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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 9866858" data-attributes="member: 6677017">The more I thought about it, the more skeptical I became that something like that actually affects CR. Too many other things that don't but should affect CR if that were the case, and the list of actual toggles to turn on seems woefully inadequate.Anomalies caused by data entry errors are the bane of this whole project. With hundreds of stat blocks or more, there are almost certainly going to be at least a few straight up mistakes like that, where someone typed the wrong thing or forgot to round correctly.But now that I have a formula that I think is likely to work, and I'm starting to test it out to identify how individual features work, I'll run into more of them, and I'll have to try to explain them. I'm much more comfortable with anomalies when I can see, "Ah, here's where they may have made a simple mistake!"The equation I'm going to use to see what I can determine is:[ATTACH=full]430486[/ATTACH]I derived that formula by trying a lot of different variants of it (and a couple different types of formulas) and adding a new element into my analysis: 2024 versions of the basic monsters. I did this because, while some of the rules have changed, I bet they still use the same equation. Turns out, while there are some basic monsters that aren't basic in 2024 (because they impose conditions), the equation works for almost all of the other one: including the blights, the grimlock, and the myconid sprout! The only one it doesn't work for is the cyclops.That formula works for all of the 2014 monsters except the blights and the myconid sprout. (You may remember that I had to choose between whether the grimlock or the sprout didn't work, and went with grimlock just because I liked the look of an equation a bit better, but this new evidence changed that.)The cyclops not working in 2024 can be explained as a mistake if they were assuming that it still worked like 2014 and you could make 2 club attacks OR 1 rock. The damage is too high because of being able to throw 2 rocks. It works with 2 club attacks if you assume that imposing the Prone condition is worth 4 hp or less virtual damage, or if they only count doing it once (since it's probably not very effective to divide your attacks between 2 PCs).That leaves all the remaining basic monsters working in 2024 (minus the 9 that don't exist or became non-basic).So for 2014, the focus of this work, that just leaves the blights. The twig blight came out in the Basic Rules 2 or 3 months before the MM, so it's possible that they hadn't fully refined the formula yet. If I start seeing some other anomalies in monsters that are in the initial Basic Rules, I can look into that. The needle blight didn't come out until the MM, so it doesn't have that potential explanation.For purposes of plausible explanations so I can continue to move on, I assumed the twig blight was mistakenly given one less HD than it should have (which fixes it, and is what 2024 does). I further assumed that they wanted there to be a relationship between the twig, needle, and vine blights, where they are CR 1/8, 1/4, and 1/2. Since they never change the CR on a monster and the twig blight's actual CR (with this formula) is less than its listed one, they had to do the same thing with the needle blight to get that. (If you give needle blight another HD without doing that to twig, it could throw off the intended balance between them.) It's a stretch to get that specific on how they might have messed up 2 of the blights, but given that the equation works just fine with 2024, I'm going to accept it for now and move on.There are other reasons I really like that formula compared to all the many other ones I've attempted, including how it compares to the "accurate" formula I played with where you directly adjust HP by hit chance, and AC by to be hit chance instead of approximating it by adding AC and AB (as the above equation does).</blockquote>

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