Anyone ever try to find the average touch ac by CR?

[christos gurd]

I'm not gonna pretend im good enough at excel to try my hand at this myself but was wondering if anyone else has?

[Bob Bob Bob]

A bit old, but here's the spreadsheet for all your monster stat needs. I am not responsible for this, all credit to whoever did make it.

[MrCharisma]

Wow there's a CR17 monster with a Touch AC of -1. Crazy!

[christos gurd]

MrCharisma wrote:

Wow there's a CR17 monster with a Touch AC of -1. Crazy!

a buddy found it

[Green Smashomancer]

Lemme spitball it based on experience:

CR 1-3: 14

CR 4-5: 13

CR 6-8: 11

CR 9-11: 9

CR 12-14: 7

CR 15-17: 5 (and an out-lier apparently)

CR 18-20: -2

[MrCharisma]

christos gurd wrote:

MrCharisma wrote:

Wow there's a CR17 monster with a Touch AC of -1. Crazy!

a buddy found it

That's an adventure in itself right there.

[Lucas Yew]

So this is why those absurdly high natural armor bonuses exist in the first place...

[Ranishe]

Lucas Yew wrote:

So this is why those absurdly high natural armor bonuses exist in the first place...

Well, higher CR monsters tends to mean bigger and badder, which tends to mean higher str and lower dex (and size penalties to AC). So to make combat still challenging to full BAB martials, you'll need a really high natural armor to offset the stacked penalties to AC and go up against all the hit bonuses the party has. Class level based high CR enemies wouldn't have this problem though, such as a dex based alchemist (innate, alchemical, enhancement bonuses to dex means something like 40dex at the end of the day if you're really trying I think for 25 touch AC + any other benefits to it. Or a monk with high wis & dex although offensively that would probably be pretty lackluster).

[GM Rednal]

In fairness, at higher levels, it's pretty normal for the first attack from a character to hit. XD Stuff like AC is mostly for use against iteratives.

[Bob Bob Bob]

Lucas Yew wrote:

So this is why those absurdly high natural armor bonuses exist in the first place...

Actually, that one's a much bigger rabbit hole. It starts with AD&D, where AC capped at (effectively) 30 AC. Which was fine, because BAB wasn't a thing and so player bonuses were much, much lower. Then once everything switched to a standardized system (instead of "its AC is this arbitrary number") most higher level monster became easier to hit, not harder. The classic "highest AC" monster, the Red Dragon, currently has an AC of 0 without natural armor. -8 size, -2 Dex. And it's not going to wear armor, and it doesn't come with magic items worn standard, etc. etc. Basically, to patch monster AC into a reasonable range, they added "natural armor" to reflect all those arbitrary numbers they made up in AD&D. Sometime in 3.0 or 3.5's lifecycle they did eventually add a spell that let you convert NA to deflection (I think), I believe specifically in one of the dragon books (so meant for dragons).

But yeah, basically monsters lose touch AC as they go up in CR. Bigger monsters have less AC in general (size penalizes it) and going up in size increase Con and Str but lowers Dex (generally). And very few monsters come with an innate deflection bonus of some kind (Cthulhu and Nymphs, I think). And the trend seems to be (these numbers I don't have) that higher CR means either medium/large (and an outsider/spellcaster), or as big as possible. Which sort of makes sense, the kind of dinosaur that could challenge a CR 15 party is probably the biggest, strongest thing around.

[lemeres]

Although I think there could be room for smaller, more agile enemies.

Ninjas with high dodge bonus. Psychics that see the future and insight bonuses (since they know how to dodge beforehand). Extradimensional creatures that warp space and get deflection bonuses.

Actually, the latter two seem like they would fit in with the new occult stuff they have been releasing...