Your first encounter
This walkthrough confirms your setup is wired up correctly and shows you what Chucks actually returns. Open a new chat in your chatbot and follow along.
What your prompt needs
Your prompt has one required ingredient and two optional ones that make the result better:
- Party composition (required). Number of characters and their level — e.g. 4 PCs at level 4. Without it the chatbot has no XP budget to work against and will ask before doing anything.
- Difficulty (optional). Low, moderate, or high. Defaults to moderate.
- Scene (optional, recommended). One sentence about where the PCs are and what they're doing — crossing a river by ferry, exploring a sealed vault, climbing a watchtower at night. The chatbot uses it for flavor in the encounter hook and to filter monsters to ones that fit (water creatures for a river crossing, climbers for a tower).
Try this prompt
Generate a moderate difficulty encounter for 4 fourth-level characters. The PCs are exploring an old vault thought to be sealed for a hundred years.Watch it work
Your chatbot pauses for ten to thirty seconds and calls a couple of Chucks tools — you'll see something like Encounter planner and Monster search flash by in the conversation. That's how you know the setup works. If no tool calls appear, the Connector isn't enabled — head back to the setup page for your chatbot.
The result
Every encounter comes back in the same shape: an Encounter Hook setting the scene, a Roster with the XP math, and a closing question inviting follow-ups. Yours will look different in the details, but the shape is the contract:
Encounter Hook
A hundred years ago, this vault was broken into by a company of tomb robbers. They were caught in the act by the vault's undying guardian — a wight, the reanimated corpse of the knight sworn to protect this place in life. The robbers never escaped. Three of them rose as ghouls, still trapped here, still hungry. When the PCs enter, the wight holds its ground at the far end of the vault while its ghouls stalk forward through the dark.
Roster
| Creature | Count | XP Each |
|---|---|---|
| Wight | 1 | 700 |
| Ghoul | 3 | 200 |
Total XP: 1,300 | Budget: 1,250–1,750
Want me to adjust the roster, swap out monsters, or build a different encounter entirely?
Iterate
That closing question is your invitation to keep talking. A few follow-ups that usually work well:
- Make it harder. Bumps the difficulty band and rebuilds.
- Swap the wight for something less deadly. Targeted swap, keeps the rest of the roster.
- Same encounter, but the vault is flooded waist-deep. Reuses the roster and rebuilds the hook around the new scene.
What's next
For sharper results, see prompting tips — naming specific monsters, asking for unusual compositions, fine-tuning difficulty. Tired of retyping your party every time? See Customize.