This isn’t a very good analysis, and is not particularly deep, but seeing as I had the book sitting on my hard-drive, I decided to have a look at the Armour Classes of creatures within…

Here’s the count of Armour Classes of each number.

It’s a bit odd seeing the spikes on AC 6 and AC 0, mucking up what would otherwise be a nicely-shaped table.

When I was doing this count, I ignored every age of dragon except the default. If I had included every age of dragons, there would be a lot more negative Armour Classes, as they range up to 8 superior to the original value! (More than one Great Wyrm has an AC of -10 or better).

Meanwhile, I also recorded how much XP they’re worth. Here’s that analysis, with a fairly inaccurate trendline thrown in.

As you can see, there’s a wide range of values in the early monster levels, and the trendline is based on very little date at the lower points.

(Most monsters tend to be in the range 0-2000 XP in any case… and little can be gained from monsters in that range. Here’s a close-up of only that data:

There is little relationship between XP and AC in this range.

For a random selection of monsters, this is what you get. A more interesting analysis would be done on the Monstrous Manual – and I’ll get to that in the near future.