Borne partly out of frustration that the D&D Next playtest packets don't provide practical information on monster construction and partly out of terminal curiosity about how monsters in "Next" fit together Surf has spent far more time than he should tinkering in Excel...
What did he come up with?
Yes, silly old me has punched raw monster and character data from the last few playtest packets into Excel and then tinkered away. I'm not a statistician or in any way a math specialist... Just a guy who works with databases for a living. But to be perfectly honest it's not that complicated. An eye for patterns in numbers and a bit of determination are all that is really required.
Now I could have just posted some tables of stats for building monsters… After all I have finished the entire analysis and I do have those tables. But it’s nice to go carefully back through my work and check it as part of the process of documenting it.
And besides, I spent all those scores of hours on this thing. I may as well subject the rest of you to it too… I mean, I might as well share the details of my explorations with you all.
The material in this series of articles are based on the data in the June 2013 packet. I may post updates if changes in forthcoming packets suggest a need and if demand is evident.
So what will we be doing in this series of articles? We'll be pulling apart some of the math underpinning D&D Next and working out how monsters math works. We'll use that to make some tables we can use when we build our own monsters.
Here's a quick map of what the series will cover...
- Part 1: Getting Started
- Part 2: Class Analysis
- Part 3: Monster Data Entry
- Part 4: AC Analysis
- Interlude: A New Packet
- Part 5: Attack Bonus Analysis
- Part 6: Hitpoint Analysis
- Part 7: Damage Analysis
- Part 8: Putting It All Together
- Part 9: XP Table review
- Part 10: Final Packet Analysis
- Part 11: Rebooting The Math: Introduction
- Part 12: Rebooting The Math: AC Review
- Part 13: Rebooting The Math: Hitpoint Review
- Part 14: Rebooting The Math: Attack Bonus Review
- Part 15: Rebooting The Math: Damage Review
- Part 16: Rebooting The Math: Consolidation
Hopefully you'll enjoy reading these articles as much as I enjoyed the analysis...
Check back tomorrow for the next post – Part 2: Class Development Profiling...
