tomedunn.bsky.social
Long time D&D player, physicist, and data analysis junkie.
https://tomedunn.github.io/the-finished-book/
42 posts
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103 following
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Congratulations on a well earned retirement! I hope you've enjoyed your time working on D&D as much as I have. And I wish you the best of luck in whatever you choose to do next!
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On the topic of damage mitigation in the new MM. For the monsters appearing in both books, the number of resistances and immunities to non-physical damage types increased by only 2. For physical damage types, the number dropped by 157 (i.e., about 52 monster losing physical damage mitigation).
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Awesome summary! I think you really highlighted why it's so difficult to write a concise set of monster creation rules for 5e. It's not that the underlying math is overly complex, it's that the design space is wide open, and nearly everything a monster does contributes to it.
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Kinda, but it's complicated. The new encounter rules don't use an XP multiplier, so they either underestimate the difficulty of encounters with several monsters, or they overestimate it for encounters with just one monster. If it's the later, having stronger legendary monsters will help fix that.
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The improvement in consistency for non-legendary monsters is impressive, but not nearly as impressive as the improvement to legendary monsters! The width of the distribution for 2024 monsters is half that of 2014 monsters, which should make for a much more consistent experience in play.
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I really enjoyed this. It's such a fascinating and broad topic. The video flew by and there was still so much more it could have covered.
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This is something that came up in my series on adventuring day XP budgets. For a single encounter your average party can easily handle 40% more XP than their average across a day with 3+ encounters. Magic items can boost that another 25-75%.
tomedunn.github.io/the-finished...
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A kindred spirit!
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The analysis is done. Time to start writing. I'm hoping to have something finished in time for the official release on the 18th, but I'm generally a very slow writer.
In the meantime, here's a high level summary. Non-legendary monsters didn't change, but legendary monsters got stronger stronger!
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All monsters have been processed. Time to begin analyzing all the new data!
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400 down, only 100 left to go! And they're all low CR, so it should go pretty quickly. I'm still really enjoying the updated monster stat blocks. To be honest, I was expecting an update similar to Monsters of the Multiverse, but the #DnD5e team did so much more for this one. Really impressive.
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250 monsters down, 250 still to go. That's half way! A few of the trends have definitely changed from 2014. Higher CR monsters are doing a bit more damage, but their saving throw bonuses are weaker. I can't wait until I'm done and I can do a full analysis of the changes.
#dnd #dnd5e
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From my calculations, the 2014 Rakshasa was the weakest monster relative to its CR out of the whole Monster Manual. The 2024 version comes in right above its CR. It's easily the most improved monster on numbers alone.
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Flapjack's House of Flumphs
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Good things are worth waiting for.
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Only one book and 71 monsters left!
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We came up with a game of Bingo based on common phrases our math teacher said. And, instead of saying Bingo, when you won you had to ask "is this going to be on the final?"