Appendix J Reloaded: Balanced Encounters for 5e.
A downloadable supplement
The first edition of AD&D had a series of encounter tables filled with recommended encounters for each level of your dungeon. Somehow, modern versions of D&D have gotten away from that. This document hopes to fill part of that void! After using these tables to judge the power level of encounters for a few months, you'll start to develop a sixth sense of how powerful certain encounters can be to reasonably challenge your party.
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Just downloaded it and it looks mostly good, but I really don't like the fields that just have "1" as the number encountered. That doesn't follow your example in the video at all and it's unclear how to make that interesting and balanced. Populating a watch tower with 2d6+3 bandits is great in the example you gave since there are different areas you could use, but populating a dungeon with a single wight at level 2? I'd love to have examples on how to make that balanced. Are you saying that a single floor of the dungeon would just have that one wight on it?
This also makes the higher tables pretty much useless. Why is a solar the most commonly encountered thing at 10th level? At that point the appendix is basically saying "from this point on, you're on your own, so here are some joke entries that are all impossible to beat at 10th level."
When I have more time, I want to make a whole series of “this monster for this level for this party size” for some of the most quintessential monsters, like you described, but also a few quintessential mixed units for major antagonist encounters, like 2d6 goblins, 1d6 wolves, 1d4 bugbears, and 1 hobgoblin shaman for a 5th level party is a good boss fight. I’ll try to do a version two of this over my holiday vacation.
Looking forward to it! That’ll really round out the advice nicely.
Looks nice, thanks!