18.7 Entities in Encounters
18.0 Entities
18.7 Entities in Encounters
The reason to build an entity once is so you never have to build one again. In an Encounter, you add entities from your codex, and you can add the same one many times over. Six wolves in a combat are six copies of your one Wolf entity, each tracking its own damage and its own turn, all sharing the stat block you wrote.
How it works in practice
- Build the creature once in the Entity Codex, with its stats and abilities.
- In your encounter, add it as many times as the scene needs.
- Track each one separately during the fight.
The numbers are copied across when you add the entity, so editing its stats later does not rewrite a fight you have already run — that encounter keeps the numbers it was fought with. The name and type are read live, though, so renaming an entity does change how it reads in past encounters.
Encounters are Game-Master-only in their entirety. Adding a secret entity to an encounter does not reveal it to your players. When you are picking entities there, secret ones are marked (Secret) in the list so you can see at a glance which of them your table has met.
If you run combat in a virtual tabletop, you may not need entities for fights at all — your VTT is already tracking those numbers. The codex still earns its place as a catalogue of your world, and as something to show your players. Use whichever half is useful to you.
Running the encounter itself is covered in the Encounters guide.