PF2 Encounter Planner is an open-source tool aimed primarily at Pathfinder 2nd edition Dungeon
Masters.
Its main goal is to assist the DM in his encounter planning task by providing him the tools for building
encounters, be them composed of fights, hazards, or even simply dialog encounters that might reward the
players for their cunning and actions.
The tool also provides encounter history feature, which allows the DM to set up an event timeline, to
calculate the experience of his players.
So let's
launch to tool, shall we?
Upon opening this tool for the first time, you will have an example session opened for you. So first of
all what is a session ?
A session is meant to represent an adventure, or a collection of smaller, related adventures (this is up
to you to decide). Each session is independent from one another, so you can have different rules and
players, specific to each one. As such, the tool only keeps one of them open at a time.
The tool itself is divided in three main tabs :
-
The encounter planner tab, where you can create named encounters and defines its elements. You
will most likely use this tab before your game sessions, during the DM preparation phase.
-
The encounter history tab, where you will be able to set up a
timeline of the events that unfolded during your game(s). It will help you in counting the xp
rewards for your players.
-
The session settings tab, where you'll be able to configure
parameters for the session, like under-leveled player xp multipliers and the like. This is also
where you can declare the players involved in this session.
Every time you make a change to the session or its content, that change will be saved to your browser
local storage, allowing you to reload the tool later and still keep its content
Finally, you also have a top bar for special actions like opening another session or creating a new one.
As the name suggests, the encounter planner will be your go-to tab for planning out your encounters in a
given session.
Encounters
Encounters are meant to scale from a simple fight, conversation or the like, up to a
fully-fledged part of your adventure. Basically, it is a set of milestone elements for a
specific part of your adventure.
Those encounters have unique names and can be created, renamed, moved and deleted as you see
fit.
Selecting an encounter will toggle the collapse of its inner content. A quick demonstration :
Here will be displayed the content of Encounter #1
Here will be displayed the content of Encounter #2
Note that you can also drag and drop the encounters to arrange in the order you want. You
can try it on this example.
Encounter elements
Encounter elements are events included in your encounters that include XP rewards. They appear
in four different forms:
-
Fight elements: An element representing a specific fight during the
adventure. More info in the How to build a fight
section
-
Accomplishment elements: Represents a minor, moderate or major
accomplishment with XP values from the core rulebook (10, 30 or 80 xp).
-
Hazard elements: Use this when your players will be facing a set of
hazards. More info in the How to build hazards
section
-
Custom elements: Elements that don't belong in any other category, and
give out a flat XP reward
Those elements are named, and there are no name restriction (you can have multiple elements with
the same name for instance), can be modified by clicking on them, moved within the encounter
with some drag and dropping, or even deleted as you see fit.
The displayed name will appear with additional information of the element, like the XP
reward. This provides a preview of the element to provide user with a quicker access to
the element's key information
Those elements will be used later when setting up an event timeline, in the encounter history.
How to build a fight
A fight is an encounter element involving the players (and optionally some NPCs) fending off
creatures.
Given the nature of the element, it can only provide an expected XP reward, given that the
reward can be influenced by the number of players (and NPC allies) and the level of their group.
Note that, as of now, the tool only takes the group level, and not the individual levels,
into account for calculating the XP reward for a given creature, given that it is how the
core rulebooks expects DMs to handle XP rewards for combat.
However this tool provides options like group level function selection to adapt to your
preferences if it comes to this.
Note also that the tool also handles the XP of players individually, it just grants the same
base XP to all of the participants of the fight and as such needs to use a group level.
Once it is done, you need to set up the enemies involved in this fight. For each creature you
need to set:
-
Name (optional): The name of the creature
-
Level: The level of the creature
-
Amount: The amount of instances of this creature in the fight
-
Link (optional): The name of the creature
During this entire process, the tool will give you a preview of the XP rewards for each
individual creature, and the entire fight, based off the data you provided earlier. It will
give the fight a rating, going from 'Trivial' to 'Extreme', with an additional
'Impossible' rating
Remember that the 'Extreme' rating is meant to be the highest rating, according to the core
rulebook. If you still want to have an 'Impossible' rating, remember to allow impossible
encounters in the session settings
How to build hazards
Hazards are handled in a similar manner to fights, with two differences: the group count does
not influence the XP reward, and an individual can be a simple hazard, or a complex one.
This tab's goal is to allow you to calculate the XP repartition for the players at the end of your game
session. To do this you will need to make an event timeline, which is created by filling it with
instances of the encounter elements you've set up previously in the encounter planner tab.
The tab is divided in three parts:
-
The planned encounters to the left. Gives access to the list of encounter elements you want
to add to your timeline as events. They are sorted by encounter, and stowed into an accordion
display.
-
The timeline to the right. This is where you will set up and arrange your game session
timeline. The timeline top is the time origin.
-
The history controls, to the bottom, which serves both as a display and a configuration pane.
This is where you will find the player XP status, and event controls.
Editing the timeline events
To add an event to the timeline, you just need to drag an encounter element from the left pane,
and drop it in the timeline to the right.
The tool will automatically instantiate a new event corresponding to the encounter event. Note
that this means you can have as many events based off the same encounter element as you want.
You can move the events around the timeline using drag and drop once again.
You can also delete any event by dropping it into the appropriately-labeled delete zone
Leveling up
If your players level up during the game session, you will need to add the corresponding event
to the timeline.
To add a level up event, you just need to drag and drop the "LEVEL UP!" element from the top of
the left pane to the timeline.
The level up event will only trigger for the players that have enough XP to level up, and
will only level the players by one level.
Configuring an event
A specific event can be configured in the history controls.
To do so, first select that event by clicking it in the timeline.
You now have the possibility to select which players will participate to this event. If they
don't participate, they are not counted in the group calculations (group level or group count).
You also have the possibility of adding NPCs that will contribute to the group count (but not
its level)
XP calculation
XP calculation is done every time the timeline is edited to keep the timeline up to date.
When no event is selected, the history controls will display the player XP status at the end
of the timeline.
If an event is selected, it will display the evolution of the players experience and levels
from before the event to after the event.
Note that the XP calculation is based off the current level of the players, not their
potential level. If this is not the behaviour you expect, level up the players preemptively
or use the auto level up feature when it will be available.
Errors in the timeline
Sometimes, you might get an error for a specific event. If that happens, the event tooltip
will describe what kind of issue it is.
Note that the XP calculation is a safe process, and will simply ignore those events.
The session settings tab allows you to set session-wide parameters.
Auto level up
This feature is not available at the moment. It will come at a later date.
If you enable this setting, the timeline will place the level-up events automatically as soon
as a player can level up.
You won't be able to manually place level up events anymore, and all previous level up
events will be erased.
Allow impossible encounters
If you enable this setting, the timeline will allow fights with an 'Impossible rating' and thus
take their xp into account.
Disabled by default.
Group level function
The approximation function used for determining the level a given group of sub-group of players.
Defaults to 'Maximum player level'.
Under-leveled player XP multiplier
Sets an XP multiplier for players with a lower level than his companions. This multiplier will
apply to any XP he earns until he has reached the same equivalent xp value as his target
teammate.
The target teammate is the teammate that has the lowest xp between the teammates that have
reached the target level.
An under-leveled player will always earn at least the original XP reward, his bonus xp will just
be adjusted to prevent him from overtaking his teammate too much.
Set to x2 by default. Set to x1 to disable
List of players
This list allows you to declare your players. Each player is given a name, a starting level and
starting XP. Those are the stats of the player at the start of the timeline.
You can rearrange, modify or even delete players as you see fit.
If you add a player to the session, he won't be added to the events already added to the
timeline. However, any new event will feature this new player by default.