Encounters

Overview

Combat prep usually means a statblock in one tab, a calculator in another, and a sticky note that says “6 goblins? maybe 8?”. ScryRPG’s encounter builder folds that into one screen: pick creatures from the bestiary, watch the difficulty meter react to your party’s real size and levels, attach the loot they’ll leave behind, and deploy when the door swings open. Initiative rolls on the server, players see exactly as much as you’ve revealed, and when the fight ends the loot drops and the battle lands on your campaign timeline.

The Three Moments of an Encounter

Moment	What happens
Prep	Build the encounter from the bestiary, tune the difficulty, attach loot. Days before the session or five minutes before.
Deploy	Send it to your party. Initiative rolls server-side, and you reveal the fight when the ambush springs.
Reference	During the battle you track HP while everyone reads the same initiative order. Afterwards, loot, XP, and the timeline entry are handled for you.

The Bestiary

SRD Creatures

Every account starts with the D&D 5e SRD 5.1 bestiary: goblins, ogres, dragons, and the rest of the creatures published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Attribution is preserved on each creature, so the licensing stays visible instead of swept under the rug.

Custom Creatures

The SRD doesn’t know about your homebrew bog witch or the owlbear you reflavored into a moss golem. Create a custom creature with its own stat block (hit points, initiative modifier, challenge rating) and it slots into encounters exactly like an SRD entry.

Fork from the Marketplace

Other GMs share creatures in the marketplace. Fork one into your library, tweak the numbers to fit your table, and use it like any creature you built yourself.

Campaign NPCs in the Fight

The mercenary captain your party has been drinking with for six sessions can finally draw steel. Any NPC from your lore can join an encounter: give them a stat block of their own, or link an existing creature so the captain fights as a veteran. They take their place in initiative alongside everything else.

Building an Encounter

1. Create a new encounter and choose the party it’s for.
2. Add creatures from the bestiary. Search by name or filter by challenge rating.
3. Watch the difficulty meter as you go. It runs the DMG’s XP threshold math (easy, medium, hard, deadly) against your party’s real size and levels, live, so you see “hard” tip into “deadly” the moment the third ogre lands.
4. Add variants where you want the dice to decide. Give a creature a dice range (2d4 wolves) instead of a fixed count, and the number rolls when you deploy, so even you don’t know how big the pack is until the fight starts.
5. Attach a loot template. When the encounter ends, that loot deploys to the party on its own.

Printing an Encounter Deck

Open a saved encounter and choose Print full set to send a table-ready reference set to Print Studio. The set starts with an encounter overview, then adds one card for each unique authorized creature in the roster and each unique authorized item in the attached loot. The overview keeps the combatant count or dice range, so a six-goblin encounter does not silently become six duplicate stat blocks.

Linked bestiary creatures retain their complete system-native stat blocks. Valid inline creatures become encounter-scoped cards. Each creature and attached-loot source is checked independently, so a visible encounter never makes private content printable. Table Reference projects each creature onto one bounded face without guessing mechanics from prose; choose Full Rules when long traits and actions should continue onto numbered faces. Required source and license notices travel on grouped Credits & Licenses cards and in the PDF, browser-print, PNG, and ZIP records.

You can also open the encounter’s one-face Table Reference showcase, download its card set, or add it to an existing deck and choose Full Rules. See Printable Cards for paper sizes, duplex setup, calibration, QR links, and export formats.

Deploying and Running

Deploy

1. Open the encounter and click Deploy to Party.
2. The server rolls initiative for every combatant: a d20 plus each one’s modifier, rolled once and recorded. No fudging, no rerolls, no “I rolled it off-screen.”
3. Any variant dice ranges resolve now. Your 2d4 wolves become five wolves. Or three. Or eight.

A party runs one encounter at a time. End or cancel the current fight before deploying the next one.

Reveal

Deployed doesn’t mean visible. Players see nothing until you reveal the encounter, so you can deploy during prep and sit on it until the party kicks in the wrong door. On reveal, everyone gets the initiative order and the creature list.

Hit Points and Health Bands

You track exact HP per combatant. Your players see health bands:

Band	HP remaining
Healthy	Over 50%
Wounded	25% to 50%
Critical	Under 25%
Down	0

Ad-Hoc Encounters

The party picks a fight you didn’t prep. It happens to everyone. Start an ad-hoc encounter mid-session without a template: add creatures on the fly and initiative rolls the same way. If the improvised brawl turns out to be a keeper, save it as a template afterwards and it joins your library for next time.

Ending an Encounter

When you end the fight, three things happen:

1. The loot drops. The attached loot template deploys to the party, ready to reveal and distribute.
2. The timeline remembers. A battle event lands on the campaign timeline, so “when did we fight the wyvern?” has an answer months from now.
3. The XP is tallied. The total is computed from the defeated creatures’ challenge ratings, ready to award however your table handles advancement.

Limits

Building encounters is unlimited on every plan, Free included. Prep as many as you like, tune the difficulty for weeks, and keep a whole shelf of fights ready to go. A party runs one encounter at a time at every tier too, so that is a rule of the table, not a limit of your plan: end or cancel the current fight before the next one goes live.

What your plan meters is deploying. Sending a prepped encounter to your party, or starting a quick ad-hoc fight at the table, each counts as one deployment. The count resets with your billing period.

Tier	Encounter deployments / month
Free	3
Player	6
GM	Unlimited
Patron	Unlimited

Cancelling a deployed encounter does not return that month’s deployment, so deploy when the fight is ready to reach the table. See the Subscription Guide for the full plan comparison.

Your Familiar and Discord

Build by Conversation

Your familiar can build and manage encounters conversationally: “set up a hard forest fight for the party, around CR 5 total, and attach the bandit-camp loot table.” It drafts the encounter and shows you its work, and every write waits for your approval before anything is saved. It also rolls honest server-side dice on request, for the moments when you need a d20 nobody can side-eye.

Discord

The /encounter command shows the current fight in Discord, view-only: initiative order and health bands. Handy when half the table follows along on their phones. See the Discord Bot Guide for the full command reference.

Common Questions

Can my players see creature hit points? No. You see exact HP; players see health bands, and only after you reveal the encounter.

Can I run a fight I didn’t prep? Yes. Start an ad-hoc encounter mid-session, add creatures as you go, and save it as a template afterwards if it earned a spot in your library.

How is XP calculated? From the challenge ratings of the creatures your party defeated. The total is ready when the encounter ends.

Can two fights run at once? No. One active encounter per party. End or cancel the current one first.

Ready to Roll (Initiative)?

Build the fight once, deploy it at the perfect moment, and let the bookkeeping handle itself.

What’s Next?

• Loot Guide - Build the treasure your encounters drop
• Lore & Knowledge Graph - The NPCs who join your fights live here
• Printable Cards - Turn an encounter and its authorized creatures into table references
• Foundry VTT Integration - Put deployed encounters on your battlemap
• Discord Bot Guide - Follow the fight from game chat