Hey all,
I needed to figure out the average number of attacks a creature of a given CR would be doing for some design work of mine, and thought I'd share the results. Where the numbers came from:
d20PFSRD's Monster DB. Big page, so don't open it unless you're curious. Attacks came from here.
Table 1-1: Monster Statistics By CR. Damage values (which assume all attacks hit) came from here.
Wrote a program (not going to release it, sorry!) to parse the Monster DB, and get the CR and Melee / Ranged attacks each monster had.
From there, through trial and error I was able to parse the melee and ranged lines to figure out how many attacks each monster got, taking into consideration things like "or" (and in that case, taking whichever had more attacks), commas, iteratives, etc. The heuristics aren't perfect. In fact, to preserve sanity, I just hardcoded all the natural attacks in, and checked to see if the attack was one of those or not. So any non-standard natural attacks may not count right.
Regardless, there are 2843 monsters in the DB, and I'm now fairly confident that my numbers are about right. If they aren't, the number of wrong numbers probably won't influence the averages too much. These numbers are rounded to the nearest whole number. For example, CR 20 is actually 4.93, not 5. But that's a lot closer to 5 than it is 4, so it rounds up.
Any CRs less than 1 were rolled into 0, which isn't displayed here. Any CRs greater than 20 were rolled into 20, since the reason why I needed these only needed to go up to 20.
Much like Table 1-1, this assumes all attacks hit.
CR Base Dmg Avg Attacks Avg Damage Per Attack
CR 01 Base Dmg: 7 Avg Attacks: 1 Avg Damage Per Attack: 7
CR 02 Base Dmg: 10 Avg Attacks: 2 Avg Damage Per Attack: 5
CR 03 Base Dmg: 13 Avg Attacks: 2 Avg Damage Per Attack: 6.5
CR 04 Base Dmg: 16 Avg Attacks: 2 Avg Damage Per Attack: 8
CR 05 Base Dmg: 20 Avg Attacks: 2 Avg Damage Per Attack: 10
CR 06 Base Dmg: 25 Avg Attacks: 2 Avg Damage Per Attack: 12.5
CR 07 Base Dmg: 30 Avg Attacks: 2 Avg Damage Per Attack: 15
CR 08 Base Dmg: 35 Avg Attacks: 3 Avg Damage Per Attack: 11.6666666666667
CR 09 Base Dmg: 40 Avg Attacks: 3 Avg Damage Per Attack: 13.3333333333333
CR 10 Base Dmg: 45 Avg Attacks: 3 Avg Damage Per Attack: 15
CR 11 Base Dmg: 50 Avg Attacks: 3 Avg Damage Per Attack: 16.6666666666667
CR 12 Base Dmg: 55 Avg Attacks: 3 Avg Damage Per Attack: 18.3333333333333
CR 13 Base Dmg: 60 Avg Attacks: 4 Avg Damage Per Attack: 15
CR 14 Base Dmg: 65 Avg Attacks: 4 Avg Damage Per Attack: 16.25
CR 15 Base Dmg: 70 Avg Attacks: 4 Avg Damage Per Attack: 17.5
CR 16 Base Dmg: 80 Avg Attacks: 4 Avg Damage Per Attack: 20
CR 17 Base Dmg: 90 Avg Attacks: 4 Avg Damage Per Attack: 22.5
CR 18 Base Dmg: 100 Avg Attacks: 5 Avg Damage Per Attack: 20
CR 19 Base Dmg: 110 Avg Attacks: 5 Avg Damage Per Attack: 22
CR 20 Base Dmg: 120 Avg Attacks: 5 Avg Damage Per Attack: 24
Of course, now that I posted this, people are going to find all the problems with it, but oh well :)
This is sort of a continuation of this post (optimized CRB only fighter's DPR) and this post (non-optimized CRB only fighter's DPR).
(Thanks to Oladon and Mark Seifter/Rogue Eidolon for the help!)
Yes and No! I just copied the damage values exactly from the Monster Statistics by CR table, and these are the numbers that monsters are supposed to match. Or be really close to. So that's already taken care of!
Oladon is working on getting a roughly "true" average damage.
Of course, now that I posted this, people are going to find all the problems with it, but oh well :)
Since you asked...
The information could be useful in the right situations, and I like the compact size. The only issue I can see is that it includes every monster, so the numbers are abstract in a sense. We now have enough monsters in PF that there are a great many that may never see the combat mat more than once of twice ever, and we have the popular "classics" that are used on a regular basis. Of course since every gaming table is different, using your opinions to create a chart with that kind of information in mind would result in ten times the criticism this one will.
Well, the way to do that would be to cross reference the monster names that are in the Monster Roles section under Combat.
Which I suppose would be easy enough... Hmm.
dot
Me Troll brain small. Final column please average damage? Multiply multiply get headache.
(Also, most-final column average damage divide three. Then me finally have answer to "How many housecats killed by full attack at each CR?" Huzzah!)
It would be interesting to see how different tables compare. Such as this first chart vs popular classic monsters vs bestiary 1 only. I would like to think the numbers are all pretty close, but that could just be a fool talking.
How many house cats? Depends on number of attacks, feat selection, and how many kitties fit into the monster's reach. Damage per attack wouldn't make a difference.
Cool! dot