White-room math people average crit damage out as a 5% DPR increase and cite critical hits as being ignorable, which I frankly find inane and ridiculous. That is not how the system works, every player has a story of how a lucky crit either blew out a boss thanks to Palladalldingdong nonsense or downed a PC out of the blue. A critical hit, on average, comes out to half again the damage of the original attack for a PC, and in the case of many monsters with their outrageously overbloated damage dice counts, a critical blow is effectively a second free attack. It very much throws things off numerically, save that there is zero narrative or gameplay benefit for doing so. The creature didn't deploy a powerful, dramatic blow, it didn't use an unexpected power and surprise the players - it did the same-ass thing it does every single turn but got to do buttloads of extra damage for free-ninety-nine. No wind up, no build-up, no drama, no tension, just boom - suddenly Alice is dead now, there was precisely nothing anybody could've done to stop it or see it coming, and the DM has to square the fact that a basic freaking mook didn't just damage a high-level PC but managed to instagib them because crits are bullshit.
Yeah. I'm all for pulling them from the game completely, but we all know that'll never fly. Letting them be a holdover of previous editions for martial characters to help differentiate weapons from spells more effectively was the next best thing, but nah - we lost that too. **** me sideways I guess.
White-room math people average crit damage out as a 5% DPR increase and cite critical hits as being ignorable, which I frankly find inane and ridiculous.
Let's say a hill giant attacks a character with AC 18 and 38 hp (say, con 14 cleric) with its club.
20.25% chance it misses entirely.
50% it hits once, for 3d8+5 damage. No chance target is taken out.
4.5% it crits once and misses once, for for 6d8+5 damage. 16.8% chance the target is taken out (combined chance: 0.76%)
25% it hits twice, for 6d8+5 damage. 46.5% chance the target is taken out (combined chance: 11.63%). Without crits, this would be 30.25% (combined 14.07%)
5% it crits once and hits once, for 9d8+10 damage. 97.1% chance the target is taken out (combined chance: 4.86%)
0.25% it crits twice, for 12d8+10 damage. 99.98% chance the target is taken out (combined chance: 0.25%). 2.8% chance (combined chance: 0.007%) for instant death (both hits do 38+).
The total chance of the target being taken out is thus 17.5%. Without critical hits, the odds would be 14%. Reducing odds from 17.5% to 14% is not zero... but it's not very important. And it gets less and less relevant at higher tier, because hit points go up faster than attack damage.
People think crits are important because "the giant knocked me out with one hit" is more memorable than "the giant hit me twice", but the majority of the actual noise in the system comes from the regular attack roll, not the crit.
Critical hits exist in many games and those that don't often have hit location tables which have a somewhat similar effect. Games that have neither work with PCs suffering penalties for being injured.
I think getting rid of them will cause a great deal of crying and gnashing of teeth.
Would you prefer a hit location chart? It would slow combat. Or perhaps allow called shots to vital points which only activate when you nat 20, where other nat 20s do nothing. I think if that became a thing people would constantly say they are shooting for the vitals.
Not sold on taking them out entirely. Maybe a way to set up or charge up for a crit. Otherwise combat (for those without special winkidoos) is just my turn, your turn, whackwhack.
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I just have to say, it's kinda funny people are saying we need more secondary effects in martial combat when I've also seen a bunch of people screaming that additional effects on martial combat will just bog down the game in other threads. One of the biggest advantages of crits is that they're simple to run; just grab more dice or do a bit of 2nd grade math. Stopping to roll tables or otherwise parse more elaborate effects sounds a lot less interesting to me, especially since such a table would either need to induce basic math-based effects that aren't particularly engaging or inevitably have effects that would be duds against various enemies, potentially ruining the thrill of a nat 20.
I'm tempted to change crits from "double damage dice" to "make another attack", as it's simple to implement, means AC isn't entirely irrelevant against crits, eliminates things like smite crits, and means critting a creature with five hit points no longer seems like a total waste. The flaw is that people like Big Numbers, and it wouldn't give those.
We just say crits at my table are half the damage automatically applied, plus whatever you roll. 1D8? Great, 5+1D8. 8d6 Sneak? 28 + whatever you roll. That way crits still feel chonky and we never run into the legendary 16d6 Sneak Crit doing 22 damage.
Applies to all sources, spells included. Spells are a resource, and spending it means it should crit, imo.
Let's say a hill giant attacks a character with AC 18 and 38 hp (say, con 14 cleric) with its club.
20.25% chance it misses entirely.
50% it hits once, for 3d8+5 damage. No chance target is taken out.
4.5% it crits once and misses once, for for 6d8+5 damage. 16.8% chance the target is taken out (combined chance: 0.76%)
25% it hits twice, for 6d8+5 damage. 46.5% chance the target is taken out (combined chance: 11.63%). Without crits, this would be 30.25% (combined 14.07%)
5% it crits once and hits once, for 9d8+10 damage. 97.1% chance the target is taken out (combined chance: 4.86%)
0.25% it crits twice, for 12d8+10 damage. 99.98% chance the target is taken out (combined chance: 0.25%). 2.8% chance (combined chance: 0.007%) for instant death (both hits do 38+).
The total chance of the target being taken out is thus 17.5%. Without critical hits, the odds would be 14%. Reducing odds from 17.5% to 14% is not zero... but it's not very important. And it gets less and less relevant at higher tier, because hit points go up faster than attack damage.
People think crits are important because "the giant knocked me out with one hit" is more memorable than "the giant hit me twice", but the majority of the actual noise in the system comes from the regular attack roll, not the crit.
I think your two hits case should be 6d8+10 but the summary is otherwise sound, however boiling it down to the overall average is missing the point.
Players aren't usually going to fight the same type of giant across the hundreds of fights necessary for the randomness to approach the statistical average performance, they're going to face them in one or maybe a handful of combats during which the swings matter.
But the issue isn't by how much the critical hits affect average performance over time, it's how it affects the experience when they land – being KO'd because of poor decisions, or the fight being particularly challenging is one thing, but it's another to be KO'd or killed by bad luck alone. Sure it can happen in D&D a bunch of different ways, but these usually require bad luck over time, critical hits add an element of "you could die instantly out of nowhere" which only makes this worse. While for some players that might be exciting, for others it will be frustrating, especially when TTRPGs usually encourage you to become attached to your characters.
A 3% statistical average difference might seem negligible in higher level statistics, but that's not going to be any comfort to the 3%. As a general principle too much swinginess in games can be bad, just as no variation is bad (we don't want to feel like we're playing a spreadsheet). How much is too much though is going to be very subjective.
And we also need to be thinking about things that make only one big attack, rather than several (comparatively) weaker ones. If a mage enemy casting inflict wounds at 5th-level hits normally they deal 7d10 necrotic damage, but on a critical hit that's all doubled to 14d10, which is a hell of a swing for a 1 in 20 chance of bad luck (if you're on the receiving end of it). Sure, the statistical chances of a critical hit on an all-or-nothing attack like that are low (well, 5% exactly), but that's no comfort when it comes up.
Now is it worse than being deleted from a fight by banishment or plane shift or whatever? Depends if the extra damage takes you down or kills you I guess, but those are the kinds of spell your party is hopefully ready to counterspell, or buffed to save against etc., though they too will really suck if a bad roll means you fall to them. It starts to come into the general problem with casters and monsters with similar abilities in 5e; sure they're risky, sure it might not land, but is it good for the fun of the game when it does?
I just have to say, it's kinda funny people are saying we need more secondary effects in martial combat when I've also seen a bunch of people screaming that additional effects on martial combat will just bog down the game in other threads.
I wonder why people would have a different view of a proposed effect that only comes up 1 in 20 times at most vs. something that could trigger on literally every attack rolled for every combat ever. 🤔
There's a difference between "extra work on top of every roll is bad" and "I don't want any bonus effects in the game", see if you can spot it. 😝
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And yet, that's precisely what must happen in a game people play for enjoyment because fun is entirely subjective. Functionally, WotC is damned either way. The game can either be simple and appeal to the lowest common denominator, or it can have more robust rules and asymmetry for only one person to keep track of. It's that tug of war between simplicity and complexity, abstraction versus simulationism, that has certain people so riled up. And let's not pretend that even people who lean in either direction can actually agree on what those words mean or how far to lean.
Personally, as much as I can enjoy it at times, I think tactical combat been a detriment to the game. Modern dungeon design stinks. Almost all squares are 5-foot, not 10-foot, and far too often rooms aren't large enough to fit all the monsters and all the party at the same time. And then there are the rules for actually navigating a dungeon, which are so thin they may as well not exist. When your game is literally titled Dungeons & Dragons, that feels like it should be a bigger deal.
Critical hits are a simple and effective way to relay an attack getting past defenses by hitting a vital spot. And, spikes notwithstanding, it's been pointed out they don't actually contribute that much to the overall damage a creature can do. This ought to be a non-issue.
And yet, that's precisely what must happen in a game people play for enjoyment because fun is entirely subjective. Functionally, WotC is damned either way. The game can either be simple and appeal to the lowest common denominator, or it can have more robust rules and asymmetry for only one person to keep track of. It's that tug of war between simplicity and complexity, abstraction versus simulationism, that has certain people so riled up. And let's not pretend that even people who lean in either direction can actually agree on what those words mean or how far to lean.
Personally, as much as I can enjoy it at times, I think tactical combat been a detriment to the game. Modern dungeon design stinks. Almost all squares are 5-foot, not 10-foot, and far too often rooms aren't large enough to fit all the monsters and all the party at the same time. And then there are the rules for actually navigating a dungeon, which are so thin they may as well not exist. When your game is literally titled Dungeons & Dragons, that feels like it should be a bigger deal.
Critical hits are a simple and effective way to relay an attack getting past defenses by hitting a vital spot. And, spikes notwithstanding, it's been pointed out they don't actually contribute that much to the overall damage a creature can do. This ought to be a non-issue.
"And spikes notwithstanding"? The spikes are the issue. It doesn't really matter that a creature's overall damage over 100 combats is negligibly affected by crits. It's that one time going from taking 20 points of damage to 40 points of damage in one hit that is the issue.
And I am fine with keeping crits. I'm also fine with the "only PC's can crit and only on weapon damage". Or another variation thereof. I did think giving more creatures recharge abilities instead of crits would have been more interesting for the game.
It just irritates me because pretty much none of the people who scream and wail about how crits are AWESOMEand AMAZING and LITERALLY THE BEST PART OF D&D have...never actually even tried playing a game with reduced or eliminated crits. They have no basis for comparison, they just know they get a little dopamine spike whenever they see that 20 and feel like that's all that's required to make something The Single Greatest Mechanic in All of Gaming Forever. Never mind that crits leave no room for doing something else cool on natural 20s, and never mind that the existence of monster crits SEVERELY constrains the things you're asllowed to do with much more useful, awesome, impactful, and memorable Recharge-style abilities because the whole system has to accomodate any single given monster randomly dealing catastrophically more damage than it's supposed to.
Just...the cooler, better shit we could have if people were willing to just let go of their tiny, meaningless dopamine spikes and try a better designed system? It makes me sad we'll never really get to see it.
You realize crits did not exist for a couple editions of D&D. Just because you are young enough not to remember it doesn't mean everyone is. Crits are fun, they barley effect the math but when they occasionally come up it is fun whether you are getting crit or delivering one.
And yet, that's precisely what must happen in a game people play for enjoyment because fun is entirely subjective. Functionally, WotC is damned either way. The game can either be simple and appeal to the lowest common denominator, or it can have more robust rules and asymmetry for only one person to keep track of. It's that tug of war between simplicity and complexity, abstraction versus simulationism, that has certain people so riled up. And let's not pretend that even people who lean in either direction can actually agree on what those words mean or how far to lean.
Personally, as much as I can enjoy it at times, I think tactical combat been a detriment to the game. Modern dungeon design stinks. Almost all squares are 5-foot, not 10-foot, and far too often rooms aren't large enough to fit all the monsters and all the party at the same time. And then there are the rules for actually navigating a dungeon, which are so thin they may as well not exist. When your game is literally titled Dungeons & Dragons, that feels like it should be a bigger deal.
Critical hits are a simple and effective way to relay an attack getting past defenses by hitting a vital spot. And, spikes notwithstanding, it's been pointed out they don't actually contribute that much to the overall damage a creature can do. This ought to be a non-issue.
"And spikes notwithstanding"? The spikes are the issue. It doesn't really matter that a creature's overall damage over 100 combats is negligibly affected by crits. It's that one time going from taking 20 points of damage to 40 points of damage in one hit that is the issue.
And I am fine with keeping crits. I'm also fine with the "only PC's can crit and only on weapon damage". Or another variation thereof. I did think giving more creatures recharge abilities instead of crits would have been more interesting for the game.
Why instead of? you can have more recharge abilities and keep crits. Why is monsters being unable to spike a good thing? If people want perfectly predictable combats why even have dice, why make it a game instead of just roleplaying. Spikes and quick swings in the flow of combat are a good thing, as long as they are not too common.
I think your two hits case should be 6d8+10 but the summary is otherwise sound, however boiling it down to the overall average is missing the point.
Thinking that my post has anything to do with overall average is missing the point. I am talking about the chance that a PC is taken down in a single action by a monster. There is absolutely nothing more interactive about "the giant hit me twice" than "the giant got a critical hit".
Thinking that my post has anything to do with overall average is missing the point. I am talking about the chance that a PC is taken down in a single action by a monster. There is absolutely nothing more interactive about "the giant hit me twice" than "the giant got a critical hit".
Because the actual computed chance of it happening isn't the issue, it's the fact that it can happen; it's the fact that the experience can vary so wildly, from a fight being boring because the monster never threatened anyone, to instead nearly causing a TPK in what is meant to be a medium difficulty fight etc.
Of course we don't want fights to be boring or too predictable, but that's why we need more monsters that aren't just "attack, attack, attack" every round until the fight ends. If critical hits are the only thing that keeps a fight exciting then that's not really a good thing, and if a fight plays out completely differently to what the DM was trying to do then that's also not a good thing.
It's the same with big Paladin novas etc.; the actual chances of the optimal scenario occurring for those theoretical maximum power nova one-shots of a boss monster are small, but the problem isn't how often they occur, it's when they do.
This is why averages and probabilities are only of limited usefulness and the "but the math is negligible" defence is missing the point; because it's not about whether a player gets insta-killed with nothing anyone could do about it in only 1 in 1,000 fights, because to that player the only fight that mattered was the one where it happened, and it happening at all was the problem.
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Thinking that my post has anything to do with overall average is missing the point. I am talking about the chance that a PC is taken down in a single action by a monster. There is absolutely nothing more interactive about "the giant hit me twice" than "the giant got a critical hit".
Because the actual computed chance of it happening isn't the issue, it's the fact that it can happen; it's the fact that the experience can vary so wildly, from a fight being boring because the monster never threatened anyone, to instead nearly causing a TPK in what is meant to be a medium difficulty fight etc.
Of course we don't want fights to be boring or too predictable, but that's why we need more monsters that aren't just "attack, attack, attack" every round until the fight ends. If critical hits are the only thing that keeps a fight exciting then that's not really a good thing, and if a fight plays out completely differently to what the DM was trying to do then that's also not a good thing.
It's the same with big Paladin novas etc.; the actual chances of the optimal scenario occurring for those theoretical maximum power nova one-shots of a boss monster are small, but the problem isn't how often they occur, it's simply when they do.
This is why averages and probabilities are only of limited usefulness, because it's not about whether a player gets insta-killed 1 in 100 fights, because to that player the only fight that mattered was the one where it happened, and it happening at all was the problem.
I would say it not being able to happen is a far far far larger problem.
Thinking that my post has anything to do with overall average is missing the point. I am talking about the chance that a PC is taken down in a single action by a monster. There is absolutely nothing more interactive about "the giant hit me twice" than "the giant got a critical hit".
Because the actual computed chance of it happening isn't the issue, it's the fact that it can happen; it's the fact that the experience can vary so wildly, from a fight being boring because the monster never threatened anyone, to instead nearly causing a TPK in what is meant to be a medium difficulty fight etc.
My point is: removing monster critical hits does not significantly affect that problem (assuming you even think it's a problem). Most of the variance in fight outcome comes from other mechanics.
I would say it not being able to happen is a far far far larger problem.
What not being able to happen? Character death? Characters can die just fine without monsters dealing critical hits, the problem is when it happens while the DM was trying to go for an easier fight just because of a couple of bad rolls.
My point is: removing monster critical hits does not significantly affect that problem (assuming you even think it's a problem).
You literally demonstrated a monster capable of both downing or even instantly killing a player character in one round, and that only most easily being possible because of the critical hits?
It might not seem like a "significant" problem to you once you extrapolate that into the percentage chance, but that's because you're abstracting away from actual play; actual play doesn't care about what the percentage chances of online theorycrafting says, it cares about what happened.
Again, something being a 1% or whatever chance doesn't make it negligible if your much loved character was that 1%.
But the other issue more generally (when players are being insta-killed) is that just doing more damage is boring; I'd much rather something interesting happened, because "you do some extra damage" or "you take some extra damage" has just never been interesting to me, but that boils down into a much longer rant about 5e that nobody needs to hear in this thread.
What I find most interesting about critical hits is that they always hit – this means that even the most statistically unlikely attack could still land, and that is something I find much more interesting, especially if it was the only way you could even hit the target at all. Sometimes your Wizard in an [Tooltip Not Found] field just tries kicking the dragon in the shin, and it works. That should be a great moment, it should take the dragon by surprise, but when damage is everything you might as well not have done it.
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You literally demonstrated a monster capable of both downing or even instantly killing a player character in one round, and that only being possible because of the critical hits?
Your reading comprehension is failing you. Critical hits are not needed to down a PC in one round, and I really don't care about that 0.007% chance for instant death.
Consider that a critical could deliver less variable and more reliable damage rather than increasing the average. A weapon delivering 1d8 damage could reliably deliver 7 or 8 points of damage on a critical. A similar design is used on Supreme Healing for a Life Cleric and Silver Tongue for an Eloquence Bard.
I really don't care about that 0.007% chance for instant death.
Yeah I gathered that much, hence my saying you're missing the point, just as you don't care about critical hits downing players either. When your argument is "I don't care about the problem" I think we can safely leave it at that, because if you need to boil an issue down to numbers to keep at as far removed from the complaints as possible, then of course the point is going to be missed.
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Yeah I gathered that much, hence my saying you're missing the point, just as you don't care about critical hits downing players either. When your argument is "I don't care about the problem" I think we can safely leave it at that, because if you need to boil an issue down to numbers to keep at as far removed from the complaints as possible, then of course the point is going to be missed.
I don't care because a 0.007% chance is the kind of thing most campaigns will never encounter. The key complaint is "I can be taken down in one turn, without any chance to do anything about it", and I demonstrated that this in no way requires critical hits, and in fact usually happens without critical hits.
White-room math people average crit damage out as a 5% DPR increase and cite critical hits as being ignorable, which I frankly find inane and ridiculous. That is not how the system works, every player has a story of how a lucky crit either blew out a boss thanks to Palladalldingdong nonsense or downed a PC out of the blue. A critical hit, on average, comes out to half again the damage of the original attack for a PC, and in the case of many monsters with their outrageously overbloated damage dice counts, a critical blow is effectively a second free attack. It very much throws things off numerically, save that there is zero narrative or gameplay benefit for doing so. The creature didn't deploy a powerful, dramatic blow, it didn't use an unexpected power and surprise the players - it did the same-ass thing it does every single turn but got to do buttloads of extra damage for free-ninety-nine. No wind up, no build-up, no drama, no tension, just boom - suddenly Alice is dead now, there was precisely nothing anybody could've done to stop it or see it coming, and the DM has to square the fact that a basic freaking mook didn't just damage a high-level PC but managed to instagib them because crits are bullshit.
Yeah. I'm all for pulling them from the game completely, but we all know that'll never fly. Letting them be a holdover of previous editions for martial characters to help differentiate weapons from spells more effectively was the next best thing, but nah - we lost that too. **** me sideways I guess.
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Let's say a hill giant attacks a character with AC 18 and 38 hp (say, con 14 cleric) with its club.
The total chance of the target being taken out is thus 17.5%. Without critical hits, the odds would be 14%. Reducing odds from 17.5% to 14% is not zero... but it's not very important. And it gets less and less relevant at higher tier, because hit points go up faster than attack damage.
People think crits are important because "the giant knocked me out with one hit" is more memorable than "the giant hit me twice", but the majority of the actual noise in the system comes from the regular attack roll, not the crit.
Critical hits exist in many games and those that don't often have hit location tables which have a somewhat similar effect. Games that have neither work with PCs suffering penalties for being injured.
I think getting rid of them will cause a great deal of crying and gnashing of teeth.
Would you prefer a hit location chart? It would slow combat. Or perhaps allow called shots to vital points which only activate when you nat 20, where other nat 20s do nothing. I think if that became a thing people would constantly say they are shooting for the vitals.
Not sold on taking them out entirely. Maybe a way to set up or charge up for a crit. Otherwise combat (for those without special winkidoos) is just my turn, your turn, whackwhack.
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I just have to say, it's kinda funny people are saying we need more secondary effects in martial combat when I've also seen a bunch of people screaming that additional effects on martial combat will just bog down the game in other threads. One of the biggest advantages of crits is that they're simple to run; just grab more dice or do a bit of 2nd grade math. Stopping to roll tables or otherwise parse more elaborate effects sounds a lot less interesting to me, especially since such a table would either need to induce basic math-based effects that aren't particularly engaging or inevitably have effects that would be duds against various enemies, potentially ruining the thrill of a nat 20.
I'm tempted to change crits from "double damage dice" to "make another attack", as it's simple to implement, means AC isn't entirely irrelevant against crits, eliminates things like smite crits, and means critting a creature with five hit points no longer seems like a total waste. The flaw is that people like Big Numbers, and it wouldn't give those.
We just say crits at my table are half the damage automatically applied, plus whatever you roll. 1D8? Great, 5+1D8. 8d6 Sneak? 28 + whatever you roll. That way crits still feel chonky and we never run into the legendary 16d6 Sneak Crit doing 22 damage.
Applies to all sources, spells included. Spells are a resource, and spending it means it should crit, imo.
I think your two hits case should be 6d8+10 but the summary is otherwise sound, however boiling it down to the overall average is missing the point.
Players aren't usually going to fight the same type of giant across the hundreds of fights necessary for the randomness to approach the statistical average performance, they're going to face them in one or maybe a handful of combats during which the swings matter.
But the issue isn't by how much the critical hits affect average performance over time, it's how it affects the experience when they land – being KO'd because of poor decisions, or the fight being particularly challenging is one thing, but it's another to be KO'd or killed by bad luck alone. Sure it can happen in D&D a bunch of different ways, but these usually require bad luck over time, critical hits add an element of "you could die instantly out of nowhere" which only makes this worse. While for some players that might be exciting, for others it will be frustrating, especially when TTRPGs usually encourage you to become attached to your characters.
A 3% statistical average difference might seem negligible in higher level statistics, but that's not going to be any comfort to the 3%. As a general principle too much swinginess in games can be bad, just as no variation is bad (we don't want to feel like we're playing a spreadsheet). How much is too much though is going to be very subjective.
And we also need to be thinking about things that make only one big attack, rather than several (comparatively) weaker ones. If a mage enemy casting inflict wounds at 5th-level hits normally they deal 7d10 necrotic damage, but on a critical hit that's all doubled to 14d10, which is a hell of a swing for a 1 in 20 chance of bad luck (if you're on the receiving end of it). Sure, the statistical chances of a critical hit on an all-or-nothing attack like that are low (well, 5% exactly), but that's no comfort when it comes up.
Now is it worse than being deleted from a fight by banishment or plane shift or whatever? Depends if the extra damage takes you down or kills you I guess, but those are the kinds of spell your party is hopefully ready to counterspell, or buffed to save against etc., though they too will really suck if a bad roll means you fall to them. It starts to come into the general problem with casters and monsters with similar abilities in 5e; sure they're risky, sure it might not land, but is it good for the fun of the game when it does?
I wonder why people would have a different view of a proposed effect that only comes up 1 in 20 times at most vs. something that could trigger on literally every attack rolled for every combat ever. 🤔
There's a difference between "extra work on top of every roll is bad" and "I don't want any bonus effects in the game", see if you can spot it. 😝
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Well, there's no accounting for taste.
And yet, that's precisely what must happen in a game people play for enjoyment because fun is entirely subjective. Functionally, WotC is damned either way. The game can either be simple and appeal to the lowest common denominator, or it can have more robust rules and asymmetry for only one person to keep track of. It's that tug of war between simplicity and complexity, abstraction versus simulationism, that has certain people so riled up. And let's not pretend that even people who lean in either direction can actually agree on what those words mean or how far to lean.
Personally, as much as I can enjoy it at times, I think tactical combat been a detriment to the game. Modern dungeon design stinks. Almost all squares are 5-foot, not 10-foot, and far too often rooms aren't large enough to fit all the monsters and all the party at the same time. And then there are the rules for actually navigating a dungeon, which are so thin they may as well not exist. When your game is literally titled Dungeons & Dragons, that feels like it should be a bigger deal.
Critical hits are a simple and effective way to relay an attack getting past defenses by hitting a vital spot. And, spikes notwithstanding, it's been pointed out they don't actually contribute that much to the overall damage a creature can do. This ought to be a non-issue.
"And spikes notwithstanding"? The spikes are the issue. It doesn't really matter that a creature's overall damage over 100 combats is negligibly affected by crits. It's that one time going from taking 20 points of damage to 40 points of damage in one hit that is the issue.
And I am fine with keeping crits. I'm also fine with the "only PC's can crit and only on weapon damage". Or another variation thereof. I did think giving more creatures recharge abilities instead of crits would have been more interesting for the game.
EZD6 by DM Scotty
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/397599/EZD6-Core-Rulebook?
You realize crits did not exist for a couple editions of D&D. Just because you are young enough not to remember it doesn't mean everyone is. Crits are fun, they barley effect the math but when they occasionally come up it is fun whether you are getting crit or delivering one.
Why instead of? you can have more recharge abilities and keep crits. Why is monsters being unable to spike a good thing? If people want perfectly predictable combats why even have dice, why make it a game instead of just roleplaying. Spikes and quick swings in the flow of combat are a good thing, as long as they are not too common.
Thinking that my post has anything to do with overall average is missing the point. I am talking about the chance that a PC is taken down in a single action by a monster. There is absolutely nothing more interactive about "the giant hit me twice" than "the giant got a critical hit".
Because the actual computed chance of it happening isn't the issue, it's the fact that it can happen; it's the fact that the experience can vary so wildly, from a fight being boring because the monster never threatened anyone, to instead nearly causing a TPK in what is meant to be a medium difficulty fight etc.
Of course we don't want fights to be boring or too predictable, but that's why we need more monsters that aren't just "attack, attack, attack" every round until the fight ends. If critical hits are the only thing that keeps a fight exciting then that's not really a good thing, and if a fight plays out completely differently to what the DM was trying to do then that's also not a good thing.
It's the same with big Paladin novas etc.; the actual chances of the optimal scenario occurring for those theoretical maximum power nova one-shots of a boss monster are small, but the problem isn't how often they occur, it's when they do.
This is why averages and probabilities are only of limited usefulness and the "but the math is negligible" defence is missing the point; because it's not about whether a player gets insta-killed with nothing anyone could do about it in only 1 in 1,000 fights, because to that player the only fight that mattered was the one where it happened, and it happening at all was the problem.
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I would say it not being able to happen is a far far far larger problem.
My point is: removing monster critical hits does not significantly affect that problem (assuming you even think it's a problem). Most of the variance in fight outcome comes from other mechanics.
What not being able to happen? Character death? Characters can die just fine without monsters dealing critical hits, the problem is when it happens while the DM was trying to go for an easier fight just because of a couple of bad rolls.
You literally demonstrated a monster capable of both downing or even instantly killing a player character in one round, and that
onlymost easily being possible because of the critical hits?It might not seem like a "significant" problem to you once you extrapolate that into the percentage chance, but that's because you're abstracting away from actual play; actual play doesn't care about what the percentage chances of online theorycrafting says, it cares about what happened.
Again, something being a 1% or whatever chance doesn't make it negligible if your much loved character was that 1%.
But the other issue more generally (when players are being insta-killed) is that just doing more damage is boring; I'd much rather something interesting happened, because "you do some extra damage" or "you take some extra damage" has just never been interesting to me, but that boils down into a much longer rant about 5e that nobody needs to hear in this thread.
What I find most interesting about critical hits is that they always hit – this means that even the most statistically unlikely attack could still land, and that is something I find much more interesting, especially if it was the only way you could even hit the target at all. Sometimes your Wizard in an [Tooltip Not Found] field just tries kicking the dragon in the shin, and it works. That should be a great moment, it should take the dragon by surprise, but when damage is everything you might as well not have done it.
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Your reading comprehension is failing you. Critical hits are not needed to down a PC in one round, and I really don't care about that 0.007% chance for instant death.
Consider that a critical could deliver less variable and more reliable damage rather than increasing the average. A weapon delivering 1d8 damage could reliably deliver 7 or 8 points of damage on a critical. A similar design is used on Supreme Healing for a Life Cleric and Silver Tongue for an Eloquence Bard.
Yeah I gathered that much, hence my saying you're missing the point, just as you don't care about critical hits downing players either. When your argument is "I don't care about the problem" I think we can safely leave it at that, because if you need to boil an issue down to numbers to keep at as far removed from the complaints as possible, then of course the point is going to be missed.
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
I don't care because a 0.007% chance is the kind of thing most campaigns will never encounter. The key complaint is "I can be taken down in one turn, without any chance to do anything about it", and I demonstrated that this in no way requires critical hits, and in fact usually happens without critical hits.