Encounter Builder

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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