The Daggerheart encounter builder

The encounter builder spends Battle Points across all 263 SRD adversaries and keeps the fight inside a budget as you go. Free, no account.

How the budget works

Your budget is (3 × the number of PCs in combat) + 2. A party of four starts with 14 points; a party of five, 17.

Each adversary costs by type — a Solo is 5, a Bruiser 4, a Leader 3, most others 2, and a whole group of Minions equal to your party size costs 1.

The adjustments it applies for you

Six adjustments change the budget, and they split into two kinds:

Three describe what you want — an easier or shorter fight (−1), a harder or longer one (+2), or adding +1d4 to all adversary damage (−2). You choose these.
Three are facts about the roster you’ve built — using two or more Solos (−2), including no Bruisers, Hordes, Leaders or Solos (+1), or including an adversary from a lower tier (+1).

The builder applies that second group automatically, so you never have to notice that adding a second Solo just changed your budget. Each one shows an AUTO tag and the points it moved.

Encounter Intelligence: how the fight will play

Battle Points answer “can I afford this?”. They say nothing about how it will feel — six adversaries and two adversaries can cost exactly the same and play nothing alike. The Encounter readout underneath the builder answers the second question.

Nothing in it is authored or guessed. It’s arithmetic over the SRD’s own data: the 419 adversary feature rows carry activations, Fear and Stress costs, conditions, damage and ranges, and the readout is what falls out of adding them up for the roster you’ve built.

The seven dimensions

Each reads low, moderate or high, and each shows the number behind it:

Dimension	What it measures	Why you’d care
Battlefield density	Adversaries against PCs	High means slow GM turns where each creature matters less
Spotlight pressure	GM spotlights per round, including Relentless	The single biggest driver of how dominant the fight feels
Single-hit damage	The biggest hit available, against the tier’s average	High means someone can cross a Severe threshold from one blow
Durability	Total HP and Stress across the roster	How long the fight physically lasts
Fear demand	Fear to fire every Fear-costing feature once	Whether you can actually afford what you’ve brought
Control pressure	Features that impose conditions	How much the party’s options get taken away
Reach	How many can act at Far or beyond	Whether the party can kite this, or has to close

Advisories

Below the dimensions, the readout raises specific, named problems it can see — and only ones it can point at. Among them:

Crowded — “12 adversaries against 4 PCs will make your turns slow… swapping a few Standards for a Bruiser or Leader buys the same Battle Points with fewer, more consequential threats.”
No Fear sink — you have nothing to spend Fear on, so the economy stalls.
Fear-hungry — the opposite: more Fear-costing features than you’ll bank.
Melee-bound — nothing reaches past Close, so the party can simply walk away.
No anchor — no Bruiser, Horde, Leader or Solo, so the fight has no centre.
Spike — one adversary can land enough in a single hit to cross a Severe threshold.
Fear contention — the environment’s features and the adversaries’ are competing for the same pool.

The character line

At the top, a few words naming what you’ve built: Crowded · Spiky · Melee-bound · Relentless. It’s a summary, not a verdict.

Where to start

Pick a scene. Choosing an environment seeds the fight with that place’s own suggested adversaries, already trimmed to your budget — and carries its Difficulty, impulses and features with it.
Or start from a shape. Six recipes — The Commander, The Monster, The Ambush, The Swarm, Hold the Line, The Court — fill themselves from the catalogue at your tier. Each one is a composition a GM already recognises.
Add adversaries from the list, or take a suggestion from Goes well with, which only ever offers things that fit what’s left of your budget and always says why — “Grouped with Bear in Abandoned Grove”.

Your fight as a hand of cards

The adversaries you add stack beside the list as a hand — the real card for each one. Click a card to bring it forward, and Enlarge opens it full size with its feature cards. The card icon on any row of the list does the same before you’ve added it.

Range rings

Underneath, What reaches how far draws your fight as concentric range bands with every attack and feature on the ring it reaches. Reach is a maximum, so the counts fall as you move outward — and the shape of that fall tells you whether the party can kite this fight or not.

Copy share link puts the whole encounter in a URL. Open it anywhere and it rebuilds exactly.
Run this carries it — cast, scene and party size — into the GM screen, so you can build on a laptop and open the link on the phone beside you.