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<blockquote data-quote="Steady Vane" data-source="post: 9597455" data-attributes="member: 7051331">Hey so I was using the average real values by CR from Blog of Holding and Forge of Foes. That was the data points lol, the DMG guidelines are kind of skewed from what monsters turned out to be. You can technically get to the printed monster stats by following the DMG guidelines but it takes a lot of fiddling, so the table is not the true averages by CR.As for getting damage from spell comparisons, there's a bit of art and a bit of science to it. The easiest is when a spell has a clear cutout for the effect's damage, like in Tasha's Mind Whip. Past that it gets funky quick. Mostly because while there are clearly laid out rules for damage spells, the criteria for where a purely non-damaging spell may end up seems a little arbitrary and can account for other spell factors. For example, power word: stun auto-applies under certain conditions. That would affect its &quot;psuedo&quot; damage; but it remains unclear how it would do so precisely. Or Thunderwave, level 1 spells do slightly too much damage, but if valued as a single-target spell as if used by a caster to knock away melee enemies, then the push effect would be &quot;worth&quot; 1d4 damage. But as an AoE, would that be only 1 damage per target? Is that even the correct value to be aiming for? Like I said, it gets funky quick if the spell is not super straightforward with the same exact use case. Namely single target, no effect on save.Part of this is also some spells, such as the aforementioned power word stun, got changed in 5.24, and we can compare discrepancies. WOTC seemed to think Power Word: Stun did too little in the base 5e version, and made it have a negative on a &quot;save&quot;. So even comparing spells, clearly some spells are valued more correctly than others. Or maybe not.Since this mechanism exists I don't know why this guidance wasn't published in the DMG 'making a spell' section. It'd be much easier than all this guesswork</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Steady Vane, post: 9597455, member: 7051331"] Hey so I was using the average real values by CR from Blog of Holding and Forge of Foes. That was the data points lol, the DMG guidelines are kind of skewed from what monsters turned out to be. You can technically get to the printed monster stats by following the DMG guidelines but it takes a lot of fiddling, so the table is not the true averages by CR. As for getting damage from spell comparisons, there's a bit of art and a bit of science to it. The easiest is when a spell has a clear cutout for the effect's damage, like in Tasha's Mind Whip. Past that it gets funky quick. Mostly because while there are clearly laid out rules for damage spells, the criteria for where a purely non-damaging spell may end up seems a little arbitrary and can account for other spell factors. For example, power word: stun auto-applies under certain conditions. That would affect its "psuedo" damage; but it remains unclear how it would do so precisely. Or Thunderwave, level 1 spells do slightly too much damage, but if valued as a single-target spell as if used by a caster to knock away melee enemies, then the push effect would be "worth" 1d4 damage. But as an AoE, would that be only 1 damage per target? Is that even the correct value to be aiming for? Like I said, it gets funky quick if the spell is not super straightforward with the same exact use case. Namely single target, no effect on save. Part of this is also some spells, such as the aforementioned power word stun, got changed in 5.24, and we can compare discrepancies. WOTC seemed to think Power Word: Stun did too little in the base 5e version, and made it have a negative on a "save". So even comparing spells, clearly some spells are valued more correctly than others. Or maybe not. Since this mechanism exists I don't know why this guidance wasn't published in the DMG 'making a spell' section. It'd be much easier than all this guesswork [/QUOTE]

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