ChucksChucks

Prompting tips

Chucks does the math and the monster lookup. Your prompt decides which monsters get considered and how the encounter feels. A few habits make the difference between a generic roster and an encounter that fits the scene at your table.

Specify your party up front

Party composition is the one thing the chatbot can't guess. Without it, the first reply is always “how many PCs and what level?” — a wasted round trip. Lead with it.

Build me a moderate encounter for 4 PCs at level 5. They're searching an abandoned watchtower at dusk.

If you always run the same party, pin it in your project instructions instead of repeating it. See Customize.

Bump the XP budget for stronger or weaker parties

The three difficulty bands (low, moderate, high) assume a baseline party. If yours is tougher or squishier than that — optimized builds, low magic setting, survival-themed campaigns — say so up front with an XP bump. The encounter-builder accepts a percentage tweak to the budget and applies it before picking monsters.

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. Bump the XP budget by 25% compared to the baseline.

You can ask for a bump after the encounter is generated too, but the chatbot will rebuild it from scratch. Specifying the bump up front is the cleaner flow.

Mention the habitat

Without a habitat hint, the chatbot draws from the entire monster pool and you end up with polar bears in the desert. One sentence about where the PCs are filters the candidates to creatures that belong there.

The PCs are crossing a frozen mountain pass. Build a moderate encounter for 4 PCs at level 4.

Speak the tool's vocabulary when you can

The tool understands the 5E taxonomy: creature types (humanoid, undead, fiend), subtypes, species (gnoll, goblin), and specific monster names from the 2024 SRD. Any of those filter the candidate pool cleanly. The chatbot will still do its best with looser concepts — ask for a gnoll fighter and it'll pick from Gnoll Warrior and Gnoll Pack Lord — but the more you can give it a name or a taxonomy node it knows, the less guesswork it has to do.

Name the twist yourself

LLMs aren't good at inventing genuinely original encounters. Ask for “something surprising” and you'll get something that feels mundane. If you want unusual, you have to bring the unusual idea yourself. The chatbot is good at fleshing it out once you do.

  • Goblins riding worgs.
  • Pirates on an airship while the PCs are flying across the sky.
  • Goblins that made a pact with fire mephits they met in an abandoned wizard's tower.
  • Aliens from another world.

Iterate instead of restarting

Once the chatbot has built an encounter, follow-up prompts are cheap — they reuse the same context. A few that work well:

  • Make it harder.
  • Swap the wraith for something less deadly.
  • Same composition, but the fight happens during a sandstorm.