Thanks to several days worth of insomnia, I finished a spreadsheet comparing the "Monster Statistics by CR" chart on p. 291 of the Bestiary with the actual monsters in the Bestiary. It has given me greater insight as to what is deemed "allowable" for monsters of certain CRs, and more confidence in my ability to make mine own monsters.
The spreadsheet is in Open Document Spreadsheet form, made in OpenOffice. It should open in Excel 2010, although you'll lose the conditional formatting (highlighting stats that are particularly high or low compared to the chart).
Conclusions I've made:
- Oozes and constructs don't fit the chart.
- Monsters often have attack bonuses, damage amounts, and/or save DCs that are "too high".
- Monsters occasionally have low saves that are "too low", particularly at higher CRs.
Other people might find the spreadsheet useful, and I'm interested in what other people might think about it. And there's a challenge: [at least] one of the monsters is listed under the wrong CR, according to the stat block. Can you find it? [It had the wrong CR in the "Monsters by CR" index in the back.]
Awesome! Thanks!
What is ROW ONE and TWO though? Row two is labeled as table, but has ranges of numbers (which I don't recall ever seeing on the table).
I assume the bottom row are averages of all the monsters?
Neat!
Awesome! Thanks!
What is ROW ONE and TWO though? Row two is labeled as table, but has ranges of numbers (which I don't recall ever seeing on the table).
I assume the bottom row are averages of all the monsters?
Row two has the numbers from the table. The table has some stats split up into two columns (such as "high average damage" and "low average damage") that I merged into one column for analysis purposes, so those are entered as ranges.
Row one has the mid value of the ranges, so the numerical calculations can be done.
And yes, the bottom row is the average value for all the monsters in the sheet for that column.