgets (Low, Moderate, and High, no group-size multiplier) and the 2014 thresholds (Easy, Medium, Hard, and Deadly, with that multiplier applied). It opens on 2024.

What does it cost?

Nothing. This page is the prep, and the app that runs the night after it plays a whole fight free as well.