Application of machine learning to monster level prediction in tabletop RPG game design
Designing balanced adversaries is a central but labor-intensive task in tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) development. In systems such as Pathfinder, each monster is described by many numerical attributes that jointly determine its power, summarized as an ordinal level. We investigate whether machine learning can support designers by predicting this level from a monster's attributes, framing the task as tabular ordinal regression. We introduce what is, to our knowledge, the first dataset built specifically for TTRPG monster-level prediction, derived from publicly available Pathfinder Second Edition data. Using it, we compare classical regression models with rounding schemes, dedicated tabular ordinal regression algorithms, and neural networks with ordinal-aware losses. To mirror real design workflows, we evaluate all models under chronological and expanding-window protocols with several complementary metrics. Results show that tree-based ensembles outperform linear models and neural approaches, achieving near-perfect ordinal ranking and high predictive accuracy. Explainable AI analyses, such as feature importance and error distributions, show that the model is aligned with human intuition and follows patterns grounded in game rules. Together, these results show that machine learning can reliably approximate designer judgments and serve as an effective computer-aided tool for monster balancing and broader TTRPG system design.