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.
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 how about let’s use some digital online tools for calculating D&D 5e encounter difficulty to do the work for us, eh?
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Art by Wizards of the Coast.