Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 shintashi Jun 04, 2015 12:07:39	Here's the thing about critical hits. Keep it Simple. Sure, simple critical hits like in the ancient days are going to crank out more damage. But so will the enemies.   Back in the day, we used to simply double the total damage on critical hit. A 1 always missed, and a 20 always hit, and did double damage. Simple, effective. Back in the day, dragons only had like 50-100 hit points or so. Nowadays they have several hundred. Most monsters in 5th edition have more hit points than the earliest editions, so the concern over "game breaking damage" from doubling bonuses is a bit paranoid.   Now, to a direct point of experience. Our game of 12-  yes twelve + players ran for months doing weekly sessions thinking "a critical doubles damage". Same rule applied to monsters and it made adamantium armor prized. (only one person in our group eventually got adamantium armor, we are level 12). It is sad and funny because the convoluted critical rules from 3e+ are one of the things I didn't like, and one of the selling points for getting me back into D&D. Then last night, a brief discussion about how criticals only double the number of dice you roll came into effect. Basically, it totally revamps the way damage is set up.   See, if you double total damage, something like a fighter or barbarian with a belt of giant strength yields like 5 extra damage per critical hit. That makes the belts prized and warrior types respectable. We know rogues will clear better results with their damage dice bonuses, but it doesn't bother the warriors much because they figure with an enchanted sword +2 or so, and various other bonuses, their critical hits are almost as good.   But when you limit it to dice only, then you basically have the rogues getting around 16-20d6 damage, and at that point they don't try for stat bonuses. We are talking about +24-40 damage for the rogues vs. +5-8 for warriors. Now everyone wants multi-dice weapons and dice bonuses, and point bonuses are crap.    Also, the game takes longer as the people scrounge for more D8s, D4s, and so on.   It's really simple to add a tiny box somewhere in a supplement that says Critical Hits can be simplied to double damage total, including bonuses, instead of nitpicking dice. It also avoids excessive favoritism of dice-high characters vs. bonus-high characters.
#2 MechaPilot Jun 04, 2015 12:14:24	shintashi wrote:
#3 mellored Jun 04, 2015 12:23:28	shintashi wrote:
#4 Tempest_Stormwind Jun 04, 2015 12:26:18	shintashi wrote:
#5 shintashi Jun 04, 2015 13:14:14	actually I watched people viscerally irritated rolling more dice. For my part, I rolled lots of 1's and no criticals in my session, so my visceral experiences were nonexistent. My hearing and eyes were fully functional however when i saw the disappointment in both players and DMs at the rules clarification of nerfed criticals. Our sessions are short and our groups are large, if everything does more damage faster, it just makes for a more fluid game, but we are tied down by strict adherance to rules lawyering. It's particularly sad because many of us remember editions where the rules operated the way we wanted.
#6 jaelis Jun 04, 2015 13:46:37	mellored wrote:
#7 Istbor Jun 04, 2015 14:28:58	shintashi wrote:
#8 ChrisCarlson Jun 04, 2015 17:13:30	shintashi wrote:
#9 Slit518 Jun 04, 2015 18:04:00	ChrisCarlson wrote:
#10 mrpopstar Jun 04, 2015 20:09:50	I've always been a fan of the simple 'max damage' approach to critical hits.   Multipliers, double dice, etc., just seem to complicate matters unnecessarily.
#11 AaronOfBarbaria Jun 04, 2015 20:33:38	You want simple and actually good for game predictability and balance? Remove critical hits entirely. No extra rolling, no extra math, no 5% chance the attack is twice (or more) deadly than expected.
#12 Coredump00 Jun 04, 2015 20:35:28	I give players a choice, max damage or roll double.   Do ya feel lucky...???
#13 lawrencehoy Jun 04, 2015 22:16:06	I give players the choice of RAW or using the Good Hits and Bad Misses tables, from Dragon Magazine (#39); they very rarely go RAW.   EDIT: addressing the OP, it is an option, via DM decision.
#14 Delazar78 Jun 05, 2015 2:27:41	mellored wrote:
#15 Rya.Reisender Jun 05, 2015 4:21:21	Hmm, I like the idea of critical dealing max damage instead of having to reroll dice. Any idea how well accepted this system is by 5e players?
(Reply to #15) AaronOfBarbaria	Rya.Reisender wrote:
(Reply to #11) CCS	AaronOfBarbaria wrote:
#18 FFSAA Jun 05, 2015 10:34:42	AaronOfBarbaria wrote:
(Reply to #18) CCS	FFSAA wrote:
(Reply to #13) draegn	lawrencehoy wrote:
#21 RCanine Jun 06, 2015 8:23:54	Rya.Reisender wrote:
(Reply to #19) AaronOfBarbaria	CCS wrote:
(Reply to #21) CCS	CCS wrote:
#24 GhostStepper Jun 06, 2015 14:31:03	Statistically, the DM is going to be rolling A LOT more crits than any one player over the course of a game. The DM is technically getting more "for free" out of critical hits than the players are.   I think part of the reason many don't like critical failures on attack rolls is that they've played the default rule sets forever without them. Adding them later on feels like a "nerf" or "punishment".
(Reply to #24) Farmer42	GhostStepper wrote:
#26 Karnos Jun 07, 2015 5:03:43	Critical failures on 1 are bad because they penalize the best fights more than anyone else. A fighter with 4 attacks per round is going to see a lot more 1 rolls than a cleric or rouge with 1 attack per round. The so-called master of combat is going to be stumbling and hitting allies far more often than anyone else, it's really pretty silly.  I'd never use critical faulures on 1 in any game I run.
#27 GhostStepper Jun 07, 2015 8:39:01	Karnos wrote:
#28 Noon Jun 07, 2015 17:49:03	Terrible observation.
#29 Xeviat-DM Jun 09, 2015 2:24:17	Spells with attack rolls can crit.
#30 shintashi Jun 09, 2015 12:12:02	criticals effect all sides of the game, both the DM controlled monsters and the player characters. It influences the community heavy players and the players who secretly plot to rob their "friends" blind after stabbing them to death in their sleep. It effects dragons and wizards, warlocks and demons, fighters and paladins. In other words, no matter what you do to criticals, it doesn't favor "players" or "good" or 'evil' or "DM run monsters". In that regard it is neutral.   What it does effect is speed of play, cost of expected dice, and how many people you can have at a table. It directly effects which classes a person might want to take, and influences how we choose our stat and character growth. For example, the feats that add bonus damage instead of bonus dice. If you know only static damage values double, you will only take the static, if you know only dice double, you will only take the dice. Given a choice between a magical item that improves your damage bonus, and one that gives you, say +1d6 fire damage, even though the +3 is nice, the +1d6 doubles, while the +3 doesn't.   But aside from all that, there is no logical reason to segregate which damage is doubled, and which damage isn't. The only things that really change are the usefulness of specific classes that can get Stat bonuses to damage (Warlock Eldrich blast for instance), certain magical items like Giant Strength Belts, +1-3 weapons, and Adamantium Armor; and the speed of play overall.   With Dice heavy crits only, weapons like an Oathbow or Holy Avenger are among the few enchanted items that currently benefit. Clearly, that kind of item specificity will impact character design for far more people than naysayers want to admit. I've probably been to 30+ conventions and in maybe 1000+ gaming sessions, and in my humble opinion, at least 25% of all gamers are number crunchers, and will change their character design for advantage.   If the ease or complexity is a concern, Multiplying numbers by 2 is actually easier and faster than adding pools of dice.
#31 ChrisCarlson Jun 09, 2015 17:40:21	shintashi wrote:
#32 Orethalion Jun 09, 2015 18:18:16	ChrisCarlson wrote:
#33 ChrisCarlson Jun 09, 2015 19:09:14	Orethalion wrote:
#34 Xeviat-DM Jun 09, 2015 19:31:09	I'm not sure I can side with the general concensus here. I think the point is being missed.   The safe arguement seems to be that characters in 5E are too fragile for straight up double damage critical hits. Yet, many affects that are levied against PCs do double damage: spells with attack rolls. These are fewer than standard attacks or saving throw spells, but they do exist. Is the arguement then that spells with attacks rolls deal sufficiently lower damage or are so rare so as to be ignored? Monster damage modifiers rarely fall outside of the +2 to +5 window, so I argue that doubling it is largely meaningless in the grand scheme of things when compared to things like a bullet's 4d12+4 damage or a bugbear's surprise attack 2d8+3+2d6.   And the point about criticals effecting everyone evenly; I think the point being made isn't just that everyone can be crited and take damage from crits, but that players both feel bad from crits (when they're against them) or feel good with crits. The current crit rules, though, allow for dumb stuff to happen like the +1 damage crits I saw rolled during my last session; that's boring. If modifiers were doubled, then at least a 1d8+3 damage attack would crit for a minimum of 8 instead of a minimum of 5.