Critical Hits, Fails, & Luck: New Card Accessories for D&D 5E

Nord Games is producing a Critical Hit Deck for D&D 5E over on Kickstarter. They've sent me along a few previews of the cards themselves, which you can see below. There are four card decks - Critical Hits for GMs, Critical Hits for Players, Critical Fails, each with 52 cards showing four different outcomes per card, plus a Luck Deck. The Luck Deck is a new mechanic with 26 good luck and 26 bad luck cards.

The difference between the player and GM critical hit decks lies in the nature of the results. The GM deck contains options which rarely killPCs outright; the player version has simple results and finishing moves which are easy for the GM to track. You can find the Kickstarter here - it's halfway through and already funded 13 times over!

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[Syntallah]

That's an interesting idea. Do you do anything with fumbles?

I played around with some ideas myself a few years ago, but never found anything that fit the feel of D&D.

I haven't come up with anything yet for fumbles. One of the reasons I'm checking out this thread. Hope to pick up something good...

 

[edhel]

I know this is just an advertising thread, but I've always had issues with critical fumbles (or hits).

A dual-wielding high level fighter is going to fumble or crit far more often than any other class. When you have a 25% chance or more of fumbling every single round, and the fumbles have significant impact, it's not fun. Losing/dropping/potentially breaking your weapon multiple times in a combat gets old.

At the same time I've always played with the NPCs/monsters following the same rules as the PCs. So if you throw a ton of lower level monsters at the group, the monsters are going to crit far more often than the players.

If you have ideas of how to mitigate these and make critical hits/fumbles an occasional fun add-on to the game without slowing things down too much I like the concept. Just not the executions that I've seen.

If it bothers you, you could rule that you (or a group of monsters) can crit/fumble only once per round, or only your main weapon can crit, or nameless mooks can't crit.
In my 5e game I use Paizo's crit deck and we apply it for both sides equally since my players think it's fun. My house rules for fumbles is that if you roll a natural 1, you can _choose_ to fumble (draw a fumble card) and receive inspiration for it. That way you don't lose/break your weapon unless you deem it fun to risk it.

You could use the same rule for crits too. Spend inspiration to crit on 20 if you want to make them more rare. Oh yeah, and my players can choose to deal max damage on nat 20 instead of drawing a card since it's usually faster for dispatching mooks.

 

[Oofta]

I like the inspiration in exchange for a fumble - might have to limit to once per rest or some such.

What I was doing for a while was that crits had to be "confirmed". If you crit, roll again to see if you would hit a second time. If so, add in extra damage. If the second roll is also a crit, keep rolling until you don't crit. I could see using something similar if using critical hit table/cards.

Conversely, you got a "saving throw" on attacks if you rolled a 1. It was basically roll a D20, if the result was higher than your level you fumbled if you weren't a warrior/fighter type. Warrior types (fighters, paladins, rangers) had to roll twice their level.

I think crits/fumbles work better with systems with limited numbers of attacks and less well with systems that have cuisinart fighters.

On the other hand, crits in particular feel pretty underwhelming unless you're a paladin critting on a smite or a rogue critting on a sneak attack.

 

[Queer Venger]

Looks a lot like pathfinders, hopefully it's released as an iOS app

 

[Grainger]

The problem with fumbles (or non-combat based critical failures) as I see it, is that it makes everything into a farce (assuming you apply them on a roll of 1; they happen too often). People competent at fighting, or picking locks etc. shouldn't catastrophically fail 1 in every 20 tries. Sure, a combatant might fail to hit their opponent, or get hit themselves, or they might get in a very good hit, but drop the weapon or fall over? I'm not saying it never happens, but 1 in 20 attempts is way, way (throw in a few more "way"s) too high, both in terms of realism, and - IMO - in terms of setting a tone where the heroes (and enemies) are competent.

 

[rob2e]

I have a d100 crit/fumble table over on the DMs guild. I also have built it out as a module for the Fantasy Grounds VTT software. 100 entries for each table. It's not a great graphics presentation like this Kickstarter campaign, but I've received some good response (players and DMs having a lot of fun).

https://www.dmsguild.com/browse.php?author=Rob Twohy&affiliate_id=878507