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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 9671700" data-attributes="member: 6677017">Well, I'm really stumped here. I created a spread of results for those monsters with different hit chances (instead of just 65%) in case it varies over CR. I couldn't come up with any functional curve from that--too little consistency.I did find an error in my spreadsheet, and corrected it. Unfortunately the only result with these sample monsters was to make brown bear not work again, lol.I considered maybe the rule of rounding off the average of the defensive and offensive CRs was a simplification. Maybe the real rounding formula varies by CR. Always rounding down if CR 1 or lower, and up if CR 2 or higher would fix several monsters, but it doesn't fix everything. It's also rather odd for it to switch immediately from down to up without an off stretch in the middle, but that could be a thing.I finally decided that when I continue my investigation I'm going to find similar simple "bag of hit points" monsters from VGtM and see how they respond to my formula. I'm doing this because, while I couldn't find a completely consistent pattern, for most of the monsters that don't map CR properly, I could find potential errors that might have been made. For example, maybe someone had the owlbear attack once with their bite and twice with their claws. The veteran may have had a shield option. Those sort of things would get those guys to CR 3 where they are supposed to be. It's also possible that having a secondary ranged attack is supposed to count for something, etc. And some of those rules might have changed as they were working on it, leaving us with incorrect values. Or maybe they hadn't decided exactly how it was going to work when some of these monsters (like the ogre) came out in the starter set prior to the core books, and they just left them where they were because they had already established ogres as being CR 2, even if the math didn't end up backing that up.In any case, if I examine more monsters in Volos (assuming there is a reasonable number of super-simple monsters, which there may not be) and they all just work, that's reason to further pursue the theory that they may just have made errors when CRing some monsters and decided not to fix them afterwards. I glanced over the errata of the MM (plus VGtMs and MToF) and couldn't see that CR was ever changed.I did, however, notice that some of the ancient dragons had non-standard XP values before errata. This makes me wonder if they actually use something like [USER=7040979]@tomedunn[/USER] 's XP-based formula and just round the XP to fit the defined CR value. There must be some explanation for why someone typed in all of those different and incorrect/non-standard XP values. I did test the XP-based formula briefly, and it wasn't working out with the real low CR critters, but that doesn't mean they don't have a slightly different version of something like it that they use.</blockquote>

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