D&D (2024) Just make critical do double damage. Period.

[Charlaquin]

Yeah I don't see why crits have to be symmetrical. They should probably be a PC-only thing, that way you can make them double damage or whatever and get the feel good of a 20 meaning something without the feel bad of sudden unexpected PC deaths.

Making them martial-only is an interesting idea. Aside from half-caster types like Paladins it's much less relevant to spellcasters anyway, and it gives fighters and thieves something cool to call their own.

Well, they tried that in the first 1D&D playtest packet, and it was soundly rejected in the survey.

 

[Justice and Rule]

I always thought "Max Normal Damage + Rolled Damage again" was a good system. Essentially if your longsword damage was normally 1d8+4, you'd be getting 12+1d8+4 for a critical. It does have the drawback of not giving people insane amounts of dice to roll, but it does mean that any critical hit you do will always do more damage than a regular strike.

Yeah I don't see why crits have to be symmetrical. They should probably be a PC-only thing, that way you can make them double damage or whatever and get the feel good of a 20 meaning something without the feel bad of sudden unexpected PC deaths.

Making them martial-only is an interesting idea. Aside from half-caster types like Paladins it's much less relevant to spellcasters anyway, and it gives fighters and thieves something cool to call their own.

Well, they tried that in the first 1D&D playtest packet, and it was soundly rejected in the survey.

Yeah, was sad to see that go but absolutely expected it to. They should have held the idea back until they were going to show off what they would do with it: they mentioned the idea that monster powers were basically their critical hits, and that's something that maybe could have made that fly. Also show that you can give monsters way more damage-dealing power when you don't have to worry about a one-term lucky strike to balance around. Other people here mentioning special attacks on a d20 aren't bad ideas, but I'd rather just see monsters get more potential attacks overall than just get a special one once every 20 die rolls.

 

[Charlaquin]

Yeah, was sad to see that go but absolutely expected it to. They should have held the idea back until they were going to show off what they would do with it: they mentioned the idea that monster powers were basically their critical hits, and that's something that maybe could have made that fly. Also show that you can give monsters way more damage-dealing power when you don't have to worry about a one-term lucky strike to balance around. Other people here mentioning special attacks on a d20 aren't bad ideas, but I'd rather just see monsters get more potential attacks overall than just get a special one once every 20 die rolls.

Yeah, unfortunately that kind of design that opens room to improve other designs but doesn’t have an immediate, direct, and obvious positive impact on the players’ individual experience of playing the game is unlikely to go far in these open playtests.

 

[Lazvon]

Neat! If my back of the napkin math is right, that makes the average crit damage 5.5 on 1d4, 7.75 on 1d6, 10 on 1d8, 12.25 on 1d12, and 15.5 on 2d6.

I should clearly have thought about the math more! Didn’t realize would be so much more at lower d4 and so much less at d12… I am thinking I like the MAX + normal roll idea now.

 

[Charlaquin]

I should clearly have thought about the math more! Didn’t realize would be so much more at lower d4 and so much less at d12… I am thinking I like the MAX + normal roll idea now.

That’s just a feature of weapon damage escalating by die size. With the RAW double damage dice you’d have average crit damage of 5 on 1d4, 7 on 1d6, 9 on 1d8, 11 on 1d10, 13 on 1d12, and 14 on 2d6. With max damage + an additional roll, you’d get 6.5 on 1d4, 9.5 on 1d6, 12.5 on 1d8, 15.5 on 1d10, 18.5 on 1d12, and 19 on 2d6.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Yeah, unfortunately that kind of design that opens room to improve other designs but doesn’t have an immediate, direct, and obvious positive impact on the players’ individual experience of playing the game is unlikely to go far in these open playtests.

Plus I think there's a certain amount of gaming conservatism that you bounce up against when you change things like how crits work that, if you are not prepared for it, you won't be able to weather the backlash. Some of these off-hand revelations that aren't put front and center are just victims of bad presentation more than anything.

 

[Weiley31]

DM: You scored a Crit!!
Player: WOOT!
DM: You rolled a 1 on the first dice.
Player: OY-
DM: And a 1 on the other dice!
Player: VEY!

Yeah, no thanks. Give me dat Maxed Damage on the first dice+roll the second dice.

 

[Justice and Rule]

DM: You scored a Crit!!
Player: WOOT!
DM: You rolled a 1 on the first dice.
Player: OY-
DM: And a 1 on the other dice!
Player: VEY!

Yeah, no thanks. Give me dat Maxed Damage on the first dice+roll the second dice.

Yeah, nothing kills the vibe quite like a wasted critical.

 

[Dausuul]

I have seen many implementations of crit fumble rules. They all resulted in slapstick combats where fighters came out looking like idiots. (And, as others have noted, multiple attacks make high-level fighters look dumber than low-level ones.) Hard pass from me.

As for critical hits, I think a crit should be guaranteed to be the highest damage you can do. To achieve this without changing 5E's combat math, have crits deal "max plus one" on each die; so if you're attacking with a scimitar for 1d6+5, a crit deals 12 damage, as if you had somehow managed to roll a 7 on that d6.

"Max damage" is simpler but depowers crits a bit relative to the 5E baseline; "max damage and roll again" is a bit more complex but also more impactful; both would also work fine IMO.

 

[Amrûnril]

Rolling fewer dice is less fun than rolling and getting a double number, and both are less fun that rolling even more dice.

In most contexts, I wouldn't find this sort of reasoning particularly compelling. For critical hits, though, generating dice-based excitement is the underlying purpose of the mechanic. Getting to roll extra dice delivers on that goal better than making mathematical adjustments.

The more nuanced benefit of critical hits is that they're a mechanic class abilities, feats, etc. can interact with. Increasing some forms of damage but not others creates some interesting design space in this regard. And abilities that add dice to a critical hit (like the Barbarian's Brutal Critical) fit much more naturally if adding extra damage dice is already the main function of a critical hit.