Conversely, why should I as a player participate in a story that's already most predetermined or only has occasional unknowns? I don't play D&D to help the DM write their novel.
With respect, it's not the DM writing a novel. It's the DM helping the players facilitate their story. You take a different approach, and that's fine, but...I understand you're trying to be respectful, but please understand this comes off as kind of dismissive...
Well, first accept my apology and regret. I was not intending to be dismissive but you know what they say about good intentions.
Next: I was responding to Ophidimancer's post wherein they say (emphasis mine):
I build my campaigns based on PC back stories and have character arcs planned for them.
...which, to me, feels like the DM writing the story and moving the players along as they want, rather than allowing for more fluidity and flexibility (especially in terms of character choices affecting the world and their own fates/outcomes).
I've been saying repeatedly that I really think most of the debate around critical hits arises from how someone views the game - what's fun for them? what's the goal? what style of DMing and "plot" (for lack of a better word) advancement do you want?
I personally like a healthy mix of planned (but not rigidly set or unyielding) adventures and missions and player choice. As Colville talks about in his DMing videos, there's great fun to be had in letting the players "mess things up" and really thinking about the affects of their choices, their successes, their failures. And it goes the other way (for me): unexpected, "little" things can affect the PCs, too, in just the same way.
My impression - hardly scientific or backed by any real data - is that a lot of folks who came to D&D with 5E or much more recent editions (I've been playing since the days of 1E) simply don't enjoy a game wherein character permadeath is a constant danger. And that's fine! As we're seeing with the tone and style of recent official adventures, gritty, deadly combat certainly isn't the only way to RP or to experience the game, nor is it always the best!
My experience, though, has shown that when players sense they have plot armor, it makes the game less fun and less, for lack of a better word, "real."
No need to apologize. I can't tell you how many times I've shoved my foot in my mouth around here.
I get where Ophidimancer is coming from. I have a number of important events planned for my player's backstories with a general idea of where they might go. If they make a decision I don't anticipate, no biggie, I just roll with the flow and adjust my plans accordingly. Ohpid's probably more character-death averse than I am, and I'm probably more averse to it than you are.
One of the things that irks me about optional rules in 5e, is that so many are shoved in the back of the DMG like an afterthought, it's easy to forget they're there. I'd rather see the default rules with their variants listed right next to them.
But this idea - that DMs are supposed to try and lose battles - that's pretty antithetical to how I run and view the game. And it's certainly not want I want as a player running PCs, either.
There's a difference between trying to lose battles, and designing battles such that they'll be lost. As a DM, I set most fights at a difficulty I expect the PCs to beat, but then play the monsters to win (I'm not always right about what my PCs can beat, which gives me a bit of a killer DM reputation). However, at low levels, due to the fragility and randomness of low level PCs, it's hard to make fights that are challenging-but-beatable, and cutting down on things like crits does help with that.
Case in point: there's a Baba Yaga type entity in my campaign world - she's likely an end-campaign boss in terms of power. She has many covens of hags doing her bidding, and they've become aware of the party. When they venture out into the wilds, it's a high probability that they're going to clash with at least one coven (which registers to the party as "random" encounter). One or more characters could die from such an encounter, as the hags aren't there to take prisoners. Will that ruin any larger arcs I have planned? Nope. Will it possibly affect them and alter them? Sure!
This is exactly what I meant by a warranted scene.
Your players have displeased a greater being to the point of its followers trying to kill the party. It may be a "random encounter" for your party, but a PC death to such an encounter would be warranted in my mind.
First, a summary for those who've been living under a rock for the last couple of days.
Part of the Character Origins playtest document for the new 'One D&D' ruleset is an experimental change to the rules for critical hits. This change has three primary components:
Critical hits only apply to weapon and Unarmed attacks - spells cannot crit, even if they make an attack roll instead of imposing a save.
Critical hits only apply to weapon damage. You roll the damage die of the weapon that crit a second time and add the damage. This discludes things like a rogue's Sneak Attack and a paladin's Smite from critical hit calculations.
Critical hits can only be rolled by players. Monsters/NPCs cannot, by default, crit.
This response to a poor decision for the majority of classes in the game is exactly why players avoided certain editions of the game. Anything that makes combat take longer and devalues certain classes will drive new and old players away from the game. There is no need to play test this change to know that it is going to cripple Rogues and Paladins. Casters are getting shafted from the damage role and told to be utility or healers. If you can't see that the new critical hit system is bad then you haven't played a class that is being hurt by this. The fact that anyone who plays D&D would want to play in a world where rolling a Nat 20 is just a hit is depressing.
That is a lovely tone to set. You know what I think is... interesting? A person that thinks that playing to lose and playing monsters to their "full capability" are mutually exclusive objectives for a DM. You know what I think is... interesting? A DM who does not place player fun as the first and most important goal for the DM. My DMing choices are not quaint or out of touch with the spirit of the game. They are deliberate choices meant to challenge my players, while at the same time considering their needs. I put them, the players, at the center of everything I do as a DM.
When I DM, my goal is to run the monsters to their full capabilities as written. And a LOT of monsters I'm only now understanding how to use strategically and cleverly. (The better I understand the rules of the game, the more I admire how a lot of monsters were constructed. There are a good number of critters that may not look too fancy or intimidating but run well, they can be quite the nasty challenge.) My monsters don't always have the same goals. Some want to kill. Some want to capture. Some want to intimidate."
Nothing here is novel. Most DMs are familiar with the concept of monsters with unique goals and motivations, and run them to the best of the monster's abilities as well. Most DMs know this, even awful ones.
I think it's the DM's job to run the monsters as best as they can to try and achieve the monsters' goal. If the monsters' goals are to kill/eat/destroy the characters, then I do my best to do that. It isn't always - I do try to think about what the monsters actually want. But I certainly don't run them in a way to guarantee they'll lose the fight.
The DM knows more than the monsters they run literally always. Running the monsters as best as the DM can, with their virtually infinite knowledge of all things in the game, is hardly demonstrating any kind of tactical genius and actually risks eclipsing what the monsters are truly capable of in character. I do not run monsters to the best of their capabilities, I run them in a way that I believe to be within the individual limitations of the monster. I also take into account my players - their goals and their play style. I then build encounters that can almost always be won by them and when they cannot, I make sure that the players are made aware with some narrative information and they have a chance to think about whether they want to have that fight. In most cases, TPKs are not fun for anyone but the bad DM. I create scenarios that can challenge my players and even put their PC's lives at risk, but they almost always can be won by design because I do not have fun when the people at my table are not having fun. My hope is that the players at my table feel like heroes, not passengers in a DM's meat-grinder "novel".
But this idea - that DMs are supposed to try and lose battles - that's pretty antithetical to how I run and view the game. And it's certainly not want I want as a player running PCs, either.
Run a game however you want, but the implication that I am somehow "playing wrong" because player fun is a foreign concept to you, or at least secondary to you, is unflattering commentary on your own DMing style rather than any kind of negative reflection on mine.
I build my campaigns based on PC back stories and have character arcs planned for them.
...which, to me, feels like the DM writing the story and moving the players along as they want, rather than allowing for more fluidity and flexibility (especially in terms of character choices affecting the world and their own fates/outcomes).
Excuse me? Character choice is the backbone of my campaigns. I do not dictate, I develop the story that my players want from the themes of their character and back story. When my players create a character I take every part of their creation as a signal for what they want from the game. Beyond that I also explicitly ask what kind of themes and narratives they want to explore with their character. This is why meaningless, random death is so antithetical to my style. It just ends the story abruptly and in an unsatisfying way. It's not a tension building threat to the character, it's a cliff hanger threat to my players' fun. It is so much more satisfying to threaten the things my PCs' love, rather than just killing them.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
This response to a poor decision for the majority of classes in the game is exactly why players avoided certain editions of the game. Anything that makes combat take longer and devalues certain classes will drive new and old players away from the game. There is no need to play test this change to know that it is going to cripple Rogues and Paladins. Casters are getting shafted from the damage role and told to be utility or healers. If you can't see that the new critical hit system is bad then you haven't played a class that is being hurt by this.
You're way overstating the role of crits in combat. Yeah, rogues and paladins don't get huge burst damage if they get lucky, but they still get consistent burst damage. Most casters are barely going to notice, because all their big damage spells didn't critical in the first place.
The fact that anyone who plays D&D would want to play in a world where rolling a Nat 20 is just a hit is depressing.
You mean like original, Basic/Expert/etc, AD&D, and AD&D 2nd? I don't think it was even a guaranteed hit in most/all of them, but it's been a long, long time. I'm not saying I want to play any of them, but lack of crits isn't one of the reasons why.
But this idea - that DMs are supposed to try and lose battles - that's pretty antithetical to how I run and view the game. And it's certainly not want I want as a player running PCs, either.
There's a difference between trying to lose battles, and designing battles such that they'll be lost. As a DM, I set most fights at a difficulty I expect the PCs to beat, but then play the monsters to win (I'm not always right about what my PCs can beat, which gives me a bit of a killer DM reputation). However, at low levels, due to the fragility and randomness of low level PCs, it's hard to make fights that are challenging-but-beatable, and cutting down on things like crits does help with that.
Yes, this. I set the stage beforehand with a comparatively large front-end process so I do not have to pull punches during the encounter. There is plenty of tension during my encounters because the party knows they can die if they are sloppy or if the dice are against them. Planning to lose does not mean throwing the matches. Like you I have miscalculated, which has resulted in players rolling new characters once or twice, but killing my player's PCs is never the goal. The intended risk at my table and one I will certainly follow through with if it comes to it yes, but never the goal.
"Death is always a possibility" is a legitimate choice, but I don't think it fits the Heroic Fantasy genre. It is more a gritty and dark genre, which is an optional choice for DM's not the default genre.
My issue with this, especially in regards to critical hits, is that Heroic Fantasy doesn't start at level 1. It's why I'll always start a campaign at level 3, because anything below that can be obliterated, not just by a crit but by any high damage role.
So it appears that my responses (and some folks responses to my responses) are due to some wording issues.
Reading Erik and Pantagruel's clarifications on what they wrote above helps. I was really thrown by the phrase "try and lose the battles" (which I now know was shorthand for a more complex idea), because I never run monsters in a way that's meant to pull punches or have them act in a way that's sure to lose the battle. That's a different issue from the actual design of the encounter, which involves deciding which creatures (and how many) will be in the encounter.
We're actually all a lot closer than you might think. I absolutely do not constantly throw what the RAW would call "deadly" encounters - most of them I'm 90%+ certain the players will defeat without fear of PC death (will bring this back to the topic at hand below) - at them. I also generally do not pick intentionally easy encounters at them; I want each encounter to challenge them from both a tactical and role playing aspect, even if I'm very confident there's no real danger of permadeath.
So what Erik summarized as "trying to lose the battle" is, I think, what I would call to myself encounter design where I can run the monsters for all their worth but not in an effort to provide a deadly encounter.
Conversely, I also purposefully sometimes run encounters they absolutely cannot win (this is often the result of rolling on a random encounter table). For instance: a group of 5th level characters in a city run by mages happen to be near where a wizard has accidentally summoned a nightwalker, something there is absolutely no way they can defeat. But what I do NOT do is force them to fight, and give them ample (and more than fair) opportunity to avoid the fight. If they make a good faith effort to hide, retreat, etc., I play the encounter in such a way to ensure their success and survival. This is done both for flavor and to emphasize that my campaign world is not one where every encounter is carefully and precisely balanced, to encourage the players to think and make good decisions.
In terms of Ophidimancer: again, I could go by what you wrote, and your post said you are planning the character's arcs. You, the DM, rather than the players. I don't plan my player's arcs for them; I let them discover them (if they have them at all; not all of my players are heavy into the RP aspect) and will essentially work with them and off of what they provide, but I don't plan anything for them. That's what the player brings to the game, or at least is supposed to, IMNSHO. Again, it appears that you meant something more complex than that sentence alone, but all I had is what you wrote. Based on your clarification and expansion, we're actually much closer in terms of DM style than you might think.
However:
I'm not adverse to what you call "random" and/or "meaningless" death due to a critical hit during a random encounter. And this is just a difference in play style; it's not a right or wrong thing, not a good or bad thing. When I say "antithetical", I mean it in a subjective way, not as an appeal to some imaginary objective standard for D&D. For me, when a character suits up and heads out into the wild, wide world looking for adventure, that means accepting all the risks inherent in such a life....which includes a chance lucky strike by an opponent they happened to encounter on the road somewhere or in a dungeon corridor or in a back alley.
In the end, whatever the way WOTC is guiding us, we can always choose how and what. My friend is already using this spell list system, as wotc is creating now. You can choose if your creature bonus damage can not crit and just its weapon. Just 2 days ago my Druid got hit by a 73Crit from a cadavar collector, that was rude. Without the necrotic damage critting, thats way less but still dangerous. You can Fudge crits into non crits and so on. Kepp in Mind whole DnD is just a "suggestion"
This just panders to that certain subset of out community that think they can do or say anything they want without any consequences. Saying that monsters cannot get a critical hit simply turns d&d into a game for babies that cry when they lose. It’s ridiculous.
Oh please. This is utterly ridiculous. You can say you hate the changes if you like, but nonsense like this utterly devalues the convHow so?ersation at hand.
The fact that anyone who plays D&D would want to play in a world where rolling a Nat 20 is just a hit is depressing.
You mean like original, Basic/Expert/etc, AD&D, and AD&D 2nd? I don't think it was even a guaranteed hit in most/all of them, but it's been a long, long time. I'm not saying I want to play any of them, but lack of crits isn't one of the reasons why.
The way it used to work is that weapons would have critical threat and damage ranges such as 20=x4, 19-20=x3, 18-20=x2, with, in 3e, feats like improved critical to double the threat ranges, and weapon improvements such as mercurial for the longswords & greatswords etc. which I think increased the damage multiplier by one step; and the most vaunted magical weapon ability of all - Vorpal.
When you roll within the critical threat range of your weapon, you only threaten a critical hit. You had to roll again to confirm whether or not you actually crited. If you crit again on the confirmation roll, or your successful crit deals "massive damage" i.e. I think it was over 50HP in one hit?; you are then threatening an instant kill. You have to roll a third time to confirm whether or not it was an instant kill. A Vorpal weapon allowed you to bypass the confirmation roll for an instant kill and have any successful critical hit automatically be an instant kill.
You did still have to confirm the crit first though I think. I don't remember if there was a way to bypass the confirmation roll for the innitial critical hit, but I think 3.5/p1 had more critical feats on the tree to further increase the threat range of a weapon, i.e. I think I once had the ability to threaten double damage on a rapier with a range of 12-20; so about 2 critical threats per every 5 hits with at least one of those often being successful. At higher levels this translated to my being able to do about one crit every other round. I don't think I ever had Vorpal, but imagine if I did: every other round, I would be able to outright slay 1 enemy.
The fact that anyone who plays D&D would want to play in a world where rolling a Nat 20 is just a hit is depressing.
You mean like original, Basic/Expert/etc, AD&D, and AD&D 2nd? I don't think it was even a guaranteed hit in most/all of them, but it's been a long, long time. I'm not saying I want to play any of them, but lack of crits isn't one of the reasons why.
The way it used to work is that weapons would have critical threat and damage ranges such as 20=x4, 19-20=x3, 18-20=x2, with, in 3e, feats like improved critical to double the threat ranges, and weapon improvements such as mercurial for the longswords & greatswords etc. which I think increased the damage multiplier by one step; and the most vaunted magical weapon ability of all - Vorpal.
When you roll within the critical threat range of your weapon, you only threaten a critical hit. You had to roll again to confirm whether or not you actually crited. If you crit again on the confirmation roll, or your successful crit deals "massive damage" i.e. I think it was over 50HP in one hit?; you are then threatening an instant kill. You have to roll a third time to confirm whether or not it was an instant kill.
A Vorpal weapon allowed you to bypass the confirmation roll for an instant kill and have any successful critical hit automatically be an instant kill. You did still have to confirm the crit first though I think. I don't remember if there was a way to bypass the confirmation roll for the innitial critical hit, but I think 3.5/p1 had more critical feats on the tree to further increase the threat range of a weapon, i.e. I think I once had the ability to threaten double damage on a rapier with a range of 12-20; so about 2 critical threats per every 5 hits with at least one of those often being successful. At higher levels this translated to my being able to do about one crit every other round. I don't think I ever had Vorpal, but imagine if I did: every other round, I would be able to outright slay 1 enemy.
That IMHO is wonderful.
What challenged you as a player then when you could delete a chosen enemy from combat every other round?
First of all, and surprised no one else has said this, why the nerf to Rogues? And does this mean they will get rid of the Assassin subclass entirely? It is hard enough just to use its main ability at all.
Given that we are supposed to evaluate this UA as backwards compatible and use it with our current rules, yes it seems a valid interpretation that things like Sneak Attack and Divine Smite will no longer double their dice on a crit. I will definitely have words about this in the survey. On the other hand, we have not seen the Class UA yet and I would be very surprised if the wording on things like Sneak Attack and Divine Smite stayed exactly the same as they currently are, so I think we should have a little bit of forbearance to wait and see how it all actually shakes out.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Our group will continue to use crits as they appear today. Some of us have played this way for decades, and a nat 20 was always a cheering moment at the table. We're going to continue this for all attacks, PCs or otherwise. There might be mathematical justification for the changes, but that doesn't mean we have to like them. We want to continue to cheer the nat 20s in all circumstances, not just PC weapon attacks. And we'll still just double the dice because it's fun to do. Is it spiky? Yeah. But no one at our table gets hurt feelings over it. Personally, we never had issues with any of it. Balanced or not, no one I've personally played with in the past 29 years has ever complained about crits. We even (with 5e) added a home-brew rule to introduce EPIC crits - a way to have a super heroic (or super unheroic) moment. Bottom line: we feel the critical changes take away some enjoyment from the game, so the new rules are going to be tossed.
I get the feeling. But the effect is that a spellcaster crit is almost always more powerful than a melee crit, and that crits vary widely by character.
It's very easy to get multi-die attack spells at 1st level and a single crit can end the boss fight. (Got to do that with a Crit on a Guiding Bolt to the bugbear that was supposed to be the big fight for us. Over. Funny. Fun for me. Not an exciting experience for anyone else.) And I've been in fights where our pally got back-to-back crits on turn 1 and it let us win a fight that honestly should have been a TPK. The downside is that the GM didn't learn anything and thought that kind of fight was well-balanced, when the actual encounter was almost 3 times higher than a "deadly" encounter for our level.
I've never played in a campaign where the martial masters of the battlefield ever had impressive crits. Spellcasters are just hands-down more useful than ever before and it's hard to balance. I'll miss not getting to have my crit fishing Swashbuckler/Champion land his Sneak Attack to the Face for an additional 10d6 rather than the normal 5d6. But it will make the fights go a little longer and give everyone a chance to matter. Especially the poor fighter. And heck...paladins may actually *cast* spells in the new version rather than saving for Smites.
And PC's are much more often the recipients of crits than the givers. PC's just receive more attacks, and 5% of more attacks means more crits. I've never had a time - as player or DM - where a PC getting critted made the game more fun. (There are also odd follow-ons...like how trash mobs miss a bunch, but rarely land a non-critical hit which just feels wrong.)
Give the new rules a chance. See if the fighter feels like he matters. See how the GM monsters stand up a little longer. See how often you are able to feed Inspiration to other characters and if that helps ramp up the interest at the table.
What challenged you as a player then when you could delete a chosen enemy from combat every other round?
Bad mechanics IMO.
Well, to be fair, I'm not the sort whose playstyle is seeking challenge in combat. I, for the most part, hate combat and would be perfectly happy with encounters that can be solved socially and so remain combat-free. The ability to be able to drop an opponent every other round would please me because it would mean the combat is usually over withing 10 rounds and we can get back to what I feel is the actual fun of the game. Nothing bores me more than a combat that last several hours over the course of like dozens of rounds.
I've been watching critical role recently and sometimes find myself just skipping ahead to the HDYWTDT moments rather than watching the whole fight because it lasts so long that I find it tedious. I then sometimes have to click back to a moment mentioned in the comments section that was funny and so worth watching, but for the most part I really do not enjoy long and arduous combats.
IMHO it's like modern Superman vs the George Reeves Superman series where he mostly just put a stop to normal crime. If I'm playing the 'superhero' I like to feel genuinely super, and not like everything in the world is still a fair match for me even when I have 'kewl powerz'.
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Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
First, I just wanna say that I've kinda skimmed through but I don't have time to read this whole thread so I may not say anything that hasn't already been said, but I want to get my opinion out there.
I appreciate what they're trying to do with the crit rule changes, and I don't think all the crit changes are bad, so much as just in need of adjustment or maybe a less blunt approach.
It's definitely a problem in higher-level play when player characters can just do a bajillion damage and one-shot the DM's carefully-constructed encounter, so rolling weapon dice again or maybe just doubling weapon dice damage is fine by me. You can always write in for subclasses like Assassin to have more powerful crits that include sneak attacks and whatever else. As was mentioned earlier in the thread, tying special perks to crits would be an interesting twist as well, like certain feats already do. To lessen the blow to spells with attack rolls, you could even add special crit effects to spells that do things outside of dealing extra damage.
The issue that really seems to get talked about, though, is players getting one-shot at level 1. That's definitely an issue, and my first thought was that the problem is not critical hits so much as the fact that level 1 characters are just so ridiculously squishy--take away crits and people just die in two solid hits instead of one. That said, with a bit more thought... I like early levels being scary like that. It makes sense that adventurers just starting out should have a hard time, and that many don't make it (the player characters being the exception). Additionally, there's still a pretty big difference between 1 hit and 2 hits in that there's still a lot the DM and players can do to adjust in the case of the latter. Given the proposed changes in inspiration mechanics, I've come to think it would be a more graceful solution to allow players to negate critical hits using inspiration. Let your level 1 players all start with inspiration as their "insurance policy" of sorts, and that way a critical hit that comes a player's way is less a sudden catastrophe and more a wake-up call. In later levels it'd still be useful, but other uses will start to look more attractive. Well, I like to think it's an idea worth considering, at least...
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Well, first accept my apology and regret. I was not intending to be dismissive but you know what they say about good intentions.
Next: I was responding to Ophidimancer's post wherein they say (emphasis mine):
...which, to me, feels like the DM writing the story and moving the players along as they want, rather than allowing for more fluidity and flexibility (especially in terms of character choices affecting the world and their own fates/outcomes).
I've been saying repeatedly that I really think most of the debate around critical hits arises from how someone views the game - what's fun for them? what's the goal? what style of DMing and "plot" (for lack of a better word) advancement do you want?
I personally like a healthy mix of planned (but not rigidly set or unyielding) adventures and missions and player choice. As Colville talks about in his DMing videos, there's great fun to be had in letting the players "mess things up" and really thinking about the affects of their choices, their successes, their failures. And it goes the other way (for me): unexpected, "little" things can affect the PCs, too, in just the same way.
My impression - hardly scientific or backed by any real data - is that a lot of folks who came to D&D with 5E or much more recent editions (I've been playing since the days of 1E) simply don't enjoy a game wherein character permadeath is a constant danger. And that's fine! As we're seeing with the tone and style of recent official adventures, gritty, deadly combat certainly isn't the only way to RP or to experience the game, nor is it always the best!
My experience, though, has shown that when players sense they have plot armor, it makes the game less fun and less, for lack of a better word, "real."
YMMV!
No need to apologize. I can't tell you how many times I've shoved my foot in my mouth around here.
I get where Ophidimancer is coming from. I have a number of important events planned for my player's backstories with a general idea of where they might go. If they make a decision I don't anticipate, no biggie, I just roll with the flow and adjust my plans accordingly. Ohpid's probably more character-death averse than I am, and I'm probably more averse to it than you are.
One of the things that irks me about optional rules in 5e, is that so many are shoved in the back of the DMG like an afterthought, it's easy to forget they're there. I'd rather see the default rules with their variants listed right next to them.
There's a difference between trying to lose battles, and designing battles such that they'll be lost. As a DM, I set most fights at a difficulty I expect the PCs to beat, but then play the monsters to win (I'm not always right about what my PCs can beat, which gives me a bit of a killer DM reputation). However, at low levels, due to the fragility and randomness of low level PCs, it's hard to make fights that are challenging-but-beatable, and cutting down on things like crits does help with that.
This is exactly what I meant by a warranted scene.
Your players have displeased a greater being to the point of its followers trying to kill the party. It may be a "random encounter" for your party, but a PC death to such an encounter would be warranted in my mind.
This response to a poor decision for the majority of classes in the game is exactly why players avoided certain editions of the game. Anything that makes combat take longer and devalues certain classes will drive new and old players away from the game. There is no need to play test this change to know that it is going to cripple Rogues and Paladins. Casters are getting shafted from the damage role and told to be utility or healers. If you can't see that the new critical hit system is bad then you haven't played a class that is being hurt by this. The fact that anyone who plays D&D would want to play in a world where rolling a Nat 20 is just a hit is depressing.
That is a lovely tone to set. You know what I think is... interesting? A person that thinks that playing to lose and playing monsters to their "full capability" are mutually exclusive objectives for a DM. You know what I think is... interesting? A DM who does not place player fun as the first and most important goal for the DM. My DMing choices are not quaint or out of touch with the spirit of the game. They are deliberate choices meant to challenge my players, while at the same time considering their needs. I put them, the players, at the center of everything I do as a DM.
Nothing here is novel. Most DMs are familiar with the concept of monsters with unique goals and motivations, and run them to the best of the monster's abilities as well. Most DMs know this, even awful ones.
The DM knows more than the monsters they run literally always. Running the monsters as best as the DM can, with their virtually infinite knowledge of all things in the game, is hardly demonstrating any kind of tactical genius and actually risks eclipsing what the monsters are truly capable of in character. I do not run monsters to the best of their capabilities, I run them in a way that I believe to be within the individual limitations of the monster. I also take into account my players - their goals and their play style. I then build encounters that can almost always be won by them and when they cannot, I make sure that the players are made aware with some narrative information and they have a chance to think about whether they want to have that fight. In most cases, TPKs are not fun for anyone but the bad DM. I create scenarios that can challenge my players and even put their PC's lives at risk, but they almost always can be won by design because I do not have fun when the people at my table are not having fun. My hope is that the players at my table feel like heroes, not passengers in a DM's meat-grinder "novel".
Run a game however you want, but the implication that I am somehow "playing wrong" because player fun is a foreign concept to you, or at least secondary to you, is unflattering commentary on your own DMing style rather than any kind of negative reflection on mine.
DM mostly, Player occasionally | Session 0 form | He/Him/They/Them
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Excuse me? Character choice is the backbone of my campaigns. I do not dictate, I develop the story that my players want from the themes of their character and back story. When my players create a character I take every part of their creation as a signal for what they want from the game. Beyond that I also explicitly ask what kind of themes and narratives they want to explore with their character. This is why meaningless, random death is so antithetical to my style. It just ends the story abruptly and in an unsatisfying way. It's not a tension building threat to the character, it's a cliff hanger threat to my players' fun. It is so much more satisfying to threaten the things my PCs' love, rather than just killing them.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
You're way overstating the role of crits in combat. Yeah, rogues and paladins don't get huge burst damage if they get lucky, but they still get consistent burst damage. Most casters are barely going to notice, because all their big damage spells didn't critical in the first place.
You mean like original, Basic/Expert/etc, AD&D, and AD&D 2nd? I don't think it was even a guaranteed hit in most/all of them, but it's been a long, long time. I'm not saying I want to play any of them, but lack of crits isn't one of the reasons why.
Yes, this. I set the stage beforehand with a comparatively large front-end process so I do not have to pull punches during the encounter. There is plenty of tension during my encounters because the party knows they can die if they are sloppy or if the dice are against them. Planning to lose does not mean throwing the matches. Like you I have miscalculated, which has resulted in players rolling new characters once or twice, but killing my player's PCs is never the goal. The intended risk at my table and one I will certainly follow through with if it comes to it yes, but never the goal.
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My issue with this, especially in regards to critical hits, is that Heroic Fantasy doesn't start at level 1. It's why I'll always start a campaign at level 3, because anything below that can be obliterated, not just by a crit but by any high damage role.
So it appears that my responses (and some folks responses to my responses) are due to some wording issues.
Reading Erik and Pantagruel's clarifications on what they wrote above helps. I was really thrown by the phrase "try and lose the battles" (which I now know was shorthand for a more complex idea), because I never run monsters in a way that's meant to pull punches or have them act in a way that's sure to lose the battle. That's a different issue from the actual design of the encounter, which involves deciding which creatures (and how many) will be in the encounter.
We're actually all a lot closer than you might think. I absolutely do not constantly throw what the RAW would call "deadly" encounters - most of them I'm 90%+ certain the players will defeat without fear of PC death (will bring this back to the topic at hand below) - at them. I also generally do not pick intentionally easy encounters at them; I want each encounter to challenge them from both a tactical and role playing aspect, even if I'm very confident there's no real danger of permadeath.
So what Erik summarized as "trying to lose the battle" is, I think, what I would call to myself encounter design where I can run the monsters for all their worth but not in an effort to provide a deadly encounter.
Conversely, I also purposefully sometimes run encounters they absolutely cannot win (this is often the result of rolling on a random encounter table). For instance: a group of 5th level characters in a city run by mages happen to be near where a wizard has accidentally summoned a nightwalker, something there is absolutely no way they can defeat. But what I do NOT do is force them to fight, and give them ample (and more than fair) opportunity to avoid the fight. If they make a good faith effort to hide, retreat, etc., I play the encounter in such a way to ensure their success and survival. This is done both for flavor and to emphasize that my campaign world is not one where every encounter is carefully and precisely balanced, to encourage the players to think and make good decisions.
In terms of Ophidimancer: again, I could go by what you wrote, and your post said you are planning the character's arcs. You, the DM, rather than the players. I don't plan my player's arcs for them; I let them discover them (if they have them at all; not all of my players are heavy into the RP aspect) and will essentially work with them and off of what they provide, but I don't plan anything for them. That's what the player brings to the game, or at least is supposed to, IMNSHO. Again, it appears that you meant something more complex than that sentence alone, but all I had is what you wrote. Based on your clarification and expansion, we're actually much closer in terms of DM style than you might think.
However:
I'm not adverse to what you call "random" and/or "meaningless" death due to a critical hit during a random encounter. And this is just a difference in play style; it's not a right or wrong thing, not a good or bad thing. When I say "antithetical", I mean it in a subjective way, not as an appeal to some imaginary objective standard for D&D. For me, when a character suits up and heads out into the wild, wide world looking for adventure, that means accepting all the risks inherent in such a life....which includes a chance lucky strike by an opponent they happened to encounter on the road somewhere or in a dungeon corridor or in a back alley.
How exactly is any of that good?
Much less "better" than we thought?
It sounds like a terrible idea across the board.
In the end, whatever the way WOTC is guiding us, we can always choose how and what. My friend is already using this spell list system, as wotc is creating now. You can choose if your creature bonus damage can not crit and just its weapon. Just 2 days ago my Druid got hit by a 73Crit from a cadavar collector, that was rude. Without the necrotic damage critting, thats way less but still dangerous. You can Fudge crits into non crits and so on. Kepp in Mind whole DnD is just a "suggestion"
How so?
The way it used to work is that weapons would have critical threat and damage ranges such as 20=x4, 19-20=x3, 18-20=x2, with, in 3e, feats like improved critical to double the threat ranges, and weapon improvements such as mercurial for the longswords & greatswords etc. which I think increased the damage multiplier by one step; and the most vaunted magical weapon ability of all - Vorpal.
When you roll within the critical threat range of your weapon, you only threaten a critical hit. You had to roll again to confirm whether or not you actually crited. If you crit again on the confirmation roll, or your successful crit deals "massive damage" i.e. I think it was over 50HP in one hit?; you are then threatening an instant kill. You have to roll a third time to confirm whether or not it was an instant kill. A Vorpal weapon allowed you to bypass the confirmation roll for an instant kill and have any successful critical hit automatically be an instant kill.
You did still have to confirm the crit first though I think. I don't remember if there was a way to bypass the confirmation roll for the innitial critical hit, but I think 3.5/p1 had more critical feats on the tree to further increase the threat range of a weapon, i.e. I think I once had the ability to threaten double damage on a rapier with a range of 12-20; so about 2 critical threats per every 5 hits with at least one of those often being successful. At higher levels this translated to my being able to do about one crit every other round. I don't think I ever had Vorpal, but imagine if I did: every other round, I would be able to outright slay 1 enemy.
That IMHO is wonderful.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
What challenged you as a player then when you could delete a chosen enemy from combat every other round?
Bad mechanics IMO.
Given that we are supposed to evaluate this UA as backwards compatible and use it with our current rules, yes it seems a valid interpretation that things like Sneak Attack and Divine Smite will no longer double their dice on a crit. I will definitely have words about this in the survey. On the other hand, we have not seen the Class UA yet and I would be very surprised if the wording on things like Sneak Attack and Divine Smite stayed exactly the same as they currently are, so I think we should have a little bit of forbearance to wait and see how it all actually shakes out.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
I get the feeling. But the effect is that a spellcaster crit is almost always more powerful than a melee crit, and that crits vary widely by character.
It's very easy to get multi-die attack spells at 1st level and a single crit can end the boss fight. (Got to do that with a Crit on a Guiding Bolt to the bugbear that was supposed to be the big fight for us. Over. Funny. Fun for me. Not an exciting experience for anyone else.) And I've been in fights where our pally got back-to-back crits on turn 1 and it let us win a fight that honestly should have been a TPK. The downside is that the GM didn't learn anything and thought that kind of fight was well-balanced, when the actual encounter was almost 3 times higher than a "deadly" encounter for our level.
I've never played in a campaign where the martial masters of the battlefield ever had impressive crits. Spellcasters are just hands-down more useful than ever before and it's hard to balance. I'll miss not getting to have my crit fishing Swashbuckler/Champion land his Sneak Attack to the Face for an additional 10d6 rather than the normal 5d6. But it will make the fights go a little longer and give everyone a chance to matter. Especially the poor fighter. And heck...paladins may actually *cast* spells in the new version rather than saving for Smites.
And PC's are much more often the recipients of crits than the givers. PC's just receive more attacks, and 5% of more attacks means more crits. I've never had a time - as player or DM - where a PC getting critted made the game more fun. (There are also odd follow-ons...like how trash mobs miss a bunch, but rarely land a non-critical hit which just feels wrong.)
Give the new rules a chance. See if the fighter feels like he matters. See how the GM monsters stand up a little longer. See how often you are able to feed Inspiration to other characters and if that helps ramp up the interest at the table.
Well, to be fair, I'm not the sort whose playstyle is seeking challenge in combat. I, for the most part, hate combat and would be perfectly happy with encounters that can be solved socially and so remain combat-free. The ability to be able to drop an opponent every other round would please me because it would mean the combat is usually over withing 10 rounds and we can get back to what I feel is the actual fun of the game. Nothing bores me more than a combat that last several hours over the course of like dozens of rounds.
I've been watching critical role recently and sometimes find myself just skipping ahead to the HDYWTDT moments rather than watching the whole fight because it lasts so long that I find it tedious. I then sometimes have to click back to a moment mentioned in the comments section that was funny and so worth watching, but for the most part I really do not enjoy long and arduous combats.
IMHO it's like modern Superman vs the George Reeves Superman series where he mostly just put a stop to normal crime. If I'm playing the 'superhero' I like to feel genuinely super, and not like everything in the world is still a fair match for me even when I have 'kewl powerz'.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
First, I just wanna say that I've kinda skimmed through but I don't have time to read this whole thread so I may not say anything that hasn't already been said, but I want to get my opinion out there.
I appreciate what they're trying to do with the crit rule changes, and I don't think all the crit changes are bad, so much as just in need of adjustment or maybe a less blunt approach.
It's definitely a problem in higher-level play when player characters can just do a bajillion damage and one-shot the DM's carefully-constructed encounter, so rolling weapon dice again or maybe just doubling weapon dice damage is fine by me. You can always write in for subclasses like Assassin to have more powerful crits that include sneak attacks and whatever else. As was mentioned earlier in the thread, tying special perks to crits would be an interesting twist as well, like certain feats already do. To lessen the blow to spells with attack rolls, you could even add special crit effects to spells that do things outside of dealing extra damage.
The issue that really seems to get talked about, though, is players getting one-shot at level 1. That's definitely an issue, and my first thought was that the problem is not critical hits so much as the fact that level 1 characters are just so ridiculously squishy--take away crits and people just die in two solid hits instead of one. That said, with a bit more thought... I like early levels being scary like that. It makes sense that adventurers just starting out should have a hard time, and that many don't make it (the player characters being the exception). Additionally, there's still a pretty big difference between 1 hit and 2 hits in that there's still a lot the DM and players can do to adjust in the case of the latter. Given the proposed changes in inspiration mechanics, I've come to think it would be a more graceful solution to allow players to negate critical hits using inspiration. Let your level 1 players all start with inspiration as their "insurance policy" of sorts, and that way a critical hit that comes a player's way is less a sudden catastrophe and more a wake-up call. In later levels it'd still be useful, but other uses will start to look more attractive. Well, I like to think it's an idea worth considering, at least...