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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 3997816" data-attributes="member: 710">Well, our group used to say that the actual CR of a monster was its listed CR + Monster Manual Number. (Though I'd say the formula is closer to 1d6-4 + Monster Manual #). But boy, have you ever looked at non-WotC monsters? How off they sometimes were?- Okay, let's take the Gargoyle, slap on some HD and to compensate, reduce its CR by 1.- Let's take a monster with n HD and give it a spell-like abilities whose caster level is equal to its HD, then give it a spell that's effect is 100 % dependend on the relation caster level to targets HD/level, and then give it's a CR 4 or more points below its HD. (But to be fair, that might be an actual usage of RAW)The 1st example is just general incompetence (and unfortunately, it wasn't the only one that caught my eyes), the second one is an example where the 3E "transparency" and guidelines to create monsters just failed. The rules for applying templates are a very cool tool for creating monsters, but the whole system fails because the numbers don't "try" to meet reasonable benchmarks.</blockquote>