Dungeons & Dragons Encounter Analysis with Semi-Random Simulation in Foundry VTT

ravyn Hardcastle, Matthew Guzdial

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is a tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) in which a group of players, guided by a Game Master, roleplay a fantasy adventure with simulated combat and improvisational narrative. In D&D, an encounter is a single instance of simulated combat, where the players must use their characters to attempt to defeat a selection of enemy characters that the GM controls. D&D has multiple systems that approximate encounter difficulty by summing individual difficulty values that designers predefine for each enemy. However, since players and enemies can have a wide variety of capabilities, encounter difficulty depends on more than just the estimated difficulty of each monster. For example, these metrics do not account for positioning and dungeon layout, the synergies between monster abilities, and player party composition. We have created a tool, Mage-Hand, that can simulate D&D encounters semi-randomly using Foundry Virtual Tabletop, a virtual tabletop (VTT) system. In this paper, we show that our tool's simulated winrates have a strong correlation with D&D's published difficulty evaluation metrics, while also better aligning with some players' reported experiences.