Dungeon DiaryTools / Encounter Balancer
5e Encounter Balancer
Drop in your party and the monsters you're thinking about using. The result updates as you type — easy, medium, hard, or deadly — using the 2014 DMG XP budget and the standard monster multiplier.
Party
One row per PC, with their level.
Monsters
One row per monster type. Set Challenge Rating and count.
How the math works
Each PC contributes XP thresholds for four difficulty tiers. Sum those across the party and you get the party's daily and per-encounter budget. Each monster contributes XP based on its Challenge Rating. Total monster XP is multiplied by a number that grows with the count of monsters in the fight — two monsters are harder than one of double the CR, because action economy.
If the party is smaller than three PCs the multiplier bumps up one tier; if larger than five, it bumps down one tier. That's the same rule the DMG prints. We don't use the 2024 DMG's updated tables yet — they're newer and most groups still play by the 2014 numbers.
Where this falls short
The XP budget is a rough guide, not a guarantee. Action economy, terrain, monster traits, and your party's composition all matter more than the raw number. A pack of CR 1 monsters with advantage on attacks can melt a CR 5 party faster than the multiplier suggests. Treat this as a sanity-check, not gospel.
Use it inside the app
If you're running a campaign in Dungeon Diary, the same math is built into the combat tracker and your encounter library — plus AI-assisted balancing that takes monster traits into account. Try the demo (no signup) to see how it plays.