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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 9835495" data-attributes="member: 6677017">That's very useful stuff!tomedunn, I think I've finally figured out basically what's going on with the two main equations, even though your mathematical derivations are way above my skills. It's funny, because I got there from looking at my equations (the ones that just directly have the AC modify HP and AB modify HP and then multiply both sides together), and realizing that--assuming I have the right assumed chances to hit connected to the AC and AB, and that the 0.25 multiplier is accurate, those values should be absolutely correct. No approximation is even involved. And, while they give close results, they aren't absolutely correct, so (in addition to the fact that I probably haven't nailed down the correct variables yet), WotC might have intentionally used an approximation rather than the most accurate formula.And why might they do such a thing? Well, I can think of two reasons that were apparent from what I was doing. The first is that with the values I was using, if effective AC goes beyond 25 you get division by zero, and then the whole XP result flips to a negative number. While I expect even if I couldn't create a formula to dodge that issue, a graph could be made which would provide consistent values beyond AC 25. Now AC 25 sounds significant because it actually is the highest AC any monster in the game has--and that's probably by design. But if you don't allow Effective AC to go higher than it after including saves and all of those other bonuses, you will significantly under CR those high level monsters who have a lot of AC boosting features. The second reason is that the 100% calculations (assuming correct variables) grant slightly more XP from AC being above the baseline than they do for AB being above the baseline. And that doesn't seem entirely desirable. Maybe they just wanted AC and AB to have an equal effect and approximated to make that happen.So, I thought of a couple ways to approximate...and lo and behold, the first one is in the form of your linear equation, and from a real close examination of the math of the non-approximated version, I could see how your exponential version might approximate it better (and I came to this from the next thing I'm going to bring up).And now come to the thought I was actually posting to share today. We know that the 65% hit chance it really solid for PCs, and we even know why--but maybe that's not actually the assumption they used for monsters!So, the reason for the 65% hit chance is psychological. Players need to have a 2 to 1 chance to hit to feel like they hit more often than they miss. Just a 55% chance feels like they miss more, even though they don't.But for the monsters, it seems reasonable that the psychology would work the same way in reverse. If a monster has a 65% hit chance, the players will probably feel like monsters basically always hit. It just doesn't feel the same coming from the other direction. If they want the players to feel like the monsters are hitting more often than they miss, but not by a huge margin, they need to drop that number. So maybe they actually used a monster hit chance baseline of something more like 55%.</blockquote>

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