(Go back to Campaign Manager ) This help topic is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Gaming License v1.0a .
This is the meat and drink of many adventures – nasty monsters to kill! Each adventure can have a group of creatures associated with it. You can create the group in the Group Manager or right in this frame (“Create New” button). Your group can have any name you want, but something like “Room 24 Goblins” will make it easier to remember where that group should be.
From this frame, you can open the New Creature Screen to add new creatures, or delete or remove creatures with the “Delete/Remove Selected” buttons.
This button is a time saver – click it and instantly the creatures in the group are added to the “Current Encounter” group, as are the PCs. Initiative is rolled for everyone. You can then either input the PC's initiative rolls or start combat immediately. See Steps for Running a Battle for more info.
The Encounter Level for the current group is calculated from the challenge ratings of each creature in it. The mathematical formula used reproduces the table in the DMG, but can calculate the encounter level even for multiple creatures with many different CR. Be warned that mixing very different CRs can reduce the accuracy of the calculation. See below for more details.
The Average Party Level is the sum of all levels for all PCs divided by the number of PCs.
The “Challenging” encounter level takes into account the number of PCs. An adventuring party of 4 will have balanced encounters with creatures whose EL is the same as the average party level. If the adventuring party has 8 PCs in it, and EL higher by 2 is needed for it to be a challenge.
The difficulty of the encounter (Challenging, Overwhelming, etc.) is displayed at the bottom of the frame.
This frame helps hand out XP when your PCs defeat the monsters. The first box calculates the total XP for all creatures in the group, based on CR and average party level (for the original 3rd edition) or based on each PC's level and the CR of each monster (for revision 3.5). You can adjust this up or down by a certain percentage, and you can add or remove a straight amount of XP for special circumstances, or as story awards.
Award button: click this to give the amount of XP in the “XP per PC” box to every PC.
Warning label: if your monster's CR is unbalanced with the PC's level (CR is different by more than 7), a warning tells you that one or several of the monsters are either too strong or too weak to calculate XP conventionally (there is no entry on the XP tables). Use ad-hoc awards in these cases.
To change the XP table: edit the XP.TXT file in DM Genie's program path. The lines that start with a * are the header of the party level. The next 20 lines are XP for a CR from 1 to 20. Do not add or remove any line. DM Genie must be restarted for the changes to have an effect.
Calculating the encounter level is difficult because challenge ratings operate in two different ways:
Above 1, the CR is exponential – a CR 2 higher is a creature twice as difficult. So putting two CR 3 creatures together gives EL 5. Four creatures give EL 7 and so on. The formula used for these is EL = Logarithm (base 1.4142) of the sum of ( 1.4142 ^ CR ).
Below 1, the CR is linear – just adding the CRs gives the total CR. So ten CR 0.1 creatures is a EL 1.
For creatures below CR 1 and above CR 1 in the same group, the program counts the sum of the CR < 1 creatures together as a single creature with CR 1.5, for example. It is then calculated with the formula above.