Variance is fun. The power-band of D&D is already so restrictive over previous iterations that very little in the realm of remarkable happens.
Variance is fun and is handled quite well with “to hit” and damage rolls. I once had a 3rd level lightning bolt do 40 damage (max is 48, avg. is 28) so that variance was fun. And it could be that way for monsters too. That could have been an NPC hitting me with that lightning bolt and it would have been fine.
But the unpredictable spiked damage that the DM has no control over, unless they fudge dice or just don’t use crits, means that it’s one area where the dice gods overrule the DM in a way not typically an issue. Recharge powers will still give variance, but less swingy. And their use is the DM’s choice, not some random dice roll
And again, I’m not against monster crits. I just think there could be better alternatives that the DM has more control over
So the lightning bolt can crit, but the goblin can't? I'm thinking a 28 to 40 swing is generally bigger than a 7 to 14 swing.
And you are acting like unpredictable is a bad thing. It is a good thing as its a game on top of it being a role playing narrative. I want unpredictable swings for and against the players. And sure have recharge abilities, which in many cases are far more swingy than a crit. But also have crits. why should it be either, or.
Who said anything about a lightning bolt critting? It’s a save spell so couldn’t crit if I wanted it to. But if you are just meaning a PC crit but goblin can’t, what if that goblin had a recharge ability to knock you prone, or stun or Daze (new condition in 1DD) or something els, instead?
Variance is fun. The power-band of D&D is already so restrictive over previous iterations that very little in the realm of remarkable happens.
Variance is fun and is handled quite well with “to hit” and damage rolls. I once had a 3rd level lightning bolt do 40 damage (max is 48, avg. is 28) so that variance was fun. And it could be that way for monsters too. That could have been an NPC hitting me with that lightning bolt and it would have been fine.
But the unpredictable spiked damage that the DM has no control over, unless they fudge dice or just don’t use crits, means that it’s one area where the dice gods overrule the DM in a way not typically an issue. Recharge powers will still give variance, but less swingy. And their use is the DM’s choice, not some random dice roll
And again, I’m not against monster crits. I just think there could be better alternatives that the DM has more control over
So the lightning bolt can crit, but the goblin can't? I'm thinking a 28 to 40 swing is generally bigger than a 7 to 14 swing.
And you are acting like unpredictable is a bad thing. It is a good thing as its a game on top of it being a role playing narrative. I want unpredictable swings for and against the players. And sure have recharge abilities, which in many cases are far more swingy than a crit. But also have crits. why should it be either, or.
Who said anything about a lightning bolt critting? It’s a save spell so couldn’t crit if I wanted it to. But if you are just meaning a PC crit but goblin can’t, what if that goblin had a recharge ability to knock you prone, or stun or Daze (new condition in 1DD) or something els, instead?
It did not literally crit but a extreme off average roll with a lightning bolt in damage is effectively a crit.
So the lightning bolt can crit, but the goblin can't? I'm thinking a 28 to 40 swing is generally bigger than a 7 to 14 swing.
And you are acting like unpredictable is a bad thing. It is a good thing as its a game on top of it being a role playing narrative. I want unpredictable swings for and against the players. And sure have recharge abilities, which in many cases are far more swingy than a crit. But also have crits. why should it be either, or.
Who said anything about a lightning bolt critting? It’s a save spell so couldn’t crit if I wanted it to. But if you are just meaning a PC crit but goblin can’t, what if that goblin had a recharge ability to knock you prone, or stun or Daze (new condition in 1DD) or something els, instead?
It did not literally crit but a extreme off average roll with a lightning bolt in damage is effectively a crit.
This is a straw man argument and has nothing to do with the argument at hand, though. Any dice can roll high or low numbers - the discussion is around crits, not arbitrary value rolls.
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I know what you're thinking: "In that flurry of blows, did he use all his ki points, or save one?" Well, are ya feeling lucky, punk?
Variance is fun. The power-band of D&D is already so restrictive over previous iterations that very little in the realm of remarkable happens.
Variance is fun and is handled quite well with “to hit” and damage rolls. I once had a 3rd level lightning bolt do 40 damage (max is 48, avg. is 28) so that variance was fun. And it could be that way for monsters too. That could have been an NPC hitting me with that lightning bolt and it would have been fine.
But the unpredictable spiked damage that the DM has no control over, unless they fudge dice or just don’t use crits, means that it’s one area where the dice gods overrule the DM in a way not typically an issue. Recharge powers will still give variance, but less swingy. And their use is the DM’s choice, not some random dice roll
And again, I’m not against monster crits. I just think there could be better alternatives that the DM has more control over
So the lightning bolt can crit, but the goblin can't? I'm thinking a 28 to 40 swing is generally bigger than a 7 to 14 swing.
And you are acting like unpredictable is a bad thing. It is a good thing as its a game on top of it being a role playing narrative. I want unpredictable swings for and against the players. And sure have recharge abilities, which in many cases are far more swingy than a crit. But also have crits. why should it be either, or.
Who said anything about a lightning bolt critting? It’s a save spell so couldn’t crit if I wanted it to. But if you are just meaning a PC crit but goblin can’t, what if that goblin had a recharge ability to knock you prone, or stun or Daze (new condition in 1DD) or something els, instead?
It did not literally crit but a extreme off average roll with a lightning bolt in damage is effectively a crit.
You're only saying that because the variance is 6-48. The reality is a plain longsword can crit for 2-20 damage. I've seen regular hits higher than a crit, and I've seen crits that maxed all the dice. I had a player with a 3rd-level paladin, first combat of a new campaign, crit and roll max damage with both his weapon and divine smite. He outpaced a 3rd-level lightning bolt two levels before a full spellcaster could even cast it, and there wasn't one in the party.
That unpredictability is just part of the game. It's a feature, not a bug, and isn't worth bringing attention to.
So the lightning bolt can crit, but the goblin can't? I'm thinking a 28 to 40 swing is generally bigger than a 7 to 14 swing.
And you are acting like unpredictable is a bad thing. It is a good thing as its a game on top of it being a role playing narrative. I want unpredictable swings for and against the players. And sure have recharge abilities, which in many cases are far more swingy than a crit. But also have crits. why should it be either, or.
Who said anything about a lightning bolt critting? It’s a save spell so couldn’t crit if I wanted it to. But if you are just meaning a PC crit but goblin can’t, what if that goblin had a recharge ability to knock you prone, or stun or Daze (new condition in 1DD) or something els, instead?
It did not literally crit but a extreme off average roll with a lightning bolt in damage is effectively a crit.
This is a straw man argument and has nothing to do with the argument at hand, though. Any dice can roll high or low numbers - the discussion is around crits, not arbitrary value rolls.
I'm sorry. no its not. It is a single hit with a massive spike in damage with the odds of it happening around that of a crit. It is the same thing as a crit you just want to accept some massive variance swings and not others not out of reasons but because one has the name crit in it.
And it’s the same with the vaunted recharge abilities, except they have significantly higher odds of recurring; looking at an Adult Black Dragon, it’s attack rolls average out to 47 damage divided among 3 attacks, giving about 1 in 7 odds that an extra 2d10+1d8 or 2d6 damage will be dealt in a round. Meanwhile the breath attack is 12d8 for an average of 54 with a 1 in 3 chance to refresh. More than twice as likely to crop up in a given round, and with a larger dice pool to swing on a given instance. Seems at least as capable of spiking damage as a crit, with the potential to hit multiple characters too.
This is a straw man argument and has nothing to do with the argument at hand, though. Any dice can roll high or low numbers - the discussion is around crits, not arbitrary value rolls.
Crits are just a feature that adds variance to damage values, there is no difference in kind between crits and any other sort of variability. To the degree there's a problem with spell critical hits, it's that they tend to be large single attacks, and this is mostly a very low level problem because there aren't a lot of high level spells with attack rolls -- in the basic rules this is almost entirely an issue with the CR 2 cult fanatic casting inflict wounds or the CR 2 priest casting guiding bolt -- but those are problems even without spell critical hits, both monsters are in the category of "most of the time they'll be irrelevant speed-bumps for the PCs, but occasionally they'll do something randomly scary".
While you're not alone in that camp, the other camp isn't empty either.
Sure, there is a market for both camps in the extreme even. Finding the balance for the majority is the trick in a game shooting for mass appeal like D&D.
One of the issues with D&D is that the characters with the fewest tools to deal with swings of good or bad luck are also the most likely to encounter such swings -- low CR monsters generally have far higher variance than high CR, meaning that accidentally killing a level 1 is far more likely than accidentally killing a level 5. This has been true in every edition of D&D (it was least true in 4e, but somewhat true even there), though back in AD&D times low level characters were viewed as sufficiently disposable that them dying was just how the game was expected to work.
One of the issues with D&D is that the characters with the fewest tools to deal with swings of good or bad luck are also the most likely to encounter such swings -- low CR monsters generally have far higher variance than high CR, meaning that accidentally killing a level 1 is far more likely than accidentally killing a level 5. This has been true in every edition of D&D (it was least true in 4e, but somewhat true even there), though back in AD&D times low level characters were viewed as sufficiently disposable that them dying was just how the game was expected to work.
Yeah a lot of players in older editions would make multiple characters as they expected to run through them. Heck the official rule in the dark sun campaign setting was make 3. I think you can find some level of balance where things are not that lethal and swingy, but without removing crits and the possibility for a sudden death just because you are john mcclain and facing down the boss in a dramatic scene.
Yeah a lot of players in older editions would make multiple characters as they expected to run through them. Heck the official rule in the dark sun campaign setting was make 3. I think you can find some level of balance where things are not that lethal and swingy, but without removing crits and the possibility for a sudden death just because you are john mcclain and facing down the boss in a dramatic scene.
Thing is, that's already gone for T2 and above. Instakilling a level 5 generally requires 60-100 damage depending on the class and build, and there are next to no monsters in the game that can do that much damage with an ability that uses an attack roll, almost everything that does that much damage is save-based and attached to things that are very high CR, and even if you do instakill that level 5... revivify exists.
On reflection, a rule for massive damage that appeals to me is
Massive Damage and Instant Death
When you take damage exceeding your hit points, make a Constitution save with a DC of the total excess damage. On a failure, mark off one failed death save. On a failure by 10 or more mark off two, on a failure by 20+ the character dies instantly.
Yeah a lot of players in older editions would make multiple characters as they expected to run through them. Heck the official rule in the dark sun campaign setting was make 3. I think you can find some level of balance where things are not that lethal and swingy, but without removing crits and the possibility for a sudden death just because you are john mcclain and facing down the boss in a dramatic scene.
Thing is, that's already gone for T2 and above. Instakilling a level 5 generally requires 60-100 damage depending on the class and build, and there are next to no monsters in the game that can do that much damage with an ability that uses an attack roll, almost everything that does that much damage is save-based and attached to things that are very high CR, and even if you do instakill that level 5... revivify exists.
On reflection, a rule for massive damage that appeals to me is
Massive Damage and Instant Death
When you take damage exceeding your hit points, make a Constitution save with a DC of the total excess damage. On a failure, mark off one failed death save. On a failure by 10 or more mark off two, on a failure by 20+ the character dies instantly.
One shots are generally gone at T2, but I've seen massive damage kills when people get dropped to a couple hit points and then take a high damage shot. Usually not a crit, but if you fail your save to a dragon breath and take buckets of damage, though yeah it still usually takes 40+ damage. But i guess like some crits from like a giant can do it. And if its a concern you can obviously build to reduce the odds, looking at some old characters of mine in the level 9-10 range hit points vary between high 40s and low 80s for the more spell caster type. A crit from a frost giants(cr8) rock throw averages 50 so it would not take too much off the average to drop a few of those characters if they were first reduced to 5 hit points or so. And you could be encountering that level 6ish, so drop 15ish from those lower hit points and now maybe they are getting dropped when at 15ish hit points.
And yeah that's a decent massive damage rule.
Though the main reason I never consider it a problem t2 and above is the option to res people comes in at level 5 for a lot of parties. But not everyone has a cleric so maybe revify or something similar should be on more lists.
Druids get Revivify too as of Tasha's- plus Lore Bards can grab it at 6, so it's in about the right place for accessibility imo; healing and resurrection is limited by design. Like I've said, the easier fix is just to shift Massive Damage to a variant/optional rule so people who want the possibility of instant death can have it, but it doesn't create the sense that a DM is bending the rules to keep someone alive otherwise. Moving the threshold and/or how it's calculated is an interesting idea as well, I just think this shift more thoroughly addresses the initial issue raised here of low level characters being perma-killed, possibly by an OHK.
If the argument is "I like crits because I think D&D is a better game when every single random creature in it has a small but nonzero chance to randomly deal ten million damage in a single blow, thereby rending my character down to their constituent atoms, slaying every last living member of their bloodline, and erasing them from history such that even the party members they had been adventuring with just the moment before have no idea my character ever existed", then do that as a variant rule. Invent some sort of Doom Roll that gets added to every successful monster attack, and if the Doom Roll ever lands your character dies and the body is permanently and irrecoverably destroyed beyond all hope of resurrection. It's way easier to bolt that sort of nonsense in as a variant rule than it is to try and cut that nonsense out when the entire game is hinged on the fact that your character can just be exorcised from the continuum of history forever by literally any attack roll.
If the argument is "I like crits because I think D&D is a better game when every single random creature in it has a small but nonzero chance to randomly deal ten million damage in a single blow, thereby rending my character down to their constituent atoms, slaying every last living member of their bloodline, and erasing them from history such that even the party members they had been adventuring with just the moment before have no idea my character ever existed", then do that as a variant rule.
The argument is "that assertion is complete and utter nonsense". Sure, you can come up with a variant rule that makes crits super-mega-dangerous, but RAW they aren't. This isn't 3e where a CR 1/2 orc can crit for 40.
The simple fact is that crits don’t spike damage as a whole anymore than rolling high for damage on a save effect against a target that failed. The concern is just that in the first level or two max HP pools are low enough that such a spike even from a mob could hit massive damage. Ergo the fix is to alter the massive damage rule, rather than the system’s underlying damage formula.
Can’t spells that hit AC crit anyway? I was 90% confident that cantrips like Fire Bolt could.
Which spells are we talking about anyway?
Way back in the first UA for 1D&D they floated the idea of scaling back crits to only player weapon damage. People didn’t go for it, and all the material since seems to have dropped the idea.
The argument is "that assertion is complete and utter nonsense". Sure, you can come up with a variant rule that makes crits super-mega-dangerous, but RAW they aren't. This isn't 3e where a CR 1/2 orc can crit for 40.
The crux of this and every similar argument is the irreconcilable split between Camp A: "Sudden, inexplicable, unavoidable permanent death makes D&D worse, impedes stories, and makes players feel bad in ways they shouldn't, so we would like them largely removed", and Camp B: "Sudden, inexplicable, unavoidable permanent death is a core, integral part of the D&D experience; the game simply isn't properly D&D without it, and any change which lessens its already-too-low presence is a bad change."
Crits exploding for ten trillion damage and erasing entire species and civilizations from the timespace continuum is what Camp B wants. Crits not bloody existing is, to a large extent, what Camp A wants. The problem is you cannot do both, the game must be designed to either account for the possibility of critical strikes or not. If the game doesn't account for crits, adding them back in blows everything up. If the game does account for crits, they eat the design space you could use to do far more interesting things with both rolls and many monsters. We are stuck for it, without any real room to do anything cool anymore.
You know, it would be easier to take your arguments seriously if your proposed scenarios had any grounding in reality as opposed to being complete strawman examples. Criticals do not exist to solely, primarily, or even occasionally cause Massive Damage insta-kills. In point of fact, as has been pointed out, on weapon attacks they pretty much completely lose that capacity once players are level 3 or higher. They exist create damage spikes on attack rolls, in the same way rolling only 5's or higher on Fireball will spike the damage on that spell compared to the average damage (average is 28, if you got an even split between 5's and 6's that'd be 44- over a 50% increase in damage).
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Who said anything about a lightning bolt critting? It’s a save spell so couldn’t crit if I wanted it to. But if you are just meaning a PC crit but goblin can’t, what if that goblin had a recharge ability to knock you prone, or stun or Daze (new condition in 1DD) or something els, instead?
EZD6 by DM Scotty
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/397599/EZD6-Core-Rulebook?
It did not literally crit but a extreme off average roll with a lightning bolt in damage is effectively a crit.
This is a straw man argument and has nothing to do with the argument at hand, though. Any dice can roll high or low numbers - the discussion is around crits, not arbitrary value rolls.
I know what you're thinking: "In that flurry of blows, did he use all his ki points, or save one?" Well, are ya feeling lucky, punk?
You're only saying that because the variance is 6-48. The reality is a plain longsword can crit for 2-20 damage. I've seen regular hits higher than a crit, and I've seen crits that maxed all the dice. I had a player with a 3rd-level paladin, first combat of a new campaign, crit and roll max damage with both his weapon and divine smite. He outpaced a 3rd-level lightning bolt two levels before a full spellcaster could even cast it, and there wasn't one in the party.
That unpredictability is just part of the game. It's a feature, not a bug, and isn't worth bringing attention to.
I'm sorry. no its not. It is a single hit with a massive spike in damage with the odds of it happening around that of a crit. It is the same thing as a crit you just want to accept some massive variance swings and not others not out of reasons but because one has the name crit in it.
And it’s the same with the vaunted recharge abilities, except they have significantly higher odds of recurring; looking at an Adult Black Dragon, it’s attack rolls average out to 47 damage divided among 3 attacks, giving about 1 in 7 odds that an extra 2d10+1d8 or 2d6 damage will be dealt in a round. Meanwhile the breath attack is 12d8 for an average of 54 with a 1 in 3 chance to refresh. More than twice as likely to crop up in a given round, and with a larger dice pool to swing on a given instance. Seems at least as capable of spiking damage as a crit, with the potential to hit multiple characters too.
Crits are just a feature that adds variance to damage values, there is no difference in kind between crits and any other sort of variability. To the degree there's a problem with spell critical hits, it's that they tend to be large single attacks, and this is mostly a very low level problem because there aren't a lot of high level spells with attack rolls -- in the basic rules this is almost entirely an issue with the CR 2 cult fanatic casting inflict wounds or the CR 2 priest casting guiding bolt -- but those are problems even without spell critical hits, both monsters are in the category of "most of the time they'll be irrelevant speed-bumps for the PCs, but occasionally they'll do something randomly scary".
Sure, there is a market for both camps in the extreme even. Finding the balance for the majority is the trick in a game shooting for mass appeal like D&D.
One of the issues with D&D is that the characters with the fewest tools to deal with swings of good or bad luck are also the most likely to encounter such swings -- low CR monsters generally have far higher variance than high CR, meaning that accidentally killing a level 1 is far more likely than accidentally killing a level 5. This has been true in every edition of D&D (it was least true in 4e, but somewhat true even there), though back in AD&D times low level characters were viewed as sufficiently disposable that them dying was just how the game was expected to work.
Yeah a lot of players in older editions would make multiple characters as they expected to run through them. Heck the official rule in the dark sun campaign setting was make 3. I think you can find some level of balance where things are not that lethal and swingy, but without removing crits and the possibility for a sudden death just because you are john mcclain and facing down the boss in a dramatic scene.
Thing is, that's already gone for T2 and above. Instakilling a level 5 generally requires 60-100 damage depending on the class and build, and there are next to no monsters in the game that can do that much damage with an ability that uses an attack roll, almost everything that does that much damage is save-based and attached to things that are very high CR, and even if you do instakill that level 5... revivify exists.
On reflection, a rule for massive damage that appeals to me is
One shots are generally gone at T2, but I've seen massive damage kills when people get dropped to a couple hit points and then take a high damage shot. Usually not a crit, but if you fail your save to a dragon breath and take buckets of damage, though yeah it still usually takes 40+ damage. But i guess like some crits from like a giant can do it. And if its a concern you can obviously build to reduce the odds, looking at some old characters of mine in the level 9-10 range hit points vary between high 40s and low 80s for the more spell caster type. A crit from a frost giants(cr8) rock throw averages 50 so it would not take too much off the average to drop a few of those characters if they were first reduced to 5 hit points or so. And you could be encountering that level 6ish, so drop 15ish from those lower hit points and now maybe they are getting dropped when at 15ish hit points.
And yeah that's a decent massive damage rule.
Though the main reason I never consider it a problem t2 and above is the option to res people comes in at level 5 for a lot of parties. But not everyone has a cleric so maybe revify or something similar should be on more lists.
Druids get Revivify too as of Tasha's- plus Lore Bards can grab it at 6, so it's in about the right place for accessibility imo; healing and resurrection is limited by design. Like I've said, the easier fix is just to shift Massive Damage to a variant/optional rule so people who want the possibility of instant death can have it, but it doesn't create the sense that a DM is bending the rules to keep someone alive otherwise. Moving the threshold and/or how it's calculated is an interesting idea as well, I just think this shift more thoroughly addresses the initial issue raised here of low level characters being perma-killed, possibly by an OHK.
If the argument is "I like crits because I think D&D is a better game when every single random creature in it has a small but nonzero chance to randomly deal ten million damage in a single blow, thereby rending my character down to their constituent atoms, slaying every last living member of their bloodline, and erasing them from history such that even the party members they had been adventuring with just the moment before have no idea my character ever existed", then do that as a variant rule. Invent some sort of Doom Roll that gets added to every successful monster attack, and if the Doom Roll ever lands your character dies and the body is permanently and irrecoverably destroyed beyond all hope of resurrection. It's way easier to bolt that sort of nonsense in as a variant rule than it is to try and cut that nonsense out when the entire game is hinged on the fact that your character can just be exorcised from the continuum of history forever by literally any attack roll.
Please do not contact or message me.
The argument is "that assertion is complete and utter nonsense". Sure, you can come up with a variant rule that makes crits super-mega-dangerous, but RAW they aren't. This isn't 3e where a CR 1/2 orc can crit for 40.
The simple fact is that crits don’t spike damage as a whole anymore than rolling high for damage on a save effect against a target that failed. The concern is just that in the first level or two max HP pools are low enough that such a spike even from a mob could hit massive damage. Ergo the fix is to alter the massive damage rule, rather than the system’s underlying damage formula.
Can’t spells that hit AC crit anyway? I was 90% confident that cantrips like Fire Bolt could.
Which spells are we talking about anyway?
Way back in the first UA for 1D&D they floated the idea of scaling back crits to only player weapon damage. People didn’t go for it, and all the material since seems to have dropped the idea.
The crux of this and every similar argument is the irreconcilable split between Camp A: "Sudden, inexplicable, unavoidable permanent death makes D&D worse, impedes stories, and makes players feel bad in ways they shouldn't, so we would like them largely removed", and Camp B: "Sudden, inexplicable, unavoidable permanent death is a core, integral part of the D&D experience; the game simply isn't properly D&D without it, and any change which lessens its already-too-low presence is a bad change."
Crits exploding for ten trillion damage and erasing entire species and civilizations from the timespace continuum is what Camp B wants. Crits not bloody existing is, to a large extent, what Camp A wants. The problem is you cannot do both, the game must be designed to either account for the possibility of critical strikes or not. If the game doesn't account for crits, adding them back in blows everything up. If the game does account for crits, they eat the design space you could use to do far more interesting things with both rolls and many monsters. We are stuck for it, without any real room to do anything cool anymore.
Ahem: bleh.
Please do not contact or message me.
You know, it would be easier to take your arguments seriously if your proposed scenarios had any grounding in reality as opposed to being complete strawman examples. Criticals do not exist to solely, primarily, or even occasionally cause Massive Damage insta-kills. In point of fact, as has been pointed out, on weapon attacks they pretty much completely lose that capacity once players are level 3 or higher. They exist create damage spikes on attack rolls, in the same way rolling only 5's or higher on Fireball will spike the damage on that spell compared to the average damage (average is 28, if you got an even split between 5's and 6's that'd be 44- over a 50% increase in damage).