Dungeon Master Assistance

Tables for Determining Encounter Size

These tables more closely conform to the guidelines in the Dungeon Master’s Guide than the ones I published in 2020. Many thanks to Andrea Mosconi for pointing out my mistakes and taking the time to create these revised tables. [For my followers that are Italian speakers, you might find the site he used to help manage a useful resource www.dragonslair.it ]

There are separate tables for groups of 3, 4, 5, or 6 PCs. Just use the PDF file for the number of PCs in your party. Then go to the Easy, Medium, Hard, or Deadly encounter table. Find their average character level on the left side of the table and go across to the column that corresponds to the CR of the monster you want to use to see how many monsters you should use for the encounter (according to the DMG).

This works even if the encounter has different types of monsters as long as they each have the same CR. But what if you want the encounter to have monsters with different CRs?
Just see how many of each CR monster you need for an Easy, Medium and Hard encounter. Then you can put them together in a single encounter using these formulas:
1D=4E=2M=2E+1M=1E+1H, 1H=3E=1E+1M, 1M=2E
Where D is Deadly, H is Hard, M is Medium and E is Easy.

Or, if you aren’t a math geek:
For a Deadly encounter you can use four Easy, or two Medium, or two Easy and one Medium, or one Easy and one Hard encounter.
For a Hard encounter you can use three Easy, or one Easy and one Medium encounter.
For a Medium encounter you can use two Easy encounters.

Here are the files:
Encounter for 3 PCs
Encounter for 4 PCs
Encounter for 5 PCs
Encounter for 6 PCs