Do there seem to be a lot of criticals?

[CleverNickName]

Of course there are more critical hits. Because, like a 12-year old AOL user once said, "OMG CRITICAL HITS R TEH AWESOME PLZ GIEV US MOR3 ROTFLMAO!!!11"

I can take them or leave them, personally. We didn't use them back in the days of 3.0, but 3.5 pretty much required us to use them, what with all of the magic items, class abilities, and other jazzy stuff that required them. So we adopted the rules, and they weren't too terribly broken (Power Attacking with a scythe aside.)

It just makes it harder on the players in the long run...at the end of the day, the party is going to be subjected to more attack rolls (and therefore, more critical hits) than any single opponent they will face. And now that spells can apparently score critical hits, even the characters in the back row are threatened by them. If I were a player, I would hate them...but it seems that it is the players who love them the most.

 

[KrazyHades]

Two things:
Critical threats happen pretty often, especially with weapons that can crit on more than just a 20

People remember (and then write about on their gleemax blogs) critical hits, because they're exciting!

 

[Gloombunny]

And surely in some of the cases, they deliberately showed us a crit so they could show off some system feature, like the infamous healing on a crit, or the fact that spells can crit.

 

[Henry]

Think how many d20 rolls happen in an average game. There's bound to be at least one or two 20's to come up at the table in every single game session, in my experience. It's just that confirmation rolls drop that down to squat.

In a Star Wars Saga game, however, a couple of months ago, I saw a player roll three 20's in a row, and thanks to a scoundrel talent, he gained four attacks total in that one round!

 

[Fifth Element]

In the various playtests reported so far, there seem to be quite a few criticals going on. Even taking out the confirmation roll, there seems to be more than 1 in 20. Has anything come up that accounts for so many crits?

How do you figure "more than 1 in 20", since we have no idea how many total attacks are resulting in these criticals?

The playtest reports aren't going to talk about misses or even mundane hits very much - they remember the crits more than anything, particularly if they have some special effect.

 

[Lanefan]

Maybe they're going away from just "crit. chance on a 20" over to something more like "crit. chance on a 20 or if you beat the AC/defense by more than 10"...just a stray thought...

Lanefan

 

[Nightchilde-2]

In my experience, once players (or myself) start rolling crits, they keep coming for a while.

Why, in our last Hackmaster game, our knight-errant managed to get off like 3 crits in a row...and when my dice (virtual or otherwise) are hot, it ends up in a near TPK.

Maybe it's just my group though...

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

In my experience, once players (or myself) start rolling crits, they keep coming for a while.

That's particularly bad when the player is actually the DM, is rolling openly and didn't except the current encounter being so difficult in the first place...

(But honestly, I think it's only a perception thing...)

 

[WayneLigon]

Without the confirmation roll, we'd probably generate at least five to six crits a game session right now with all the iterative attacks. Without those, I'm not sure.

Also, we don't know what range crits will happen in. If it's like now where with a combo of feats and weapons I can get my crit range up to like 15-20, then removing the confirmation roll would generate a lot more crits.

 

[fba827]

also keep in mind that for a short piece, people are only going to mention the noteworthy hits. They aren't mentioning every "he hit me for minimal damage again ..." "i swung my sword and got 7 damage on him ..." -- for both excitement for the audience and brief size of the articles, they're probably only going to mention the most noteworthy strikes and maneuvers.