Dnd 5e Dmg Calculating Encounter Difficulty

Let's face it, there's nothing sexy about math in D&D -- unless it's adding up 10d6 sneak attack damage from a critical hit. However, calculating the difficulty of an encounter for your players is a skill set that all DMs need. A slew of easy encounters or incredibly hard ones will get super old super fast for your players.

The app will calculate the XP award given as well as the difficulty of the planned encounter taking into account party size and encounter size as well. Below the whole thing is a progress bar that illustrates the relative difficulty between trivial and deadly encounter thresholds for the party.

Now, the Dungeon Master Guide and Xanathar's Guide to Everything do contain tables and formulas for setting the difficulty and challenge rating when you're building your encounters in Dungeons & Dragons 5e. However, punching the numbers manually is no fun.

So about let's use some digital online tools for calculating D&D 5e encounter difficulty to do the work for us, eh?

Dnd 5e difficulty chart
  • How do you create encounters in Dungeons and Dragons 5e? This video will not show you how to balance your encounters in dnd 5e, but rather how to create unba.
  • The 5e DMG has several tables for calculating the difficulty of combat encounters. Have people found these to be accurate? My 3.5 DM sometimes talks about how easily we've overcome an encounter that technically qualifies as 'hard' or 'deadly.' I have a hard time believing that's just because we rolled well or are just really good at the game.
  • The encounter creation method from the DMG is based around having 4-8 encounters with 1-2 short rests, so they are on the easy side to start with. A single deadly encounter, especially against a single enemy, isn't likely to be difficult when the players are on full resources, but if they've already been through some medium/hard encounters, then it becomes a real threat.
  • How to use this calculator. First, fill in the number of characters in your party and their level. If characters in your party are at different levels, add multiple rows and include each group of characters with the same level in their own row. Next, press CALCULATE to see the encounter XP thresholds for the party.

Related posts:

Tested with FG version 3.3.5.
This is an update/streamline of hereander's original version that was updated by Fudly.Encounter
How it works:
Put the attachment in your fantasy ground's extensions folder. On my computer that is:
C:UsersOlogAppDataRoamingFantasy Groundsextensions

Dnd 5e Encounter Generator


Activate the extension for your campaignDnd 5e Dmg Calculating Encounter Difficulty
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Choose whether you want to get party levels from the combat tracker or the party sheet.
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To use this, as you're creating a new encounter, click the refresh button to update the XP total, and then press 'Calculate Encounter Difficulty' to output the difficulty of the encounter to chat.
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This version uses Fudly's formula for calculating the difficulty, which seems to agree with the 5E DMG. I removed the 'super deadly' threshold, and any changes to the random encounter template. Encounters generated using random encounter template will still have the difficulty calculator available. Attached Files

Dnd 5e Dmg Calculating Encounter Difficulty

  • 5E_Encounter_Calc_new.ext(3.5 KB, 1192 views)