Encounter Summary
Tabular Summary

Island of the Blue Dragon

Summary Overview

You are a team of 7 seasoned adventurers with 6 level 10 party members and 1 level 9

  • You are on the way to visit your patron for your next assignment
  • Your boat crashes off the shore of a mysterious island
  • Soon after arriving you are spotted by 2 airborn riders (on on wyvern, one on wyrmling)
  • You dispatch them but someone gets away
  • You explore the island cautiously
  • You run into little kobolds and small out-patrols and determine that the island is home to a fearsome blue dragon who aspires to conquer the nearby land of your patron which had been your destination
  • You camp and are attacked in the night by an assasin before you can sleep
  • As you tromp through the woods at some point you are accosted by a bulette and a shambling mound
  • You approach the army encampment where you fight their generals
  • You find out the location of the bad dragon themselves and go to their cave
  • When you get to their cave you have to fight their fierce guardian constructs (read: security system) first
  • After that you fight the dragon ruler of the island and are victorious

Encounter Details

1. Geting to shore (Easy)

After their ship wrecks, they should have to encounter some hardships getting to shore. This is a warmup. Maybe they can have some emotional stakes by trying to save the crew.

Enemies

2. First Encounter with the dragon's army (Med-Easy)

I'm thinking while they're setting up on the island, they'll encounter a some enemies on flying mounts. They'll get attacked and probably one will get away to notify the main army since the party can't fly yet.

Enemies

3 Assassin with Enforcers (Med-Easy)

At some point, maybe midway into the night they'll get attacked by the assassin. I really don't want them to get a long rest. That'd be too easy.

Enemies

4 Approaching the city (random woods encounters) (Easy)

They should encounter these things as they're exploring, but also, maybe I can throw them at the party if they try to sleep again. NO LONG RESTS 'til dragon!

Short Rest

If I haven't let them short rest yet, I should probably let them do so before they fight this mini-boss coming up. They could have potentially gotten a short rest already if the assassin team interrupted their sleep and prevented them from getting a long rest.

5. Miniboss (HARD)

This is basically going to be some kind of elite team that they face. At this point they can find out about the big dragon's plan to capture the land where the party's patron lives. They can also get information about where the headquarters is and maybe a way to sneak in.

The Gladiator, and Veteran are going to be flavored as some kind of war-chiefs or generals. The Mage is going to be some kind of important consigliere or advisor for the big bad dragon ruler of the island. Berserkers and Knights are just additional guys to fight.

Enemies

Short Rest

I'm thinking that they probably won't have time to short rest after facing the guardians of the throne room unless they are somehow very sneaky. They should proabably take a short rest now.

6. Guardians of the throne room (Medium)

These are basically just to soften the party up a little more and spend a little more of their resources before the final fight.

Enemies

7. Big Boss (HARD)

I'm thinking that the knights are mounted on the wyrmlings. The priests are just a little extra spell casting support to make the battle interesting. The main bad guy taking up their attention will be the younb blue dragon (the big bad)

Enemies

Other Enemies Considered

I also considered adding these guys to the mix. In the end the blue dragon was a more challenging variant I went with it to keep the challenge up for this high-level party.

Encounter Builder for D&D 5e

This tool is intended to help dungeon masters streamline their encounter planning for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition. (See “what is dungeons and dragons”“ below if you don't know what this means)

With this tool, you can plan all of the encounters in your adventuring day and make sure that it's well balanced for your players. All of the recommended adjustments for party size and number of monsters are handled automatically, so you can spend less time on tedious calculations and more time storytelling.

Parts of the tool

The app is organized into 3 main tabs plus this informational tab. There is also a sidebar to input information which is viewable from all tabs.

Sidebar

The sidebar is the main area where you will interact with the tool. It takes in information about your players (party) and the enemies that they will fight (encounters). For all of these, you will enter lists of comma separated values. For the party the values are the player levels. For the encounters, the values are the XPs of the monsters they will fight. You don't need to fill in all 12 encounters, you can leave some blank.

Budget

This is the workhorse of the app where the information in the sidebar gets used. It is based on the encounter building rules as described in the Dungeon Master's Guide (DMG). These are clearly described in detail in this blog post. It takes information on the party and monsters in the encounters and does the tedious math of adjusting the output for you.

Monsters

The whole point of Dungeons and Dragons is fighting monsters. This tab gives you basic information on the monsters in the open-source portion of Dungeons and Dragons. It can be filtered and sorted as you desire and the information can be used to fill out your encounters. When you need more detailed information for a monster, like its combat stats, you can click the links in the table to see the monster's detailed information at roll20.net.

Story

At its most basic, Dungeons and Dragons is a means to telling a story. This tab ties the monsters that are pre-populated in the encounters into a narrative.

Info

This tab gives you information on the use of the app and the methodology behind it.

Encounter Planning

Rules of thumb

  • Players should have 6-8 medium to hard encounters per day.
    • This comes out to ~18 rounds of combat.
    • Each fight should take ~3 rounds of combat
  • They should have 2 short rests (roughly breaking the day up into equal parts) as well.
  • An adventuring day can be 2-3 sessions
  • It's very easy for players to fight one monster

How does the daily budget get calculated

Each character is expected to get a certain amount of XP in an adventuring day. You calculate each characters daily XP based on their level and you simply add them all together

How does the adjusted XP per encounter get calculated

First you get the sum of the XP for the monsters that you are fighting. Then you put them through a series of conversion factors that come from tables in the dungeon master's guide. You can see the detailed tables in this blog post

Basically having more party members makes the encounter easier overall. Having more monsters makes it harder. There are tables that give you multipliers to account for both factors. These become the adjusted XP for a given encounter.

How do we get the encounter difficulty levels

The encounter difficulty levels come from a table. The table lists the XP per character that makes an easy, medium, hard, and deadly fight. To get the overall XP theshold for an easy fight for the party, take the 'easy' threshold' for each character based on their level and sum it together.

What do the diffiulty level mean?

From the rules

Easy. An easy encounter doesn’t tax the characters’ resources or put them in serious peril. They might lose a few hit points, but victory is pretty much guaranteed.

Medium. A medium encounter usually has one or two scary moments for the players, but the characters should emerge victorious with no casualties. One or more of them might need to use healing resources.

Hard. A hard encounter could go badly for the adventurers. Weaker characters might get taken out of the fight, and there’s a slim chance that one or more characters might die.

Deadly. A deadly encounter could be lethal for one or more player characters. Survival often requires good tactics and quick thinking, and the party risks defeat.

What is Dungeons and Dragons

Dungeons and Dragons is fundamentally a collaborative storytelling exercise. The game is led by a dungeon master whose role is to provide a story prompt that players need react to. The players decide what their characters should do and say it to the DM. They then roll a 20-sided dice to see if they were successful or not. Higher numbers are better, the dungeon master decides what threshold they need to pass in order to be successful. The consequences of their actions lead to a new situation that they have to respond to and the cycle repeats.

The story stays grounded because everyone needs to follow certain rules. Characters have different abilities based on their backgrounds. Likewise monsters that they face must abide by these rules.

If you want a very basic introduction to Dungeons and Dragons, I recommend checking out the introductory site put together by the game's publisher. If you want more details, you can download the open-source basic rules for free.

Resources