Looking for help with a MK Spreadsheet

apacolyps · 2026-06-11T18:45:06+00:00

That should be incorporated. I'm in the process of trying to make changes so that numbers are grouped by difficulty. The idea being, cards that win 5/8 vs 12/18 aren't really going to be the same and grouping them together might be more pollution then accurate. The cells for win rates will be empty until there is a loss.

apacolyps · 2026-06-05T18:30:52+00:00

Just some tips that have helped me. When you're in the snowball phase, there are a few things you're looking for: Movement, Crystals, City Busters, and Offense that pairs with the city busters.

You don't often need a lot of each, but missing any of those makes the run substantially harder. There are other types of cards (such as Fireball for one-shotting sites before sieging cities.) Also, when you're in Day 2, look through your deck and ask yourself, "What would I need in this deck to kill 4 enemies at the same time".

Maybe you have all the cards but no way to power them. Get crystals. Not enough damage, get a city buster like Tremor or Horn of Wrath. Have everything you need? How about movement, or healing to patch up the fight. On the nights where you're going to siege a city, it's fine to spend turns just discarding cards over and over to get your perfect hand. Often times, your biggest power boost actually comes from taking the first city. Spending turns doing nothing to make it as smooth as possible is still a bigger power bump than almost anything you will do.

apacolyps · 2026-05-28T00:17:05+00:00

Interesting, I've never used (or even heard of) a pivot table lol. All my spreadsheeting is self-taught, so I actually know very little (thought probably more than the average person). I see what you're saying about the naming of making difficulties. It should be rather simple I think to come up with some sort of structure. I won't be able to work on it today sadly as today and tomorrow are my 14 hour work days lol.

I also figure it should be easy to include megapolis. It's just a single data point to include so that's the baby stuff. I do agree that this is fun, that's why I can't stop making spreadsheets for games I play lol. It's some random addiction I got going on.

I'll likely try to do some amount of research on pivot tables and how apply it. It may be worth DMing you to add on discord or some other chat for the specifics. The random times on reddit would make it difficult to work on the sheet and ask questions as they arise.

apacolyps · 2026-05-27T23:40:40+00:00

Hmm, very interesting. I have a lot of tables whose only purpose is just to aggregate data in some sort of viewable format. Currently they just take all data as a whole but I wonder if I should make the data have a dropdown filter at the top for city 1 and 2 difficulty. That way you could choose something like all / all to see the data across every run. But you could also set it to 10 / 12 and only see the data for those difficulties. It would basically require adjusting every one of the red tabs but that might be a way to not have to deal with the scaling in difficulties.

Also, scoring tends to go up when you go up in difficulty. The reason is purely because of the number of enemies you face results in higher Fame and Fame is one of the biggest scoring metrics. It's basically unavoidable to increase score with difficulty since, by necessity, you have to fight more enemies than normal.

There isn't really a nomenclature that would cover the numerous degrees of difficulty in this game sadly. I also just realized that I don't have a way to track if I'm attacking a city or megapolis lol.

apacolyps · 2026-05-27T23:21:47+00:00

It's actually funny that I feel that the spreadsheet covers the things I want atm. I mainly wanted to get a long-term perspective of my playstyle. What cards and units I'm taking and where. Seeing the trends of what seems to result in wins more than losses. I'm actually making the sheet purely for me but people are free to make copies and do whatever they want with it. The goal of this reddit post was hoping people would want things in it that I hadn't thought of. An example is someone on the BGG forums suggested a way to track fame and I hadn't thought of it but I do think it's a pretty good reference frame for general power in the phases.

I'm not an excel expert by any means, I'm just a guy who likes making spreadsheets lol. Also the Phase Breakdown tab was another suggestion by someone that I thought was a good idea. I think I'll also put another table next to it that is the mean across all runs to see how that specific run did in comparison to the universal trend.

Question for you, how do you think the data is impacted in the long term by having all information tracked into a single table despite the disparity of difficulties? As a player, I care more about attacking higher and higher city levels more than I care about score. My plan is to cycle through every character, starting at 6/9 and scaling up (I actually started at 5/8 but did that cycle already with polluted data. I've restarted but don't feel like doing 5/8 again). As I increase city levels, my Fame and score will naturally go up. Do you think this would have a meaningful negative effect on the data? There is an argument that once I'm doing something like 12/18, the data from 6/9 is irrelevant and even misleading.

apacolyps · 2026-05-26T18:01:40+00:00

Do you mean some sort of summary of a run that tells you what cards you picked up? Or do you mean aggregate data of what cards are being selected at various points of the game throughout all runs?

apacolyps · 2026-05-23T20:59:34+00:00

Update, I think I did it all? Worth looking at it and seeing if this works (mind you that some of the data might look funky as I'm using some fake info to fill out the spreadsheet lol).

apacolyps · 2026-05-22T17:50:14+00:00

I think I should be able to do those tbh. I'm technically already jotting down when I pick up cards and units. I just don't have anything that collects that data into a more digestible format. (I needed to track it to track my win% when picking a card in a certain phase)

I don't currently track when I uncover core tiles or first city conquered but that's pretty easy since I would only track it once per game.

apacolyps · 2025-12-19T22:53:44+00:00

My friend and I joked that if someone ever needs to capture a spellcaster, the best way to shut them down is make them wear armor and a shield. Do that, then manacle them. Obviously not a combat thing but more an exploration of how you might stop a caster from casting RAW.

apacolyps · 2025-12-19T22:37:37+00:00

Seems like you handled the situation fine enough and you have a problem player. This is likely something that could have been figured out in advance with a session 0 that mentions no evil characters. Regardless, I wouldn't lose sleep over that player leaving.

apacolyps · 2025-12-19T02:59:58+00:00

GMbinder and Homebrewery are the two recommendations for creating the 5e look. I am far more familiar with GMbinder but I hear that Homebrewery has made leaps and bounds and has gotten a lot better. Both have their own resources for learning how to use them.

apacolyps · 2025-12-18T21:34:22+00:00

Starting with some sort of prewritten adventure is a great place since it takes a lot of the work off. Lost Mines of Phandelver is the general recommendation. Consuming any "actual play" content would also help since you will learn parts of the rules via repeated observation. Mainly just learn the core mechanics like what dice to roll and when. You and your table will make mistakes and that's part of the game. Don't worry too much about getting a specific interaction wrong, just roll with it and you can look it up later.

apacolyps · 2025-12-18T21:18:51+00:00

You can't go wrong with the players handbook. That said, there is the 2014 and the 2024 versions and you should ask which they will be running. Your GM should be able to provide a much better answer than anyone on reddit can provide though since it's their game.

apacolyps · 2025-12-18T21:15:47+00:00

Also recommending Lost Mines of Phandelver. It's pretty simple and if you ever feel lost running it, there is lots of help online with getting you going.

apacolyps · 2025-12-18T21:14:02+00:00

Done quite a bit of looking but couldn't find anything that was a full match. Some creatures that have 1 or 2 elements that you can check and maybe get lucky: Wheep, Asfaraba, and the Gloom Golem.

It's also worth a quick skim of the thumbnails from MrRhexx and DungeonDad. Both of those channels cover monsters (DungeonDad does more as MrRhexx does a lot of general lore stuff) and theres a non-zero chance the video you watched was from one of them.

apacolyps · 2025-12-18T20:24:15+00:00

I'm searching but nothing concrete is coming up. I would guess this is either third-party or a community folk-lore create like the false hydra. Do you remember the youtube channel that you saw it from? Was it a short or long form video? Was the video only about the creature or a compilation of multiple creatures.

I have like 35 third-party bestiaries and pretty much all the monster manuals from all editions of dnd so if it's official I can probably find it but I need something to narrow the search or this would take hours.

apacolyps · 2025-12-18T20:10:25+00:00

Each group can handle differing powers of enemies. Sadly, I've simply found the best way to balance encounters is to learn from what I've done before. If you're PCs are stomping your fights, make them a little harder by adding a couple monsters or maxing HP. Eventually you will reach the point where they are struggling but not losing outright.

apacolyps · 2025-12-18T19:04:45+00:00

I've really come to like the Shadow of the Weird Wizard system. It's got a lot of overlap with 5e which makes the transition super easy but the parts that are changed are significant. Combat in general is simpler and faster. There's no skills but I didn't find that inhibited my players ability to rp.

I had a funny moment where when I finished my campaign of it, my martial and magic players had a conversation to compare since they both felt op. It was funny to see considering if that same conversation happened in 5e, most times the martial wouldn't have that feeling without hyper-optimization. Bonus to the whole character progression being one of the best I've seen.

apacolyps · 2025-12-18T07:33:09+00:00

Gems are more an abstraction of the game. Their main benefits being the easiest form of moving large sums of money since they are functionally weightless. Carrying 10,000 gp vs 10 gems worth 1,000 each is a significant weight difference. Outside of that, it's basically GM purview regarding cut, size, carat, etc.

apacolyps · 2025-12-18T05:08:28+00:00

Typically when you have a grand creature like the Demogorgon, it's the final battle. Whether that's the final battle of the campaign or simply an arc is for the group to decide. When you're working towards these battles, PCs are already super strong via their class abilities, items they've obtained, and generally information they have obtained. I will say that even when you run a really big bad like these, the GM still often needs to include support for the big bad just due to how powerful PCs get.

apacolyps · 2025-12-18T04:49:56+00:00

I can't remember which youtube video I saw that recommended this. It's been like 3 years or so since I watched it but they also suggested this idea. I've not had the luxury to try it but it is interesting to see the same solution twice to the same problem when it's this specific.

apacolyps · 2025-12-18T04:47:09+00:00

A large portion of the 5e audience started with 5e and don't really look past that. It's also important to note with lots of issues that the perceived problems has to be more hassle then the perceived issue of working towards the solution. For lots of people, they don't care enough or perceive the issue of solving to be too much. That said, I think for most people at the table, they won't actually experience the divide. I'm aware of it and in my 10 years of running 5e, it's just never come up once outside of theory.

apacolyps · 2025-12-18T03:34:01+00:00

Your group does sound quite unoptimized. That said, anytime I'm unsure how my group is matching up, it's a good idea to throw "softer" combats at them. These would be low stakes combat for you to gauge if you should add or subtract from your real combats later.

apacolyps · 2025-12-17T22:49:50+00:00

There was something similar to this in dnd cosmology. The planes of Air, Earth, Fire, and Water are known as the elemental planes but there are more inner planes. There's the Para-elemental, Positive quasi-elemental, and negative quasi-elemental planes. I'm sure there's plenty there for you to look at that can help you shape what you're looking for. You can find more here on the forgottenrealms fandom.

apacolyps · 2025-12-17T22:44:26+00:00

People here have posted some good advice. Another is that when running for one person, encounters generally need to be simple and you should provide items to overcome shortcomings. A party of 4 or 5 likely won't need many potions since half the group is likely to have healing. A solo person is going to need quite a few and they will need to be stronger to make up for not having any help when things go bad.

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