Criticals and double dice

Greenstone.Walker said:

I would really like to see a definitive answer on this. I answered one of the Rpg.stackexchange questions but my answer got voted off the bottom, slightly unfairly, I thought.

I feel that if the damage has a necessary condition of "this attack hits you" then it is "involved in the attack" and its dice should be doubled on a critical hit. If missing the attack means that there is no way to apply the damage then how can it not be considered involved?

I have a particular issue with Crawford's tweet, "Any damage dice delivered by a critical hit—as opposed to a saving throw—are rolled twice." In the case of poison or arrow or slaying, the damage is not "opposed to" a hit; it is "in addition to" a hit. I don't think Mr Crawford understands the question. In other words, we all know that damage delivered by acid splash is not doubled and damage delivered by chill touch is doubled. What we want to know is what happens when there is both an attack roll and a saving throw, and I don't think anyone has answered this.

Additionally, additional damage is not always gated. Consider a giant spider's bite. The poison damage from that is not "Save or take poison damage" (gating the damage behind a saving throw); it is "Take poison damage, save for half." Whether or not you make a saving throw, you are going to take poison damage.

And a related question: Does a critical hit during booming blade double the damage taken next round if the target moves?

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Greenstone.Walker said:

The rules do not use the word "belong" - they use the word "involves" which means something different.

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jaelis said:

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The rules are indeed written in natural language, which means here that it is up to the DM to interpret that language and decide what damage is part of the attack and what isn't. .....

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CapnZapp said:

For those of you who might think this is a strange question to ask, let me go into detail exactly why it's so frustrating to get only non-answers.

Here's the PHB:


Nowhere is "attack’s damage dice" or "other damage dice" actually defined.

Where does it say poison dice isn't doubled? How about the difference between a DMG poison and the inherent poison damage from a Drow: while the first is gated behind a saving throw the second is not? The question isn't "does the second damage get double while the first is not?" The question is: what, specific, rule passage do you claim for making your answer?

And what about items that deliver extra piercing damage (such as Arrows of Slaying)? How can you justify this being not doubled simply because it's gated behind a save, when the rules never actually talk about this? You can't very well argue it's secondary damage - in the case of poison, yes, but this is just more piercing damage? How is that unlike sneak damage, which does get doubled?

Sage Advice does its best to avoid answering the question each time it gets asked. Even Stackexchange manages to claim the question is answered without actually providing an answer (see links above).

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Arial Black said:

The 5e rules are written using natural language. The use of the apostrophe (the ' character) in a word, followed by an s, indicates the possessive case and differentiates it from the plural.

So "the attack's damage dice" indicates that the damage dice are possessed by (belong to) the attack.

If it was written "the attacks" it would mean more than one attack.

It it is written "the attack's" then it possesses whatever follows.

If it is written "the attacks'" then these multiple attacks would possess whatever follows.

The punctuation used, the apostrophe followed by the s, indicates the possessive case in English. Therefore, the language used is already adequate to express that the damage dice belong to (are possessed by) the attack roll.

No errata needed. All that is needed is sufficient understanding of written English.

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captainbananas said:

Arial Black is correct. But there's a logical way to represent this without natural language, too. I apologize for not using formal logic statements, but advanced forum formatting is too high-level an ability for me.

The set of elements that constitute resolving a successful attack (A) include subsets (B) damage dice; (C) static modifiers; (D) status effects that resolve conditional only on a successful attack; and (E) status and damage effects conditional on the victim failing a save ( A = {B,C,D,E} ). Set (B) can include weapon dice (e.g., d8 for rapier), spell effect dice (e.g., d6 for hex), class effect dice (e.g., d6 for sneak attack), race effect dice (e.g., 2d6 for bugbears in surprise rounds), and material effect dice (e.g., any poison dice that apply without a saving throw; these are often a subset of race effect dice).

Both B and E are proper/strict subsets of A, but the conditional effects of a critical hit apply to all elements of set (B) but only set (B). So the 6d10 from an arrow of slaying, for example, are not contained in the set of dice that are subject to the effects of a critical hit.

Ok I haven't had to use sets in a long time so hopefully that is both internally consistent and helpful.

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jaelis said:

So let me propose a situation:

Suppose there was a monster with the reaction ability: "Shrug it off: When this creature would take damage from an attack, it can make a DC 15 Constitution save. On a success the damage is negated." (Maybe there is already such an ability, IDK.)

Certainly, if you critted this creature and it failed the save, it should take the full crit damage. But that means simply saying "the crit doesn't include anything that requires a separate save," because if that were the rule my creature wouldn't take the extra crit damage.

The rules are indeed written in natural language, which means here that it is up to the DM to interpret that language and decide what damage is part of the attack and what isn't. I really don't think that you can boil that down to a simple algorithm. IMO that is a good thing, it avoids weird problems. But it also means there is room for different DMs to rule differently on occasion. I certainly don't think it needs errata. But I also don't think we should claim "RAW is unambiguous" here.

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Arial Black said:

The Shrug It Off ability has no relevance to which damage dice belong to the attack roll that scored a crit. That attack is resolved, from 'attack roll=crit' to 'damage roll', with qualifying dice rolled twice, to get a total of damage dealt by that attack.

The fact that this particular target can make a save to negate that damage is irrelevant. The Shrug It Off ability does nothing to the resolution of the attack/damage rolls. Those are resolved, and get a total, say, 24 damage.

All Shrug It Off does is give you a chance to avoid taking that 24 damage. It doesn't interfere with the way that 24 damage total is generated.

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