Encounter difficulty calculator
Your data
Fractions are written the usual way: one eighth, one quarter and one half all work, and so does a plain zero. Lines that make no sense are simply skipped.
Results
What this encounter is for that party
—
| Experience the monsters are worth, added up | — |
| Multiplier for facing that many at once | — |
| What the encounter counts as after the multiplier | — |
| Where the party's four thresholds sit | — |
| Experience each character actually takes home | — |
The groups you typed
| How many | Challenge rating | Experience each | Experience for the group |
|---|
Adding the experience up on its own ranks encounters backwards. Four monsters of challenge rating one are worth eight hundred, less than the eleven hundred of a single monster of challenge rating four, and yet the four are the harder fight: the multiplier for facing four at once turns their eight hundred into sixteen hundred.
The multiplier moves with the size of the party as well, and it moves a lot. That same group of four monsters is a hard fight for two characters at level five, a walk in the park for six of them, and the monsters never changed.
One last thing that is easy to get wrong: the multiplier exists only to judge how dangerous the fight is. The experience the characters actually take home is the plain sum, divided among them, with no multiplier anywhere.
The thresholds, the experience per challenge rating and the multipliers come from the System Reference Document 5.1, published by Wizards of the Coast under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.
Why is adding up the experience not enough?
Because it ranks encounters backwards whenever the number of monsters changes. Four monsters of challenge rating one are worth eight hundred, and a single monster of challenge rating four is worth eleven hundred, yet the four are clearly the harder fight.
The rules handle that with a multiplier that grows with how many creatures the party faces at once. It turns the eight hundred into sixteen hundred, which finally puts the two encounters in the right order.
Why does the size of the party change the answer so much?
Because it moves both ends of the comparison. A party smaller than three moves up one step on the multiplier and a party of six or more moves down one, and at the same time the thresholds are per character, so they scale with the head count.
The same four monsters of challenge rating one against level five characters are a hard fight for two of them, an easy one for four, and a walk in the park for six. Nothing about the monsters changed.
Do the characters earn the adjusted experience?
No, and this is the detail most tables get wrong. The multiplier exists only to judge how dangerous the fight is going to be. The experience actually awarded is the plain sum of what the monsters are worth, divided among the characters.
So a fight can count as deadly for the purpose of planning it and still hand out a modest amount of experience afterwards. The two numbers answer different questions.
Where do these tables come from?
From the System Reference Document 5.1, published by Wizards of the Coast under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. The thresholds by level, the experience by challenge rating and the multipliers are reproduced from it.
This page only applies them: it does not adjust or reinterpret the numbers, and any judgement about a specific table of players stays with the person running the game.
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