Use a CR calculator to design your combat encounters and calculate experience. We recommend https://koboldplus.club/.

You can also reference this Combat Encounter CR Cheatsheet to plan out your monsters. Using your party’s Average Level, the sheet will tell you what kind of challenge each CR of monster should pose.

• For instance, for an average party level of 5, a Thug (CR 1/2) would be a weak but not insignificant combatant, an Archer (CR 3) would be a high priority target, and an Assassin (CR 8) would be a formidable fight all on its own.

When designing your encounters, here are a few other tips to keep in mind:

• Action economy matters. You should consider a standard of having about as many monsters as you do party members. If you add more monsters, this will increase the difficulty of the fight even if their relative XP value is the same; conversely, if you reduce the numbers, the resulting fight will become both easier and more prone to swingy Avrae results.
• A “significant” fight (i.e. one that isn’t just a throwaway road encounter) can take most of an OOC questing day to resolve. Use this estimate to plan out how how many fights you can expect to have, and how difficult each fight should be.
• Because text-play is slower, we tend to have fewer encounters per quest and per adventuring day. To compensate for this, you should make sure your fights are at least Hard difficulty, or you’ll find that they will pose little challenge to the party. If you are running only a single encounter, feel free to go up past the Deadly range - remember that the party will be able to blow their entire resource pool on a single fight.
• Be aware of the hard crowd-control capabilities of your party - control casters like wizards, monks, etc. You generally want to make sure your encounter cannot be shut down by a single bad string of saving throws (from an upcasted Hold Person, for example). Ways to combat this include spreading out your monsters on the map, or adding more smaller creatures.
• If you have one single caster monster, be aware if your party contains someone who knows Counterspell. It’s not unlikely that that character can reduce your single caster into an irrelevant body of hit points - so don’t plan your entire encounter strategy around that one caster.

Additionally, if you are running for Fledgling or higher players, it is strongly recommended that you adjust defensive values such as HP and AC. Due to the way our magic item system works, characters are able to punch well above their weight, and monsters die very fast.

Maps

Maps are not necessary when running combat encounters. However, if you do want to use one, we recommend trying out https://www.owlbear.rodeo/.

🚦Quest Approval 🕑 Scheduling Quests 📅 Quest Calendar 🗂️ Quest Channel Management

🪦 Hunts and Graveyards 🪙 Calculating Player Rewards