Fixing 5e's Challenge Rating | Game Changer

Follow-up video & Frequently Asked Questions: https://youtu.be/LOcVlJfeq1w

As a long-term homebrewer and constant "simulator" myself, I must tip my hat to you for making such an accessible and efficient tool. I hope you have plenty of people in your life who are as proud of you as you should be of yourself

A DND “fix” video that isn’t clickbait?? ❤ Can’t even imagine the amount of work that went into this.

Bro, when he said it was only his sixth video it blew my mind. The quality of these videos are easily on par with channels doing similar content, like pointy hat. You are doing amazing work, and thank you for this! (Also only realized while writing this that Pointy Hat only has 33 videos... You guys are incredible!)

This is absolutely insane lmao, and I mean that as the highest form of praise. You actually (de)coded "vibe"-based encounter balancing and extrapolated it into a set of statistics.

This is a great tool! The original CR-System is so broken, that it only takes 4 normal frogs (which don't even have an attack) to count as a deadly encounter against one Level-1 character.

"Just getting started" already more comprehensive and logical than 80% of other DnD youtubers. Bravo my good Modron, instant like and subscribe

Dude, I am a relatively novice DM, and I'm currently preparing my own material... Calculating CR has been such a pain in the neck and so confusing that I basically came to conclusion that the only adequate way to assess the danger and balance everything is to run the encounter multiple times on my own. Your tool is going to save me and many others hours of preparation, for which I thank you with all sincerity that I have. Amazing work, keep it up, please!

Sir, please know you're an absolute madlad of great quality. Great idea and execution of this. Probably the best way to try to navigate the blurry state of encounter balancing in 5E. May this tool help those poor DMs running their own games outside of published adventures, as they seem strangely forgotten by WOTC.

This comment is brought to you by Standard Array Gang. Also thank you for creating Battle Sim because it's not only a fantastic tool but also it's proven that my back-of-a-napkin fudges for encounter difficulty were actually spot on all this time. My ego expresses its gratitude!

I make it very clear to my players whenever we sit down at the table that as a DM, I see stat sheets as a suggestion. I always tailor encounters to what I want the party to experience. If I put together a set piece where my players are up against a Roc while the sky echos with thunderous roar and the crashing tides threaten to pull them into the jagged depths, I'm not letting the fact that they are only level 5 or 6 stop that. As a bonus, this throws a wrench onto the mind of the metagamer and adds real value to the knowledge skills.

Very interesting. Cool tool too! I work using the same kind of prediction in a spreadsheet, not taking into account any deathspiral that may occur. 1. set the order in which the party will kill the monsters (or experiment this later) 2. use hp, ac, saves, and average player damage to calculate each monster's time-to-kill in rounds 3. calculate monster lifetime in rounds: the first monster to be killed will last only their own time-to-kill but last monsters they kill will have lived the longest: the sum of all time-to-kills. 4. use monster damage to calculate their total damage in the encounter Now you've got a few interesting stats: - expected number of rounds - expected suffered total damage (when players focus-fire and monsters don't at all) If the total damage done by the monsters is bigger than the party's total remaining hp, you probably made it as hard as you'll ever want it to be, since perfect PC target prioritization and bad target prioritization by the monsters will likely still lead to a TPK, especially since death spirals aren't take into account. In this kind of fight, the player will have to be lucky or make good tactical decisions to win. I try to minimize the number of rounds (lower HP/higher DMG), while finding a sweet spot in damage taken depending on the mood I'm looking for. Your tool can do the same thing I see, and is more fine-grained. It's not the best for homebrew (yet) I think. I think my own sheet helps me out better for now, because I use the sheet to design creatures while designing the encounter. But if I were to run some book-only things, I'll try it out.

Nicely done! I also thought about trying something like this but was overwhelmed by the amount of data input. You deserve serious kudos for actually doing it!

Dang, this this is incredible. In one of the official DungeonTalk podcast episodes, J-Craw talked about how the internal WOTC challenge rating spreadsheet is different than the published one. Theirs adjusts by decimal point, but the published CR information does it with whole numbers. It seems like you've been able to kind of crack that, and it's really impressive. I hate the current challenge rating system and a TON of what 5e does with its "do it however you want!" approach to DM advice. This app is incredibly useful.

This is a pretty impressive tool. There are some aditional features it would be nice to see added, such as damage reduction, maybe a category of passive abilities, or reactions. But they say that if a lawful alligned creature attempts to read javascript they must succeed a DC 25 wisdom saving throw or fall under the effects of the feeblemind spell, so I'm not volunteering to code any new features.

I'm pretty new in the DM world but I realized on day one that those standard CR are often not even to be taken as guidelines. Thank you for making this tool, after the last session I literally thought about testing all those encounters beforehand. Luckily I found your video just in time. I'm looking forward to more of your content.

This is staggeringly amazing. Incredibly impressed with the idea behind this. Haven't used the tool yet though, so i cant comment on the quality of the actual tool.

The crazy thing about a rakshasa is that it's CR could potentially be way under tuned in a party of spell casters. I'm glad to see a tool like this to help balance while taking party composition into account.

I've used this for a year now, and it is very accurate below level 12. After that level items, magic, 5e lack of tactics encounters are hard to plan. Awesome tool, spread the word. Thank you for giving this to the world.

This is an amazing project! Super excited to see how it progresses. A couple things I've noticed so far. 1. it seems to assume party members will never heal their downed allies. So if a party member goes down, they're assumed to stay down for the remainder of the conflict. not the most accurate in my experience. 2. it doesnt seem to handle druids getting knocked out of wild shape very well. Instead of reverting to their base HP, the druid just dies when their wildshape gets hit. Paired with the first point, a druid that in real life would've continued to be very relevant will be simulated as just not part of the fight for most of it.