D&D Encounter Builder

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Encounter Builder

After Wizards of the Coast ended their support for the official 4th Edition monster and encounter tools, I still wanted a program that could help me create and manage encounters for my campaigns. My goal was to make something that would let me rapidly create both simple & complex monsters, crunch most of the numbers for me, and "pretty print" the results in the style of the original tools. This is what I came up with to fulfill that need:

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Encounter Builder Screenshot: Main Window — Encounter Builder: Main Window

Encounter Builder Screenshot: Speeds, Senses, Etc. — Encounter Builder: Speeds, Senses, Etc.

Encounter Builder Screenshot: Traits and Actions — Encounter Builder: Traits and Actions

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The lower right area of the main window holds all the controls to create, edit, and view monster stats & abilities. I tried to group the various monster properties into sensible categories in order to strike a decent balance between data density and usability. The left and upper portions of the window form the encounter editor, which houses notes about encounter-wide conditions, target difficulty (via party size & total encounter XP), and allows management of which monsters are part of the encounter.

Once all the monster stats and encounter notes are in place, the program can export the whole encounter to an RTF file that can be opened in any modern word processor for further editing or compiling into a running campaign document. Monsters are exported as tables that are similar to those made by the old Wizards of the Coast tools:

Encounter Builder Output — Exported Monster Stat Block

The Encounter Builder is written in Python 3 using wxPython for the GUI. I modified PyRTF to make it compatible with Python 3 and am using that to export the encounter data. I'm really happy with the results, it's been an invaluable time saver when I'm creating combat encounters for my D&D campaign. I plan to clean up the documentation and then release it for anyone who could use a tool like this in their own campaigns.