D&D 5E Which monster saves are weakest: Saving throw analyzer

[Ruin Explorer]

Wow, this is absolutely fascinating, thank you.

I do wish you could cut off at CR20, or somehow reshape the table so that the higher CRs, which have so few monsters in them, took up less of the table and the lower CRs, which have so many monsters in them, took up more.

But it shows very clearly that DEX is a surprisingly great thing to target, and STR and CON are pretty bad ones, which is something I'd sensed but couldn't actually prove.

 

[Hemlock]

Wow, this is absolutely fascinating, thank you.

I do wish you could cut off at CR20, or somehow reshape the table so that the higher CRs, which have so few monsters in them, took up less of the table and the lower CRs, which have so many monsters in them, took up more.

You can actually, using Plotly's Zoom control to zoom in on a specific range:

However, I'm currently working on displaying encounters instead of just monsters, so you'll have a graph of (for example) what a bunch of randomly-generated 20th level encounters using Xanathar's encounter rules (pg 90) look like, from a saving throw perspective. I suspect that's more what you're interested in than just CRs 1-20. It's certainly what I'm more interested in, since mobs are actually deadlier IME than solo monsters in 5E.

But it shows very clearly that DEX is a surprisingly great thing to target, and STR and CON are pretty bad ones, which is something I'd sensed but couldn't actually prove.

It makes me happy that you're gaining new insights from the tool. Thanks for the kind words!

 

[Mistwell]

@Treantmonklvl20 might like this.

 

[Hemlock]

I made a couple of small enhancements to the saving throw analyzer:

(1) You can now analyze randomly-generated encounters under Xanathar's rules, DMG rules, or my modified DMG rules which give less unbalanced encounters for low-CR monsters, using Lanchester's 3/2 Law of Combat, which is what the DMG rules are apparently a simplified version of.

(2) You can now set tags like "Fire Damage, Save for Half" or "Charmed" on your attacks to see how that changes overall effectiveness, since some monsters are vulnerable, resistant or immune to certain attacks.

For instance, if I've set my filters to only undead, a normal Wisdom save graph would look like this:

However, if I'm contemplating a spell like Hypnotic Pattern, many undead are actually immune to being charmed and will be unaffected. To see how badly the spell is impaired against undead, I set the Effect Tag "charmed" as follows:

and you can see that the graphed effectiveness drops substantially.

Limitations: the UI is still kind of ugly. Sorry. I'm not a design expert, and I'm focused more on functionality than on getting all of the text to line up prettily on each line.

Furthermore, for technical reasons, effect tags are not available on the overview screen--you have to drill down on a specific attribute (Str/Dex/Con/Int/Wis/Cha) in order to apply specific effects. I don't intend to fix this because this app has grown to a point where it's unwieldy and difficult to extend further, and because you should normally know what attribute you're interested in if you're applying a specific effect like "fire, save for half" (probably Dex).