D&D (2024) Critical Hits only for PCs?

[jgsugden]

We did playtest a bit last night and a few questions came up surrounding critical hits. The rules:

Weapons and Unarmed Strikes* have a special
feature for player characters: Critical Hits. If a
player character rolls a 20 for an attack roll
with a Weapon or an Unarmed Strike, the attack
is also a Critical Hit, which means it deals extra
damage to the target; you roll the damage dice
of the Weapon or Unarmed Strike a second time
and add the second roll as extra damage to the
target. For example, a Mace deals Bludgeoning
Damage equal to 1d6 + your Strength modifier.
If you score a Critical Hit with the Mace, it
instead deals 2d6 + your Strength modifier.
If your Weapon or Unarmed Strike has no
damage dice, it deals no extra damage on a
Critical Hit.

1.) Do monsters still deal critical hits to a helpless/paralyzed foe? The rules are silent at this point.
2.) Will PCs deal critical hit damage on a sneak attack? On paladin smite damage? Currently it is only on weapon or unarmed strike damage that has a repeated roll. They may address this by having sneak attacks roll additional weapon dice...

Any thoughts or other questions?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

2.) Will PCs deal critical hit damage on a sneak attack? On paladin smite damage? Currently it is only on weapon or unarmed strike damage that has a repeated roll. They may address this by having sneak attacks roll additional weapon dice...

The playtest rules are pretty clear - they do not, and I do not believe that is an oversight, but rather a balancing measure. The issue is that monsters often do multiple dice of damage which notionally includes stuff like that (particularly smite or other damage-boosters, like the Zealot Barbarian's damage add), but there's no way to distinguish that, and you'd have to re-write monsters to distinguish it. Removing crits from monsters means you also want PC crits to do less - magic no longer crits, so that's fine, but if you let Smite and Sneak Attack damage and so on get rolled twice that's a disparity.

 

[Umbran]

This is another thread on this - DM's no longer getting crits on PC's

closing this as a duplicate.