DND Beyond Encounter Builder – Early Access Review (With Pictures)

Wizards of the Coast, the makers of Dungeons and Dragons, has been expanding the functionality of its official toolkit, D&D Beyond. It is in the early stages of development of one of its latest and greatest features, the Encounter Builder. As a master tier subscriber to D&D beyond, we have been granted early access to the Alpha version of the tool to use, and give early feedback. This tool has the potential to be a real game changer for DMs and players alike. In this article, we’ll be giving you an honest review of the D&D Beyond Encounter Builder in its current Alpha “under construction” state.

What is the D&D Beyond Encounter Builder

The D&D Beyond Encounter builder is a tool designed to streamline and organize the encounter creation process for dungeon masters who are creating combat encounters for their players. While the D&D beyond toolset overall is on browsers, and smartphone apps, the encounter builder has a desktop browser-based UI at the moment, with the mobile-optimized view, and smartphone app view not yet available.

The encounter builder provides an interface to quickly search for baddies to add to your fights. This includes adding in your party’s levels and quantity of players, so that the tool can recommend how difficult a fight will be vs. the monsters that you’ve includes.

Why We’re Excited About the Encounter Builder

This encounter builder aims to solve one of the biggest challenges to running a game as a DM: Prepping for a game takes way too long, and takes way too much work. This obstacle is arguably the second highest reason for DM burnout (second only to the almighty IRL player drama) … it’s just too much damn work to plan engaging sessions for many people who already have busy lives.  This encounter builder may provide a way to really lessen the load and make planning an encounter much easier for the DM, so while the storyline, plot hooks, NPCs, location details, etc. may still need to be worked out, developing the mechanics of a fight can now be as simple as a 3-4 minute click through some intuitive UI.

Let’s Address The D&D Sourcebook Paywall

As with all things on D&D Beyond, this encounter builder is a really great tool for organizing and using content that you have paid for on the platform.  Personally, I’ve purchased the bundle with all of the sourcebooks, so finding any monster information was not hard.  If you have not bought sourcebooks you may find really cool monsters that you want to use in your encounters, but they may be behind a paywall.  What’s nice is that they have allowed most items to be purchased ala-carte (for example a few dollars for a race, or monster, or subclass) or with an entire sourcebook. As a reminder, sourcebooks that you buy the physical copies of DO NOT transfer to allowing access to their digital counterparts and vice versa. This encounter builder may be a great tool for you if you are considering making D&D beyond your place for sourcebook information, but if you have dumped a considerable amount of money into

For transparency, we have absolutely zero affiliation with D&D beyond and gain nothing personally from any subscription you make to their platform.  Our goal here is to inform and share our experience with it.

Where is the D&D Encounter Builder at in it’s Current Development

The encounter builder is in an Alpha stage of development.  This is usually the place where only internal employees would be allowed to test the functionality. In this case, however, Wizards of the Coast have decided to release the encounter builder to Hero and Master tier subscribers. Their thought here is that the heaviest users of the application will be able to get early access and provide feedback to the devs, shaping how the tool is developed.  Within Alpha, key featured of the app are not yet released so you’re really using the thing while it’s under construction.

Putting the Encounter Builder Through it’s Paces (With Pictures!)

I went through three encounter creations in the new tool; a big boss in its lair, a bar fight with an elephant… in the room, and a mountain pass highwayman heist on the party.  Here are some of the impressions of the process with images

The Manage Characters Functionality was incredibly intuitive. I found that it was very helpful that it balanced my cumulative Monster XP vs. the party’s allotted XP for the day to judge how difficult it was recommending that the encounter would be.  Note for anyone using this XP difficulty calculation system, you really need to know your party.  For example, the power gamers that I play with need constant “hard / deadly” challenges to make the fight non-trivial.  Start with where the guide says the difficulty is for a basic party and then adjust up or down based off of what you know about your individual group.

Finding a Monster to include in the encounter is the feature where this encounter builder is at its finest.  First I searched for “Elemental” to see if there was a big bad elemental I could include… I didn’t like what I saw so I simply hit the advanced filter and toggled “yes” to “Has Lair,”  Bam! A concise list of all monsters with built-in lair actions.  This was astronomically faster than thumbing through something like a Monsters Manual to find the same information.

The Drag and Drop, and Group Monsters functionality was very refreshing and intuitive.  Took zero brainpower to organize my enemies the way I wanted them.

Also the Encounter Summary with the changing bar for XP filled was very easy on the eyes.

The free text fields for the DM to fill out the information about the encounter is a great approach. Needs more features to feel fully baked.

Once Created, The Encounter Screen is very clean.  Select your monster of NPC on the left, get info on the right that can be drilled down into.

Honest Impressions of the Encounter Builder (8 Takeaways)

Honestly, this friggin tool could be a game changer for DM’s, and players may get some sick benefits to boot.  Here’s a list of reactions we have to the tool after using it:

Amazing Core Functionality

The core functionality of the tool – finding monsters for, and calculating the challenge for your party’s encounter is ridiculously intuitive.

The add monster functionality has all of the easy to use, and snappy features that you would expect from a polished, well-written application.  It has a search box to just type in anything to get a result… so you could type in “ooze,” or “dragon,” or “undead” and get a bunch of results back, ranked by challenge rating, etc.  There are also filters for looking for monsters of a certain kind of terrain such as desert or underdark or urban.

Drag and Drop for the win.

Once you’ve selected your monsters in your encounter, you can intuitively drag them around to have them appear in a different order. You can also drag them on top of each other to make groups.

Grouping Monsters – I Didn’t Realize I would like this

The ability to group monsters with a simple drag and drop, and then the option to label the group is a great feature that I didn’t even realize I’d want.  This provides an easy way to segregate monsters. Let’s say there’s a wave of adds that appears later in the fight, or the fight is happening on 2 fronts.  Drag em’ into a group and you’re good!

Good, Functional Free Text Sections

Free text for DM’s to add their own flavor text, encounter descriptions, and loot are a nice touch.  I appreciate that WOTC encourages DMs to really make the game experience their own and gives you some simple structure to be able to do that, and keep your notes about the encounter right there saved with the encounter.

Still falls short for tuning Encounters

Tuning encounters has always been one of the more brainpower consuming parts of creating an encounter.  We DMs will often want to make a fight tougher, or easier but still have the same flavor of an existing monster so we’ll improve or decrease it’s stats arbitrarily.  Once you’ve started monkeying with this it’s hard to objectively calculate how easy or difficult your encounter is and so you’re typically going for kind of some mix of loose math, knowing your party, and “gut feel.” 

It would be amazing if the tool helped us tune encounters.  I’d love to be able to click up / down a monster’s challenge level so that it scaled to my games needs better.  Room for improvement here.

Drill Down into Monster Details is great

The ability to see my monsters in a list, and then click into the details of them with ease is very, very useful.  When I print out my resources on monsters I often struggle between keeping the high-level stat blocks visible but also being able to drill into the details of a monster’s behaviors and abilities.

Core features are still (understandably) missing.

When I was building my encounters, I found myself “expecting more” when editing the summary fields of the encounter.  These are areas where you can type in free text to describe the setting, the encounter breakdown, and the phat lootz that would be found.  I wanted to use formatted text, like underlines and bolds, which was not available. I wanted to add images and hyperlinks… also not available, and I wanted to have a search box that I could type into for the system to pull back loot information.  For example, I wanted to type in “Ring of…” and have it bring back lots of magical rings I could throw into the treasure section.  I don’t show these features written into the “coming soon” section.  I wrote it into them as feedback in their survey.  Here is a link to the official thread detailing what features are in development and being released week over week.

Summary – D&D Beyond Encounter Builder

The D&D Beyond encounter builder is already my favorite encounter builder, even in its Alpha stages.  I love how simple,  intuitive, and fast it is to turn an idea into an encounter ready for the party, stats, mechanics and all.  If Wizards of the Coast come through with some of the really crucial, problem-solving functionality with what they develop into the tool as it releases, they could have something really magical here.  If the encounter builder can allow for easily tuning monsters up or down, randomly generating encounters based off of specifications (like party level, location, monsters to include), they could really take away a lot of prep time needed to run games without a tool like this. 

And if Wizards of the coast makes it easier and more accessible to run games, it gets more people past the “start DM’ing” threshold, which is great for the hobby overall.  Great work on this

Your thoughts on the D&D Encounter Builder

What do you think? What do you like about what you see so far and what key features should an encounter builder include making it the biggest winner from your perspective?  Do you think that it’s worthwhile buying into the D&D beyond ecosystem for sourcebooks considering the solid functionality that is being built on top of it? Leave your feedback in the comments below.