Well it's a great opportunity to rework the classes, give the martial characters a few new ways to inflict damage and be slightly more resilient against on the old saving throws.
I'd say it's not about the damage really - it's about versatility and resources. Monk, for instance, has to really struggle with ki shortage until mid-levels. So many fun features use ki, you can burn through them in first few rounds and be reduced to just punching the enemy like a weaker fighter.
Monk by far has the worst punishment for resource usage, want to bonus action dash or disengage, that'll be a ki point; Rogue wants to bonus action dash, that'll be free. yea, still I think the problem with this argument is that it'd require that Fighter itself not need a bit of a buff; I think the only Martial that doesn't need a buff is Paladin.
In combat most the martials are fine balance wise as their DPR is generally king and while crowd control etc is great end of the day depletion of hit points is what wins battles. They for the most part are twiddling their thumbs outside of combat though, and the ones who aren't like the rogue really isn't amazing in combat.(well except the monk which is in a bad spot) I'd still add battle master+ to all martials as a default, not for balance purposes but for fun purposes and I'd have a separate pool for out of combat bad assery for the martials without magic, super human leaps, shattering blows vs objects, unearthly intimidation etc. You are a martial and your physical/mundane feats should leap into the impossible whether in combat or not, and they need to be separate resources so they don't feel like they can't take the leap ability without hamstringing their dpr. When they do a skill it should be effectively magic for how good they are at it, hide in plain site as an example from previous editions.
There is not one single sensible part out there who, given the option between a paladin and a fighter of equal level and competence, would take the fighter.
Apples and oranges. Paladins don't have much in the way of crowd control or ranged attacks. I get the feeling you've never tried building a good Battle Master, Eldtritch Knight or Arcane Archer.
The issue with Spell Caster Crits, even on Cantrips only is that it makes using Cantrips potentially superior (DPS) than higher level spells. Since a single attack would do 8d10 with Firebolt at lvl 17. 44 damage. That's compared to Finger of death 62 damage but also requires a save. For comparison a Fighter would do about 40 damage across all 4 attacks dual wielding longswords and getting 1 crit. (lvl 20)
That's not a cantrip problem, it's just how low level damage spells work. Even if spellcasters didn't have cantrips that scale with level, Magic Missile isn't a good way to spend your turn once the baseline is 2-3 weapon attacks with +5 bonus and maybe more (e.g. magic weapon bonuses, Hunter's Mark.) Saving those slots for something like Shield is way better.
Also, TWF is bad for high level fighters. The proper comparison is Dueling, Archery or Great Weapon Fighting.
Divine Smite is Nova it is a lot of damage and it's on command, it also burns resources, stack it with a smite spell for more fun.
You're still proving my point; the problem with Divine Smite is that it lets you firehose your spell slots. Under normal circumstances you can only expend one big spell slot per turn (*I know about Action Surge, thanks.) Divine Smite is like if Bladesingers had a feature that said "whenever you make a weapon attack, you can cast any spell that has an attack roll (no action needed). If the spell's attack misses, you don't expend your spell slot. On a hit, its damage can't be resisted." It bypasses the natural action economy of spellcasting and the usual losses from potentially missing your spell attack or having the damage reduced with a save and it's all being delivered with a poorly thought out damage type that nothing realistically resists.
The crits aren't the problem. It's Divine Smite. Paladins with just smite spells function are intended. You can't even try to fish for crits with smite spells because you can't retroactively cast the spell.
Crit fishing isn't just waiting for a 5% chance, a crit fisher can potentially be pushing as high as a 19% chance to critical, when you crit on a 19 and have advantage. A vengeance Paladin/Hexblade Warlock can actually be pushing that.
It's a cute trick, but the problem there is still the fact that you've got a Paladin that can go all in on Charisma for both saves and attack rolls and also has short rest spell slots they can keep regenerating.
This has already broken your baseless assertion of 5%, you're just straight up wrong here.
I'm not wrong, you're just not reading my posts carefully.
As for Nerfing Divine Smite; Nerfing Divine smite ain't enough, Rogue's sneak attack is just as broken when it comes up.
It's not. The expected damage is exactly the same as if the Rogue made a bunch of tiny attacks instead of 1 big attack. What you're proposing distinctly handicaps rogues.
Gee, it's almost like all those things are part of future 1DD playtests and have the opportunity to be changed in accordance with improved crit rules!
There's no reason to take such a convoluted approach when the current crit rules already benefit everyone equally. It's just rules bloat for no reason. The new crit rules don't fix anything.
Gee, it's almost like all those things are part of future 1DD playtests and have the opportunity to be changed in accordance with improved crit rules!
There's no reason to take such a convoluted approach when the current crit rules already benefit everyone equally. It's just rules bloat for no reason. The new crit rules don't fix anything.
The new Crit rules are a round about way of testing how people feel about the lack of spell-based crits.
We know it's about casters, because I'm pretty sure the video said that there were plenty of people already confused on that point. They want actual feedback from it, so they made it deliberatively provocative.
And, Yurei has a point. There's zero point complaining that Sneak Attack or Smites can't Crit when we haven't seen the new rules for them. I'm inclined to think they do count - see above for "should spells Crit?" for my reason why. It's not what's being tested.
As for benefitting everyone equally.... Or trying to fix something... Given the lack of caster attack rolls outside of cantrips and Scorching Ray... I can't say it's equal at all. Is the lack of attack rolls because of crits on powerful spells are too much? A good consideration to have.
So basically, no there is no indication at all that they will change anything else regarding martial crits in future playtest material and you are just going off of an assumption?
Have you seen 2024's PHB? Have you seen ODnD class features playtest? Have you at least seen the last iteration of core mechanics playtest?
I still remember 2012 playtests, where there was no extra attack feature, everyone made one attack per round, adding "martial damage dice", of which every class had different progressions.
And, Yurei has a point. There's zero point complaining that Sneak Attack or Smites can't Crit when we haven't seen the new rules for them. I'm inclined to think they do count - see above for "should spells Crit?" for my reason why. It's not what's being tested.
If the intent is for those things to count the current rules are still poorly written and shouldn't go to print as is. I don't see how anyone could possibly interpret Sneak Attack dice or Divine Smite dice as part of the weapon's damage. That's not how that would be interpreted in 5e.
Best case scenario they add ad-hoc crit rules for every single situation and achieve...the same thing we already have, just with more rules and special cases to remember. Worst case scenario they forget to address crits in some feature or another because it's no longer a default behavior of attacks and they're only human.
As for benefitting everyone equally.... Or trying to fix something... Given the lack of caster attack rolls outside of cantrips and Scorching Ray... I can't say it's equal at all. Is the lack of attack rolls because of crits on powerful spells are too much? A good consideration to have.
Most of the spells that lack an attack roll* in 5e are targeting multiple creatures and most likely deal half damage on a save. That makes their damage roll be worth at least 3 times what the same dice would produce on an attack (two targets = double damage, half damage on a save = 50% more damage on average than no damage on a save/miss.) Crits only kick in 5-10% of the time (depending on advantage) and will at most do double damage (sans high level Barbarians) so they don't do nearly enough to bridge that gap. Like I said, crits only add 5% of the damage roll to your average damage.
None of the arguments against cantrips or disintegrate hold water because the average damage of 3 attacks that deal 2d6 each and 1 attack that deals 6d6 is exactly the same, with or without crits. Lumping all of the damage into a single roll doesn't somehow make crits more powerful. The martial characters are just scoring more frequent but smaller crits while the Rogue's is scoring bigger but fewer crits...just like the martial characters are already scoring more but smaller regular hits. All the pearl-clutching over Smite and Sneak Attack crits is just observer bias. They're outlier events, so it's only natural those are the ones you're going to remember. We don't pay particular attention to all the times the dice did exactly what we expected. Any fight gets "ruined" by a crit was going to end extremely even without it.
*Except for Disintegrate, which again, is a result of WotC over-streamlining 5e and getting rid of touch attacks/touch AC. It's historically been an attack that ignores armor.
My laptop crashed writing my previous post so I lost my initial reply to this:
When monsters routinely throw 6+ dice on any given attack, watching that monster crit basically means a PC dies. End of story.
You're going to have to get real specific with what you're talking about because this absolutely isn't the norm. Players get another hit die every single level and monsters certainly aren't getting an extra damage die with every CR point. A 5d10 character is going to take over 10d10 to kill outright from full health and still 5d10 to kill outright from 1 HP. What's a million times more likely to kill players is the fact that melee attacks will cause 2 death saves after they go down and pretty much everything has multiattack.
As for benefitting everyone equally.... Or trying to fix something... Given the lack of caster attack rolls outside of cantrips and Scorching Ray... I can't say it's equal at all. Is the lack of attack rolls because of crits on powerful spells are too much? A good consideration to have.
It doesn't even have to be about powerful spells. Fighter crits for 2d12+str or 4d6+str at best. Fire bolt, a cantrip, can crit for up to 8d10.
The real issue is interaction with new inspiration rules. Martials can crit with attacks, gaining inspiration. If spellsall use saving throws, then casters don't roll a d20 test, losing on chances to get inspiration from combat.
Again, in any situation where a fire bolt can crit 8d10 the Fighter's got 3-5 chances to crit while the wizard's got 1. It's a wash. The situation's no different from regular hits; fire bolt only gets one chance to hit so it's also more likely to do 0 damage.
The averages are the same for multi-hitters and one-big-hitters, all alse being equal.
Averages don't tell the entire story, IC. Sure, averaged over ten thousand rolls critical hits only account for five percent or so extra damage, exempting junk like Brutal Critical. But most combats don't occur over a period of ten thousand rolls. In point of fact, I don't know as any combat anybody has ever run has gotten to ten thousand rolls. Combats tend to take between, we'll say, two and eight rounds depending on amount of WTF involved. In two to eight rounds? A single cantrip crit deals more 'bonus' damage than any three "crits" you'd care to name from a martial class that doesn't get to retroactively throw a dozen exploding dice at a crit. Monks roll crits plenty in the current system but nobody cares because monk crits work the way Wizards is saying everybody's crits should work - you roll your damage die a second time and get that. Paladins dumping 35d8 retroactively into a crit, Battlemasters burning half their Maneuver pools on a crit, rogues Golden BB-ing something for 69d6 on a crit...all of that junk just makes other people's crits feel like they aren't even worth rolling. They're outliers, and any basic game dev knows that you tune down outliers.
Combats tend to take between, we'll say, two and eight rounds depending on amount of WTF involved...A single cantrip crit deals more 'bonus' damage than any three "crits" you'd care to name from a martial class that doesn't get to retroactively throw a dozen exploding dice at a crit.
2 to 8 rounds in a fight appropriate for 4-6 creatures has enough headroom to absorb the variability introduced by crits. Even if the wizard gets lucky? They're at most 1/4th of the party's firepower and that was at most *1/3rd of the fight's rounds. Sorry, but that's not tipping the scales nearly as much as you make it out to be.
*In my opinion any fight that can be settled in 2 rounds is too easy to even be worth having this discussion, and both the DMG and Jeremy Crawford himself tend to think about 3 round cycles when analyzing monster designs.
Second, a single cantrip is far more likely to be swingy in the other direction and contribute absolutely nothing. You can't claim "well, the average doesn't tell the whole story" for crits and ignore the other end of the variability. That's a double standard.
Third, the variability introduced by crit cantrips is still far smaller than the variability from the wizard deciding to use spell slots (or not) and which spells they brought to the fight. If you were right and crit cantrips are too swingy, we have to get rid of daily spell slots. Might as well give wizards a fixed number of spells per fight from a standardized spell list so their output is consistent.
Paladins dumping 35d8 retroactively into a crit, Battlemasters burning half their Maneuver pools on a crit, rogues Golden BB-ing something for 69d6 on a crit...all of that junk just makes other people's crits feel like they aren't even worth rolling.
The Paladin problem goes away if you fix (i.e. remove) Divine Smite, Battle Masters can't do that, and by the time a Rogue can do that I sure would expect monsters to have the HP to absorb that and much more. Forget the Rogue, what daily spells is the Wizard throwing out at that point? Are we going to take away their spell slots because some player that didn't want to play a wizard in the first place could hypothetically get dice envy when the Wizard casts Fireball?
They're outliers, and any basic game dev knows that you tune down outliers.
Crits are so far down the list of things that make or break a fight it's not even funny. Simply allowing Polearm Master + GWM, Crossbow Expert + Sharpshooter, min-maxed grapple/shove builds (e.g. Barbarian with Prodigy/Expertise), Eldritch Blast + Agonizing Blast + Repelling Blast + Spell Sniper or Paladin X/Hexblade 2 does far, far more for those character's baseline power. You could take those build's crits away and they'll still outdamage alternative builds with crits by a wide margin. Hell even just having a caster with Faerie Fire's going to amplify the party's damage much more than random crits.
Divine Smite is Nova it is a lot of damage and it's on command, it also burns resources, stack it with a smite spell for more fun.
You're still proving my point; the problem with Divine Smite is that it lets you firehose your spell slots. Under normal circumstances you can only expend one big spell slot per turn (*I know about Action Surge, thanks.) Divine Smite is like if Bladesingers had a feature that said "whenever you make a weapon attack, you can cast any spell that has an attack roll (no action needed). If the spell's attack misses, you don't expend your spell slot. On a hit, its damage can't be resisted." It bypasses the natural action economy of spellcasting and the usual losses from potentially missing your spell attack or having the damage reduced with a save and it's all being delivered with a poorly thought out damage type that nothing realistically resists.
The crits aren't the problem. It's Divine Smite. Paladins with just smite spells function are intended. You can't even try to fish for crits with smite spells because you can't retroactively cast the spell.
Crit fishing isn't just waiting for a 5% chance, a crit fisher can potentially be pushing as high as a 19% chance to critical, when you crit on a 19 and have advantage. A vengeance Paladin/Hexblade Warlock can actually be pushing that.
It's a cute trick, but the problem there is still the fact that you've got a Paladin that can go all in on Charisma for both saves and attack rolls and also has short rest spell slots they can keep regenerating.
This has already broken your baseless assertion of 5%, you're just straight up wrong here.
I'm not wrong, you're just not reading my posts carefully.
As for Nerfing Divine Smite; Nerfing Divine smite ain't enough, Rogue's sneak attack is just as broken when it comes up.
It's not. The expected damage is exactly the same as if the Rogue made a bunch of tiny attacks instead of 1 big attack. What you're proposing distinctly handicaps rogues.
I'm not saying Paladin/Hexblade isn't also broken in other ways, it is definitely one of, if not the most broken multiclass in the game. Maybe 2nd place to sorcerer/warlock.
Well you keep saying 5% and not really giving context, if you were talking about how it's a 5% chance, I have already shown how that is false, if you're talking about it being a 5% increase to damage overall then again I have shown how that is false. So what do you mean by the 5%, be explicit and clear, because I can't see anything else you can mean by saying it's just 5% then.
Doing 2d6+DEX+10d6 is distinctively a lot more damage than 1d6+DEX+5d6, this is way closer to double damage than fighter gets. Rogue definitely needs some damage buffs overall but maintaining their critical hits working like this isn't, I think the correct way to do it, it makes rogue basically a class that either needs to force a critical or to just do unreliable and inconsistent damage.
If the intent is for those things to count the current rules are still poorly written and shouldn't go to print as is.
Repeat after me: this is only a playtest. This isn't the final form going to print. The rules in the classes may make things clear. Everything is subject to change.
It's one thing to say, "I'm worried that Smites and Sneak Attacks count as crits with these incomplete new rules we see. I made a comment about it on the survey."
It's another to say, "It absolutely doesn't work and everything is ruined."
Most of the spells that lack an attack roll* in 5e are targeting multiple creatures and most likely deal half damage on a save.
The only non-cantrip spell with an attack roll in 5e is Scorching Ray, which itself targets multiple people.
Why is that, and is it going to change? In either direction? Are we getting more attack rolls? No attack spells rolls?
This is where we go back to "We don't have all the rules they are testing." Because we don't know how getting crits will affect the future of spellcasting. Nat20s are practically twice as easy to come by now, don't forget
So the answer is to just throw away any attempt at all to massage the system into a better place?
People want to be able to SuperMegaUltraCrit? Cool. I want to be able to give my monsters cool, visceral, iconic and memorable Recharge abilities that make them exciting and punchy to fight, but I don't bloody get to do that if I have to balance around giving every single monster the same 6d12 five-hit Multiattack and praying I get my crits because That's What Encounter Math wants. Never allowed to make different monsters use different tactics, never allowed to give different creatures different modes of combat - nope. Wizards said "hey, wouldn't it be cool if we put more emphasis on unique, thematic and memorable monster powers that change the way a fight works?" and The D&D Playerbase collectively rose up and bellowed "NO ALL WE WANT IS CRITS MORE CRITS JUST CRITS JUST CRITS"
Hot take: **** crits. Stuff that Embiggens Numbers - and that's all a crit is, just a bigger-than-normal wad of numbers - is never as cool as stuff that changes behaviors, alters existing options, or introduces entirely new ones. Y'all can have crits - when I build homebrew monsters I'm going to keep giving them unique and flavorful abilities that allow them to surprise the players and keep them on their toes and I don't particularly care that the slobbering mouth-monster that is the Internet Fanbase for the game demands that all unique monster powers go away in favor of JUST MOAR CRITS.
It doesn't even have to be about powerful spells. Fighter crits for 2d12+str or 4d6+str at best. Fire bolt, a cantrip, can crit for up to 8d10.
The real issue is interaction with new inspiration rules. Martials can crit with attacks, gaining inspiration. If spellsall use saving throws, then casters don't roll a d20 test, losing on chances to get inspiration from combat.
The interaction with inspiration is indeed a consideration. I've had a Vicious Mockery bard in 5e that has never rolled an attack roll.
So the answer is to just throw away any attempt at all to massage the system into a better place?
People want to be able to SuperMegaUltraCrit? Cool. I want to be able to give my monsters cool, visceral, iconic and memorable Recharge abilities that make them exciting and punchy to fight, but I don't bloody get to do that if I have to balance around giving every single monster the same 6d12 five-hit Multiattack and praying I get my crits because That's What Encounter Math wants. Never allowed to make different monsters use different tactics, never allowed to give different creatures different modes of combat - nope. Wizards said "hey, wouldn't it be cool if we put more emphasis on unique, thematic and memorable monster powers that change the way a fight works?" and The D&D Playerbase collectively rose up and bellowed "NO ALL WE WANT IS CRITS MORE CRITS JUST CRITS JUST CRITS"
Hot take: **** crits. Stuff that Embiggens Numbers - and that's all a crit is, just a bigger-than-normal wad of numbers - is never as cool as stuff that changes behaviors, alters existing options, or introduces entirely new ones. Y'all can have crits - when I build homebrew monsters I'm going to keep giving them unique and flavorful abilities that allow them to surprise the players and keep them on their toes and I don't particularly care that the slobbering mouth-monster that is the Internet Fanbase for the game demands that all unique monster powers go away in favor of JUST MOAR CRITS.
Woah woah woah calm down there, friend. Why not have best of both worlds? I mean, the real problem WotC is trying to address is low-level characters getting one-shot. Having monsters occasionally deal spikes of damage can turn the tide of encounter when the previously smug fighter suddenly needs help ASAP or a lucky goblin's arrow hits a wizard, breaking his concentration on control spell cast on an ogre... And in the end it just feels fair and brutal for monsters to also sometimes get lucky and score crits. It doesn't prevent recharge abilities from being designed or anything. Just saying.
I myself am torn on this. I welcome experiments and changes, I definitely want some more survivability and control over situation at low levels, and I want casters and martials to be closer to equal. But I also dislike it when rules are different for players and NPCs, it makes it feel unfair. As if the players were heroes only because universe pampers them.
So what do you mean by the 5%, be explicit and clear, because I can't see anything else you can mean by saying it's just 5% then.
For any attack (ignoring advantage, Brutal Critical for simplicity) the average damage is d*h + 0.05d + b (d = damage dice, h = chance to hit, b = fixed numerical bonuses.) The 0.05d is the term that crits contribute. If you're a wizard casting 2d20 (avg = 11) Fire Bolts and you hit 70% of the time your average damage is 0.7*11 + 0.05*11 = 8.25. Take away crits and it becomes 7.7.
Yes, that extra 5% of the damage roll is actually relative increase of 7% when you take misses into account, but it's not going to be much more than that in practice. Enemy ACs generally cap out at 20, the average AC is 14-15. Players already start at around +5 attack bonus. You're generally not going to do much worse than 50% hit chance most fights. If advantage is a factor you can expect at least 75% hit rate. And yes, advantage doubles your crit rates but that's still overshadowed by the massive increase in hit chance.
The only objective way to look at a situation is to look at the averages, unless you're specifically discussing a situation where the enemy's 1 hit away from death. D&D is a game of randomness. No matter how "balanced" an encounter is, if every single person rolls a crit every single round, it's going to be over quick. But the chances of that happening are astronomically small.
It's another to say, "It absolutely doesn't work and everything is ruined."
If anyone can point out any advantage to the new rules that holds up to scrutiny I'd happily eat those words.
The only non-cantrip spell with an attack roll in 5e is Scorching Ray, which itself targets multiple people. Why is that, and is it going to change? In either direction? Are we getting more attack rolls? No attack spells rolls?
People want to be able to SuperMegaUltraCrit? Cool. I want to be able to give my monsters cool, visceral, iconic and memorable Recharge abilities that make them exciting and punchy to fight, but I don't bloody get to do that if I have to balance around giving every single monster the same 6d12 five-hit Multiattack and praying I get my crits because That's What Encounter Math wants.
Again: the damage from crits is a drop in the bucket. If a single crit is going to turn the tide of the battle then 1) your players are probably screwed either way and 2) a single additional miss would sway the fight in the opposite direction, and I don't see anyone arguing we should get rid of attack rolls. Crits are such a relatively rare event that the variability they introduce always gets outweighed by the variability of hits and misses and the decision to use limited-use resources like Action Surge and Spell Slots.
No one here has remotely attempted to address that point.
Hot take: **** crits. Stuff that Embiggens Numbers - and that's all a crit is, just a bigger-than-normal wad of numbers - is never as cool as stuff that changes behaviors, alters existing options, or introduces entirely new ones. Y'all can have crits - when I build homebrew monsters I'm going to keep giving them unique and flavorful abilities that allow them to surprise the players and keep them on their toes and I don't particularly care that the slobbering mouth-monster that is the Internet Fanbase for the game demands that all unique monster powers go away in favor of JUST MOAR CRITS.
You can do both.Having crits has not stopped Wizards from giving monsters limited use abilities at all.
The rules have to be different for PCs and not-PCs. Because PCs are endlessly fiddly and over-complicated by DM/NPC standards, with dozens and dozens of moving pieces that make absolutely no sense for the DM to have to bother with mid-session. Players get that junk because it helps them focus down on the one single character they're playing for dozens of sessions and hundreds of hours; the stat block a DM's going to use one time for one combat doesn't need all that extraneous crap.
And yes - that is exactly what people keep pushing for. "Keep crits, dump the stupid Recharge mechanic! Crits are better anyways!" No. No they are not, and they never will be. Yes, people get excited when they roll a crit because it means their turn will be extra punchy for zero resource investment. But hey - players already do everything in their power to stop the DM from critting or take away those crits when they happen. Adamantine armor, Grave clerics, Silvery Barbs...players will do anything to avoid getting critically struck themselves, despite everybody claiming that Critting Is Super Fun and the DM deserves to do it too. Why not let the DM have fun doing something only a DM gets to do, ne? If the players are going to deny the DM all of their crits anyways, why also insist on taking away all the best monster abilities while we're at it?
So far our table has had kind of a ho-hum attitude to the UA crit rules. Generally speaking, the impact on the players stands out more than does for the DM. They don't really get excited over Inspiration at all and prefer rolling a fist full of damage dice. From a DM perspective, I haven't seen much of a change over all and my DM seems to feel the same way.
As far as super cool recharge abilities for monsters or neat crit abilities for classes/subclasses, I will wait to see if that is the case. We can only playtest what has been presented in conjunction with the current rules and so far, it looks a like a bust at our table, not because the DM's dislike it, but because the players do.
I've seen it all over the place. "Why focus on Recharge? Recharge is dumb! It's not exciting like critting is!" "Why should I have to track a stupid Recharge thing instead of just critting when the dice say I get to crit? I've got enough going on as a DM!" "It doesn't make sense for every monster to have Recharge powers, we shouldn't have to rely on Recharge in our fights!" "If I can't Massive Damage a PC to death with a single lucky crit in Tier 1 play the whole game is broken and I don't care about anything else - keep crits and to Hell with recharge on high-level monsters, my players will never live long enough to fight them anyways!"
But it doesn't make sense for every monster to have unique recharge powers. 5e already has a ton of stat blocks that are most likely going to be used for your run-of-the-mill random encounter or as weaker companions to a boss, and most of those don't have recharge powers. There's nothing wrong with that and we shouldn't have to throw those stat blocks away either. Dragons get a recharge because they're going to be used for exciting boss fights. Common wolves, not so much.
The vast majority of people don't want level 1 to be super lethal either.
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In combat most the martials are fine balance wise as their DPR is generally king and while crowd control etc is great end of the day depletion of hit points is what wins battles. They for the most part are twiddling their thumbs outside of combat though, and the ones who aren't like the rogue really isn't amazing in combat.(well except the monk which is in a bad spot) I'd still add battle master+ to all martials as a default, not for balance purposes but for fun purposes and I'd have a separate pool for out of combat bad assery for the martials without magic, super human leaps, shattering blows vs objects, unearthly intimidation etc. You are a martial and your physical/mundane feats should leap into the impossible whether in combat or not, and they need to be separate resources so they don't feel like they can't take the leap ability without hamstringing their dpr. When they do a skill it should be effectively magic for how good they are at it, hide in plain site as an example from previous editions.
Apples and oranges. Paladins don't have much in the way of crowd control or ranged attacks. I get the feeling you've never tried building a good Battle Master, Eldtritch Knight or Arcane Archer.
You're still proving my point; the problem with Divine Smite is that it lets you firehose your spell slots. Under normal circumstances you can only expend one big spell slot per turn (*I know about Action Surge, thanks.) Divine Smite is like if Bladesingers had a feature that said "whenever you make a weapon attack, you can cast any spell that has an attack roll (no action needed). If the spell's attack misses, you don't expend your spell slot. On a hit, its damage can't be resisted." It bypasses the natural action economy of spellcasting and the usual losses from potentially missing your spell attack or having the damage reduced with a save and it's all being delivered with a poorly thought out damage type that nothing realistically resists.
The crits aren't the problem. It's Divine Smite. Paladins with just smite spells function are intended. You can't even try to fish for crits with smite spells because you can't retroactively cast the spell.
It's a cute trick, but the problem there is still the fact that you've got a Paladin that can go all in on Charisma for both saves and attack rolls and also has short rest spell slots they can keep regenerating.
There's no reason to take such a convoluted approach when the current crit rules already benefit everyone equally. It's just rules bloat for no reason. The new crit rules don't fix anything.
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The new Crit rules are a round about way of testing how people feel about the lack of spell-based crits.
We know it's about casters, because I'm pretty sure the video said that there were plenty of people already confused on that point. They want actual feedback from it, so they made it deliberatively provocative.
And, Yurei has a point. There's zero point complaining that Sneak Attack or Smites can't Crit when we haven't seen the new rules for them. I'm inclined to think they do count - see above for "should spells Crit?" for my reason why. It's not what's being tested.
As for benefitting everyone equally.... Or trying to fix something... Given the lack of caster attack rolls outside of cantrips and Scorching Ray... I can't say it's equal at all. Is the lack of attack rolls because of crits on powerful spells are too much? A good consideration to have.
Have you seen 2024's PHB? Have you seen ODnD class features playtest? Have you at least seen the last iteration of core mechanics playtest?
I still remember 2012 playtests, where there was no extra attack feature, everyone made one attack per round, adding "martial damage dice", of which every class had different progressions.
Most of the spells that lack an attack roll* in 5e are targeting multiple creatures and most likely deal half damage on a save. That makes their damage roll be worth at least 3 times what the same dice would produce on an attack (two targets = double damage, half damage on a save = 50% more damage on average than no damage on a save/miss.) Crits only kick in 5-10% of the time (depending on advantage) and will at most do double damage (sans high level Barbarians) so they don't do nearly enough to bridge that gap. Like I said, crits only add 5% of the damage roll to your average damage.
None of the arguments against cantrips or disintegrate hold water because the average damage of 3 attacks that deal 2d6 each and 1 attack that deals 6d6 is exactly the same, with or without crits. Lumping all of the damage into a single roll doesn't somehow make crits more powerful. The martial characters are just scoring more frequent but smaller crits while the Rogue's is scoring bigger but fewer crits...just like the martial characters are already scoring more but smaller regular hits. All the pearl-clutching over Smite and Sneak Attack crits is just observer bias. They're outlier events, so it's only natural those are the ones you're going to remember. We don't pay particular attention to all the times the dice did exactly what we expected. Any fight gets "ruined" by a crit was going to end extremely even without it.
*Except for Disintegrate, which again, is a result of WotC over-streamlining 5e and getting rid of touch attacks/touch AC. It's historically been an attack that ignores armor.
My laptop crashed writing my previous post so I lost my initial reply to this:
You're going to have to get real specific with what you're talking about because this absolutely isn't the norm. Players get another hit die every single level and monsters certainly aren't getting an extra damage die with every CR point. A 5d10 character is going to take over 10d10 to kill outright from full health and still 5d10 to kill outright from 1 HP. What's a million times more likely to kill players is the fact that melee attacks will cause 2 death saves after they go down and pretty much everything has multiattack.
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It doesn't even have to be about powerful spells. Fighter crits for 2d12+str or 4d6+str at best. Fire bolt, a cantrip, can crit for up to 8d10.
The real issue is interaction with new inspiration rules. Martials can crit with attacks, gaining inspiration. If spellsall use saving throws, then casters don't roll a d20 test, losing on chances to get inspiration from combat.
Again, in any situation where a fire bolt can crit 8d10 the Fighter's got 3-5 chances to crit while the wizard's got 1. It's a wash. The situation's no different from regular hits; fire bolt only gets one chance to hit so it's also more likely to do 0 damage.
The averages are the same for multi-hitters and one-big-hitters, all alse being equal.
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Averages don't tell the entire story, IC. Sure, averaged over ten thousand rolls critical hits only account for five percent or so extra damage, exempting junk like Brutal Critical. But most combats don't occur over a period of ten thousand rolls. In point of fact, I don't know as any combat anybody has ever run has gotten to ten thousand rolls. Combats tend to take between, we'll say, two and eight rounds depending on amount of WTF involved. In two to eight rounds? A single cantrip crit deals more 'bonus' damage than any three "crits" you'd care to name from a martial class that doesn't get to retroactively throw a dozen exploding dice at a crit. Monks roll crits plenty in the current system but nobody cares because monk crits work the way Wizards is saying everybody's crits should work - you roll your damage die a second time and get that. Paladins dumping 35d8 retroactively into a crit, Battlemasters burning half their Maneuver pools on a crit, rogues Golden BB-ing something for 69d6 on a crit...all of that junk just makes other people's crits feel like they aren't even worth rolling. They're outliers, and any basic game dev knows that you tune down outliers.
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2 to 8 rounds in a fight appropriate for 4-6 creatures has enough headroom to absorb the variability introduced by crits. Even if the wizard gets lucky? They're at most 1/4th of the party's firepower and that was at most *1/3rd of the fight's rounds. Sorry, but that's not tipping the scales nearly as much as you make it out to be.
*In my opinion any fight that can be settled in 2 rounds is too easy to even be worth having this discussion, and both the DMG and Jeremy Crawford himself tend to think about 3 round cycles when analyzing monster designs.
Second, a single cantrip is far more likely to be swingy in the other direction and contribute absolutely nothing. You can't claim "well, the average doesn't tell the whole story" for crits and ignore the other end of the variability. That's a double standard.
Third, the variability introduced by crit cantrips is still far smaller than the variability from the wizard deciding to use spell slots (or not) and which spells they brought to the fight. If you were right and crit cantrips are too swingy, we have to get rid of daily spell slots. Might as well give wizards a fixed number of spells per fight from a standardized spell list so their output is consistent.
The Paladin problem goes away if you fix (i.e. remove) Divine Smite, Battle Masters can't do that, and by the time a Rogue can do that I sure would expect monsters to have the HP to absorb that and much more. Forget the Rogue, what daily spells is the Wizard throwing out at that point? Are we going to take away their spell slots because some player that didn't want to play a wizard in the first place could hypothetically get dice envy when the Wizard casts Fireball?
Crits are so far down the list of things that make or break a fight it's not even funny. Simply allowing Polearm Master + GWM, Crossbow Expert + Sharpshooter, min-maxed grapple/shove builds (e.g. Barbarian with Prodigy/Expertise), Eldritch Blast + Agonizing Blast + Repelling Blast + Spell Sniper or Paladin X/Hexblade 2 does far, far more for those character's baseline power. You could take those build's crits away and they'll still outdamage alternative builds with crits by a wide margin. Hell even just having a caster with Faerie Fire's going to amplify the party's damage much more than random crits.
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I'm not saying Paladin/Hexblade isn't also broken in other ways, it is definitely one of, if not the most broken multiclass in the game. Maybe 2nd place to sorcerer/warlock.
Well you keep saying 5% and not really giving context, if you were talking about how it's a 5% chance, I have already shown how that is false, if you're talking about it being a 5% increase to damage overall then again I have shown how that is false. So what do you mean by the 5%, be explicit and clear, because I can't see anything else you can mean by saying it's just 5% then.
Doing 2d6+DEX+10d6 is distinctively a lot more damage than 1d6+DEX+5d6, this is way closer to double damage than fighter gets. Rogue definitely needs some damage buffs overall but maintaining their critical hits working like this isn't, I think the correct way to do it, it makes rogue basically a class that either needs to force a critical or to just do unreliable and inconsistent damage.
The only non-cantrip spell with an attack roll in 5e is Scorching Ray, which itself targets multiple people.
Why is that, and is it going to change? In either direction? Are we getting more attack rolls? No attack spells rolls?
This is where we go back to "We don't have all the rules they are testing." Because we don't know how getting crits will affect the future of spellcasting. Nat20s are practically twice as easy to come by now, don't forget
So the answer is to just throw away any attempt at all to massage the system into a better place?
People want to be able to SuperMegaUltraCrit? Cool. I want to be able to give my monsters cool, visceral, iconic and memorable Recharge abilities that make them exciting and punchy to fight, but I don't bloody get to do that if I have to balance around giving every single monster the same 6d12 five-hit Multiattack and praying I get my crits because That's What Encounter Math wants. Never allowed to make different monsters use different tactics, never allowed to give different creatures different modes of combat - nope. Wizards said "hey, wouldn't it be cool if we put more emphasis on unique, thematic and memorable monster powers that change the way a fight works?" and The D&D Playerbase collectively rose up and bellowed "NO ALL WE WANT IS CRITS MORE CRITS JUST CRITS JUST CRITS"
Hot take: **** crits. Stuff that Embiggens Numbers - and that's all a crit is, just a bigger-than-normal wad of numbers - is never as cool as stuff that changes behaviors, alters existing options, or introduces entirely new ones. Y'all can have crits - when I build homebrew monsters I'm going to keep giving them unique and flavorful abilities that allow them to surprise the players and keep them on their toes and I don't particularly care that the slobbering mouth-monster that is the Internet Fanbase for the game demands that all unique monster powers go away in favor of JUST MOAR CRITS.
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The interaction with inspiration is indeed a consideration. I've had a Vicious Mockery bard in 5e that has never rolled an attack roll.
Woah woah woah calm down there, friend. Why not have best of both worlds? I mean, the real problem WotC is trying to address is low-level characters getting one-shot. Having monsters occasionally deal spikes of damage can turn the tide of encounter when the previously smug fighter suddenly needs help ASAP or a lucky goblin's arrow hits a wizard, breaking his concentration on control spell cast on an ogre... And in the end it just feels fair and brutal for monsters to also sometimes get lucky and score crits. It doesn't prevent recharge abilities from being designed or anything. Just saying.
I myself am torn on this. I welcome experiments and changes, I definitely want some more survivability and control over situation at low levels, and I want casters and martials to be closer to equal. But I also dislike it when rules are different for players and NPCs, it makes it feel unfair. As if the players were heroes only because universe pampers them.
For any attack (ignoring advantage, Brutal Critical for simplicity) the average damage is d*h + 0.05d + b (d = damage dice, h = chance to hit, b = fixed numerical bonuses.) The 0.05d is the term that crits contribute. If you're a wizard casting 2d20 (avg = 11) Fire Bolts and you hit 70% of the time your average damage is 0.7*11 + 0.05*11 = 8.25. Take away crits and it becomes 7.7.
Yes, that extra 5% of the damage roll is actually relative increase of 7% when you take misses into account, but it's not going to be much more than that in practice. Enemy ACs generally cap out at 20, the average AC is 14-15. Players already start at around +5 attack bonus. You're generally not going to do much worse than 50% hit chance most fights. If advantage is a factor you can expect at least 75% hit rate. And yes, advantage doubles your crit rates but that's still overshadowed by the massive increase in hit chance.
The only objective way to look at a situation is to look at the averages, unless you're specifically discussing a situation where the enemy's 1 hit away from death. D&D is a game of randomness. No matter how "balanced" an encounter is, if every single person rolls a crit every single round, it's going to be over quick. But the chances of that happening are astronomically small.
Huh? Chaos Bolt, Chromatic Orb, Guiding Bolt, Ice Knife, Inflict Wounds, Ray of Sickness, Witch Bolt, Acid Arrow, Ray of Enfeeblement? Those are just the low level instantaneous-ish ones (taking some liberties with Guiding Bolt.) There's lots others I left out.
Again: the damage from crits is a drop in the bucket. If a single crit is going to turn the tide of the battle then 1) your players are probably screwed either way and 2) a single additional miss would sway the fight in the opposite direction, and I don't see anyone arguing we should get rid of attack rolls. Crits are such a relatively rare event that the variability they introduce always gets outweighed by the variability of hits and misses and the decision to use limited-use resources like Action Surge and Spell Slots.
No one here has remotely attempted to address that point.
You can do both. Having crits has not stopped Wizards from giving monsters limited use abilities at all.
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The rules have to be different for PCs and not-PCs. Because PCs are endlessly fiddly and over-complicated by DM/NPC standards, with dozens and dozens of moving pieces that make absolutely no sense for the DM to have to bother with mid-session. Players get that junk because it helps them focus down on the one single character they're playing for dozens of sessions and hundreds of hours; the stat block a DM's going to use one time for one combat doesn't need all that extraneous crap.
And yes - that is exactly what people keep pushing for. "Keep crits, dump the stupid Recharge mechanic! Crits are better anyways!" No. No they are not, and they never will be. Yes, people get excited when they roll a crit because it means their turn will be extra punchy for zero resource investment. But hey - players already do everything in their power to stop the DM from critting or take away those crits when they happen. Adamantine armor, Grave clerics, Silvery Barbs...players will do anything to avoid getting critically struck themselves, despite everybody claiming that Critting Is Super Fun and the DM deserves to do it too. Why not let the DM have fun doing something only a DM gets to do, ne? If the players are going to deny the DM all of their crits anyways, why also insist on taking away all the best monster abilities while we're at it?
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So far our table has had kind of a ho-hum attitude to the UA crit rules. Generally speaking, the impact on the players stands out more than does for the DM. They don't really get excited over Inspiration at all and prefer rolling a fist full of damage dice. From a DM perspective, I haven't seen much of a change over all and my DM seems to feel the same way.
As far as super cool recharge abilities for monsters or neat crit abilities for classes/subclasses, I will wait to see if that is the case. We can only playtest what has been presented in conjunction with the current rules and so far, it looks a like a bust at our table, not because the DM's dislike it, but because the players do.
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I agree with you on that. That doesn't mean all the rules have to be different for PCs and monsters.
No one here has even suggested that?
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I've seen it all over the place.
"Why focus on Recharge? Recharge is dumb! It's not exciting like critting is!"
"Why should I have to track a stupid Recharge thing instead of just critting when the dice say I get to crit? I've got enough going on as a DM!"
"It doesn't make sense for every monster to have Recharge powers, we shouldn't have to rely on Recharge in our fights!"
"If I can't Massive Damage a PC to death with a single lucky crit in Tier 1 play the whole game is broken and I don't care about anything else - keep crits and to Hell with recharge on high-level monsters, my players will never live long enough to fight them anyways!"
On and on and on.
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But it doesn't make sense for every monster to have unique recharge powers. 5e already has a ton of stat blocks that are most likely going to be used for your run-of-the-mill random encounter or as weaker companions to a boss, and most of those don't have recharge powers. There's nothing wrong with that and we shouldn't have to throw those stat blocks away either. Dragons get a recharge because they're going to be used for exciting boss fights. Common wolves, not so much.
The vast majority of people don't want level 1 to be super lethal either.
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