D&D 5E Surf's D&D 5e Monster Analysis

[surfarcher]

Yeah [MENTION=1932]Savage Wombat[/MENTION] it is a bit messed up, as I mentioned already. They seems to have spliced three different curves together. I'll probably re-engineer it at some stage, but not in the short term.

 

[Quickleaf]

Are you planning to talk about the EXP table for monsters? Because someone needs to; that thing is messed up.

How is it messed up? Do you mean cause there are staggered jumps and its not a straight curve? Or because the XP multiplier gets goofy when you have high CR and very low CR monsters in the same group?

 

[surfarcher]

How is it messed up? Do you mean cause there are staggered jumps and its not a straight curve? Or because the XP multiplier gets goofy when you have high CR and very low CR monsters in the same group?

From my perspective it's the splicing together of 3 distinctly separate curves.

 

[Savage Wombat]

How is it messed up? Do you mean cause there are staggered jumps and its not a straight curve? Or because the XP multiplier gets goofy when you have high CR and very low CR monsters in the same group?

The first one. It's just weird that the amount of EXP for a monster is almost equal to a "fair" encounter for PCs of the same level as CR, but not quite. Sometimes more, sometimes less. And yes, the incomprehensible curve is strange - I'm hoping Surf can figure out how it relates to the power level of the monster in some way.

 

[Quickleaf]

From my perspective it's the splicing together of 3 distinctly separate curves.

The first one. It's just weird that the amount of EXP for a monster is almost equal to a "fair" encounter for PCs of the same level as CR, but not quite. Sometimes more, sometimes less. And yes, the incomprehensible curve is strange - I'm hoping Surf can figure out how it relates to the power level of the monster in some way.

My hunch is there's some kind of increasing ratio between the boundary levels of each Tier of Play in regards to the comparison of medium difficulty encounter XP & XP for an equal level monster... Probably to account for higher level PCs ability to take on increasingly higher level monsters (CRs go to 30!) thanks to a multiplier effect.

Hmm, assuming a party with 4 PCs, here's a comparison of Medium difficulty encounter XP (for the party) vs. XP for facing one equal level monster.

Level Encounter : Monster how different monster XP value is

APPRENTICE
Level 1 200 : 200 encounter = monster
Level 4 1,000 : 1,100 monster +100
Net +100

HEROIC
Level 5 2,000 : 1,800 monster -200
Level 10 4,800 : 5,900 monster +1,100
Net +1,300

PARAGON
Level 11 6,400 : 7,200 monster +800
Level 16 12,800 : 15,000 monster +2,200
Net +1,400

EPIC
Level 17 15,400: 15,600 monster +600
Level 20 22,800 : 25,000 monster +2,200
Net +1,600

EDIT: I would have expected Level 5 to be +200 or 400, and for net values for Levels 11 and 17 to be reversed! That way you'd see an increasing baseline monster threat as the PCs level. Weird. Weird. Weird.

 

[surfarcher]

My hunch is there's some kind of increasing ratio between the boundary levels of each Tier of Play in regards to the comparison of medium difficulty encounter XP & XP for an equal level monster... Probably to account for higher level PCs ability to take on increasingly higher level monsters (CRs go to 30!) thanks to a multiplier effect.
...snip...

I can model CR0 through CR20 pretty easy with a moderately complex polynomial. It gets a lot harder after CR20. It can be done, but it's not slick. I believe they've spliced together three formulae...

• <CR1: Simply derived from the level 1 PC profile.
• CR1 - CR20: Derived from the PC profile of the matching level.
• CR21+: Derived from a modified baseline math and a different progression curve.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Can't wait to dig into some of the monter's attacks.

IMO, there's four basic units of monster construction: how many hits they can take, the DC to hit them, how many hits they give before they drop, and the DC's that they can hit.

 

[surfarcher]

Can't wait to dig into some of the monter's attacks.

IMO, there's four basic units of monster construction: how many hits they can take, the DC to hit them, how many hits they give before they drop, and the DC's that they can hit.

Thanks to Bounded Accuracy it looks like "to hit" values have been somewhat decoupled and don't seem to factor into Damage any more.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Or maybe to put it another way: a critter's CR doesn't dictate their AC or attack values to any great degree (perhaps just as much as a proficiency bonus might). What mostly matters is the hits they can give and the hits they can take.

 

[surfarcher]

Or maybe to put it another way: a critter's CR doesn't dictate their AC or attack values to any great degree (perhaps just as much as a proficiency bonus might). What mostly matters is the hits they can give and the hits they can take.

Kind of!

What I mean is AC and to-hit do scale somewhat with CR, more-so to-hit than AC. Those two seem to form their own axis in the system.

The more significant axis in the system is the health/damage axis, which scales much faster.

Those two axis don't seem to have the significant mathematical linkage that they did in the preceding two editions. That's what I mean by decoupled, though arguably I should more properly say "partially decoupled".