Kobold Fight Club alternatives that work with 2024 rules
The original Kobold Fight Club went offline in late 2024. Here are the working replacements, what changed about encounter maths in 2024, and how to balance fights fast.
For most of a decade, “how do I know if this fight will kill my players” had one answer: Kobold Fight Club. Then, in late 2024, the original kobold.club stopped working — a dependency on the Google Sheets API broke, and the site that a generation of DMs used went dark.
If you have been bouncing off a dead bookmark, here is what actually works now.
The replacements
Kobold+ Fight Club (koboldplus.club) is the best-known fork of the original, actively maintained, with a broader monster database and filtering.
koboldtraining.club is the closest feature match to the original if what you want is the tool you remember.
Browser encounter builders including the free encounter builder on this site, which does the 2024 difficulty maths, has no account requirement and works on a phone at the table.
D&D Beyond’s encounter builder, if you already subscribe — though that is a recurring cost for one feature. See D&D Beyond alternatives if that is the only thing keeping you subscribed.
Check which ruleset your tool is using
This is the part that trips people up, and it matters more than which tool you pick.
The 2014 encounter maths took your monsters’ combined XP and applied a multiplier based on how many monsters there were — the same total XP split across eight creatures was treated as considerably harder than one big one.
The 2024 rules dropped that step. Difficulty calculation is simpler, and the same encounter can come out at a meaningfully different difficulty band depending on which version a calculator implements.
Neither is wrong. But a tool silently using 2014 maths while you run 2024 will mislead you, particularly on large groups of weak enemies. Check before you trust it. Our 2024 vs 2014 comparison covers the wider differences.
The budget is not the fight
Every encounter calculator gives you a number, and the number is the least interesting part of encounter design. Four things move real difficulty far more:
Action economy. Eight goblins get eight turns. One ogre gets one. Equal XP, wildly different fights — and this is precisely what the 2024 maths stopped adjusting for, so you now have to hold it in your head.
Terrain. A corridor that lets two characters fight at a time is a different encounter from an open room, using identical monsters.
Resources. The same fight is trivial after a long rest and lethal as the fourth encounter of the day. No calculator knows where your party is in its adventuring day.
Focus fire. Whether the monsters can drop a character in one round before that player acts. This is the single biggest predictor of whether a fight feels dangerous or feels unfair.
Our guide to building balanced encounters covers how to sanity-check those, and best low-CR monsters for early encounters covers what to actually pick at low levels.
Speed at the table
The calculator solves prep. It does not solve the fight running slowly, which is the more common complaint.
Two things fix that, and neither is a tool:
Have the stat blocks visible, all at once. A fight with four creature types is four stat blocks, and a book opens to one page. Laying them out side by side in initiative order is the single biggest speed improvement available — see how to use monster stat cards.
Track initiative somewhere everyone can see. The free initiative tracker handles it, and players who know their turn is coming are ready when it arrives.
For the improvised case — the party goes somewhere unprepped and you need a fight now — a deck of pre-built encounters is faster than any calculator, because there is no building step at all. Draw, adjust the numbers to your party, run it.
A working routine
- Rough budget from your encounter builder, using the right ruleset.
- Check the shape — action economy, terrain, and whether anything can one-shot a character.
- Have stat blocks laid out before initiative is rolled.
- Keep a deck or table for the unplanned fights, because there will be some.
That covers both halves of the problem: the calculator handles the maths you would get wrong, and the physical layout handles the pace you would otherwise lose.
More on the speed side in how to speed up D&D combat, and the free monster reference has the SRD stat blocks if you need something to build from right now.
Free monsters to build with. Alongside the free encounter builder, the 20 free illustrated monster cards give you stat blocks you can lay on the table, and the free downloads page has matching tokens for the map.
Frequently asked questions
- Is Kobold Fight Club still working?
- The original kobold.club stopped functioning in late 2024 after an issue with the Google Sheets API it depended on. Community forks have taken its place, principally Kobold+ Fight Club at koboldplus.club and koboldtraining.club, which reproduces the original's feature set closely.
- What replaced Kobold Fight Club?
- Several tools. Kobold+ Fight Club is the best-known fork, koboldtraining.club is the closest feature match to the original, and there are browser encounter builders including the free one on this site. D&D Beyond also has its own encounter builder if you subscribe.
- How did encounter balancing change in the 2024 rules?
- The 2024 rules simplified difficulty calculation, dropping the multiplier-per-number-of-monsters step that the 2014 maths used. That makes the arithmetic easier but means a 2014-era calculator can give noticeably different answers, so check which ruleset a tool is using.
- How do you balance a D&D encounter quickly?
- Work from party level and size to a rough XP budget, pick monsters that fit it, then sanity-check the shape: how many turns before the party can act, whether any single monster can drop a character in one round, and whether the fight has terrain or an objective beyond killing everything.
- Is XP budget enough to balance a fight?
- No. XP budget is a starting point, not an answer. Action economy, terrain, ranged versus melee mix and whether the party is fresh or on their last spell slot all move real difficulty more than the budget number does.
- Do you need an encounter builder at all?
- Not strictly, but it removes arithmetic from prep and stops you accidentally building a fight that is twice as hard as intended. Once you have run a few hundred encounters you will estimate well by feel; before that, a calculator is a genuine safety net.
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