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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 9669662" data-attributes="member: 6677017">Here's some numbers I'm putting up to see if I can get some other sets of eyes on them.I selected the simplest monsters in the Monster Manual, that should derive their CR purely from AC, Hit Points, Attack Bonus, and Damage output. I left out creatures that had anything I knew could affect CR (such as saving throw proficiencies, imposing conditions, effects relying on saves, damage resistances, etc), and even anything I previously suspected might affect CR (like a fly speed, even without ranged attacks). These are all basically just your "bags of hit points".In other words, these are the creatures that the spreadsheet WotC used should work for perfectly. I re-did my calculations today, since I now know that they base damage output on fixed values, and my proposed formulas hold up better than I thought. There is only one case where the DMG rules give you the MM CR and my formulas fail to do so (the veteran), while there are 5 where the DMG CR doesn't match the MM but the proposed formula does. For the remaining 10 discrepancies, neither the DMG nor the proposed formula agrees with the MM.Blue is used to indicate that the formula gave a higher value than the MM CR, while orange indicates the opposite.[ATTACH=full]406725[/ATTACH]And here's an expanded one with the Defensive and Offensive CRs.[ATTACH=full]406726[/ATTACH]Here are the two most likely theories of what's going on here.1) The designers sometimes ignored their own CR formulas and assigned a different CR. I know a lot of people assume this is what happened, but I'm really trying to see if I can falsify this claim before I accept it. Now to be fair, we were told that dragons are intentionally under-CR'd to make them more dangerous than their CR would indicate: because Dragons! So there is already precedent that they have done this in the past. However, in both listening to how Jeremy talked about adjusting hp in small increments to get a desired CR, and how Mike played around with the numbers on the video I linked, it seems like that wasn't standard procedure, and standard procedure was to instead tweak your monster's numbers to make it work with the formula, rather than to ignore the formula and just assign whatever old CR they wanted to.2) Their internal formula (as implemented in the spreadsheet Mike Mearls was using) does produce the formulas in the MM, and my proposed formula isn't exactly right.In order to accomplish anything else, it's pretty vital that I'm able to find out which of these is the case, so any analysis of those tables, or just random ideas, is appreciated.The biggest problem here, is that those formulas I derived are right. They aren't guesses. They are literally how the math works. We know various assumptions, we know how the math fits those assumptions, and we know how that can change by altering the percentages. It's really, really solid with the Defensive CR, as I explained in the first post. Now, it's theoretically possible that something different is going on with the Offensive CR. Or it's possible that there are additional considerations beyond the strict percentage system going on in their formulas.For example, maybe they have something slightly different going on under the hood with fractional CRs? As you can see, almost all of the discrepancies involve a fractional defensive and/or offensive CR. However, the Giant Ape is a standout that doesn't work right, even though it has no fractional CRs, which means if that is the case, there must also be something else going on that explains the giant ape. (Now, if we can get everything but 1 or 2 monsters figured out in the whole MM, we can probably assume that someone just made a mistake somewhere, but at this point that giant ape is still significant.)Now, remembering that we can look at the entry forms of the spreadsheet they themselves used to see what data can be included, do you all have any ideas about what might possibly be going on with the invisible calculations on that sheet to cause it to give us the MM CRs rather than the ones from the proposed formula I derived?</blockquote>

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