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Thanks for the suggestion. Thankfully, I've already seen the video and come to terms with damage rounding, as well as a few other points of contention. Something else I think might help you along this path is that the baseline monster stats by CR in the 2014 DMG don't match values used by WotC...

A little while back I derived a formula for calculating monster XP values based on their effective offensive and defensive stats. It may look arbitrary, but it was derived from a basic calculation of how much damage the monsters can be expected to do during an encounter against four generic...

I wrote a detailed breakdown of the 2024 Monster Manual that shows how those monsters scale with CR. In short, non-legendary monsters follow the same rules as 2014 monsters, with the caveat that they tend to have proficiency in initiative rolls at higher CRs. On the other hand, legendary...

The Free Rules on DnD Beyond were just updated yesterday to remove several references to WotC IP. The kinds of things you would expect to be taken out if you were planning on releasing them via a Creative Commons license. I couldn't say if that means the Free Rules are now ready to become SRD...

I was more referring to the fact that a 1 level adjustment at low levels can increase a character's XP budget by 50-100%, which is likely substantially more than the actual boost they get from their magic items, depending on the specific items they have. But as you point out, and I agree, it's...

This approach should work reasonably well at higher levels, where the gap in power between levels is more consistent, but at lower levels it runs the risk of significantly overestimating how much stronger a party is for certain types of magic items. I did a similar analysis where I looked at...

On the monster side of things, I've calculated CRs for some 2,000 published monsters using the method outlined in the 2014 DMG and generally they match the listed values in each stat block. There are obviously outliers, but on average they're close. When they republished monsters from Volo's...

If you rounds the calculated ratios shown in figure 4 of my analysis to the nearest whole number, they exactly match the values in XGtE for all monster CRs and PC levels shown in that book (with the exceptions of those ratios greater than 1:12, since those are capped). So, at the very least, the...

There are bound to be inaccuracies built into the system because it lacks an XP multiplier, but where those inaccuracies are depends on where they centered the math. If they centered it around one monster per PC, like they did in XGtE, then the biggest inaccuracies will come from single monster...

Based on the analysis I did last year of the XGtE encounter building rules, the 2024 encounter building rules are effectively the same as the XGtE rules for multiple monsters but with double the number of monsters per PC. The XGtE encounter building rules for multiple monsters are based on the...

No, it wouldn't. The logic for healing and damage is based on the general rules for those mechanics. Temporary Hit Points have different general rules, which means the logic for them is different. That difference results in a different outcome for what happens when they end, as covered in my...

I've seen a few people try to connect damage and healing from concentration spells to temporary hit points, so I'd like to point out that even if we were to give them the same treatment as temporary hit points, by claiming they go away when concentration ends, it wouldn't actually do anything...

I do wish it was as simple as that, but, from my experience, people are quick to dismiss that kind of general statement without concrete examples to back it up. That said, my point wasn't just that error bars and distributions matter. I picked that example to illustrate the difference between...

Not to undercut your point too much, because I do think DPR can be useful for comparing class features, but I'd like to offer up an example of where even this can go wrong, using Great Weapon Master vs a +2 to Strength as an example Let's say we have a PC with 30 hit points, who wields a...

I've enjoyed many of the other channels people have posted over the years, but lately I've been enjoying The Bard's College. It's a small channel with only a handful of videos, but I've found the content to be a good source of inspiration for creating adventures. It also helps that videos tend...

It's not that more actions make you dangerous, it's that monsters in groups live longer than a single monster alone. There are benefits to having more actions, but those are smaller orders effects to what's driving the difficulty change when grouping monsters. This is why referring to this...

Increasing the number of dice rolled (specifically attack rolls and saving throws) will make the results more consistent, not less. You might be more likely to roll a critical hit or a high damage roll, but those make up a smaller portion of the overall result than a single critical hit or high...