Encounter tool
Encounter Builder
Size a fight in seconds. Give it your party and a target difficulty, and it returns a threat budget, a workable mix of foes, and a few twists that turn a stat swap into a scene.
This is a planning aid, not a rulebook. The threat number below comes from a simple point heuristic of our own, built so counts stay sensible at any level. Use it to get close fast, then trust your read of the table. If your system has its own encounter math, that math wins.
The multiplier table, the per-role caps, and the terrain, objective, and escape valve lists are all written for this site by the desk. The budget is not calibrated against any publisher's challenge rating or experience tables, and it will not match them. How we make this.
Build the fight
Set the three controls, then press Forge encounter. Press it again to reroll the mix and the twists until something clicks. Copy sends a clean text block to your clipboard for your prep notes.
Encounter blueprint
The threat points are an original abstract unit, not a published experience or challenge table. They keep the ratio of foes to party in a sane range so you can plan quickly. Always pressure test the result against your own game before you sit down to run it.
How to read the results
Threat budget
A single number that scales with party size, level, and difficulty. Higher difficulty means a bigger budget to spend on foes. Think of it as a spending limit for the fight, not a target you must hit exactly.
Suggested mix
A ready pattern such as one elite plus a screen of minions, or a solo boss with support. Reskin the roles to your setting. A big budget can also be split into waves rather than thrown at the party all at once.
Shape
The one-line idea behind the mix. It tells you who anchors the fight and who fills it out, which shapes how the round-by-round action economy will feel.
The three twists
Terrain changes the map, an objective changes the win condition, and an escalation changes the fight over time. Keep one or use all three. They are what people remember after the dice go back in the bag.
A worked example, beat by beat
The format clicks fastest once you have seen one full blueprint read out. Here is a standard roll for four PCs at level 5, exactly as the tool produces it, with a line on how each part shows up at the table.
Sample blueprint: 4 PCs, level 5, Standard, 44 threat points
How each line plays at the table
- Shape. One elite behind a wall of minions means the party cannot burn everything down on a single target. The lieutenant is the pressure point: drop it and the minions lose coordination, but ignoring it costs you rounds of chip damage. Fourteen bodies is a lot to move, so run them in squads that share an initiative or cut the count and give each one more staying power.
- Suggested mix. Reskin freely. The same numbers are a cult leader with chained thralls, a bandit captain with press-ganged levies, or a temple warden with ash-choked husks. The shape carries the fight; the flavor is yours.
- Terrain. Braziers splitting the floor into lit and dark halves give the back-rank casters a reason to reposition and turn light itself into a targeting choice every round. Drop a similar feature onto your own map.
- Objective. Holding a lever for two rounds changes the win condition. The brute squad stops being a damage sponge and becomes an obstacle to a goal, which is more interesting than another fight to the last body standing.
- Escalation. The horn on round two is your in-flight difficulty dial. If the party is cruising, the reinforcements arrive and the lever gets harder to hold. If they are struggling, the horn can be silenced early as the escape valve, with no fudged dice behind the screen.
Tune the result by hand
Three knobs are worth more than any extra arithmetic once you sit down to plan.
- Bodies before numbers. If the fight reads too easy, add a second threat that forces the party to split focus: a healer, a sniper on a ledge, a skirmisher heading for the back rank. If it reads too swingy, merge weak foes into one sturdier body so a single bad round does not wipe the table.
- Split a big budget into waves. A boss-difficulty pool plays better as two waves than thrown at the party all at once. The first wave tests their resources, the second tests what they have left, and the pause between them is a natural moment for a villain monologue or a parley offer.
- Let the room do half the work. One feature the party can exploit and one the enemy can exploit turns a flat brawl into a decision. A choke point, a ledge, a spreading fire, a rising tide: any of them moves the difficulty dial more than tweaking the hit point total does. The full method lives in use lairs and terrain to make fights unforgettable.
For the mental model behind the threat budget itself, read encounter balancing basics without the math headache, and for the longer argument that feel beats arithmetic, see balance a fight by feel, then check the math. Boss-difficulty rolls get a deeper treatment in running your first boss fight as a new GM.
Difficulty is a feeling as much as a formula. Action economy, terrain, and whether the party has an escape valve move a fight more than raw numbers do. Roll a budget here, then read the room and adjust in the moment.