Critical Hits - why, and why not?

[Cleon]

I don't disagree, but my post is less focused on arguing for the addition of critical hits and fumbles than on the assumption we will have them and, if so, why is there no result between "add a few more hp damage" and "consult limb loss subtable". We played with a model of varying severity of critical hits, but we had to assess how the various curative-type spells would interact with these longer-term effects.

I've long been toying with the idea of tying the various "ranks" of heal wound spells to ranks of injury - e.g. a "serious wound" would require a cure serious wounds to completely cure, and a lesser healing spells such as cure light wounds could only partially ameliorate the condition. Such an approach seemed a natural partner to a critical system of some sort. And as an added bonus it might make the critical in cure critical wounds actually mean something!

The problem is figuring out an approach that is low enough on book keeping to be easy to use in play.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I've long been toying with the idea of tying the various "ranks" of heal wound spells to ranks of injury - e.g. a "serious wound" would require a cure serious wounds to completely cure, and a lesser healing spells such as cure light wounds could only partially ameliorate the condition. Such an approach seemed a natural partner to a critical system of some sort.

The major issue with something like this is, if you define wound levels in terms of fractions of total HP, then a low-level character is far more likely to suffer an incurable grievous wound than a high-level character, and the low-level character doesn't have access to the tools required to treat that sort of wound. For example, if you set the critical wound threshold to 50% of your total HP in a single attack, then most enemy attacks will cause a lasting injury to a first-level character.

The other way to go about it would utilize absolute HP values. You could say that a Light Wound is 10 HP, and a Critical Wound is 30 HP, so you shouldn't have to worry about getting hurt so badly that nobody can ever fix it. The only drawback to that model is the way low-level characters can die from a minor injury, but even that fits well into the notion that a level 1 character is just some chump.

 

[Celebrim]

The major issue with something like this is, if you define wound levels in terms of fractions of total HP, then a low-level character is far more likely to suffer an incurable grievous wound than a high-level character, and the low-level character doesn't have access to the tools required to treat that sort of wound. For example, if you set the critical wound threshold to 50% of your total HP in a single attack, then most enemy attacks will cause a lasting injury to a first-level character.

This was the biggest stumbling block I hit in my attempts to make healing spells more explicable in the fiction. You run into a situation where while what you have is consistent with the fiction, it reduces the playability of the game and cannot be balanced. Healing magic hits a point where it simultaneously is too inefficient in returning low level characters to play and also too efficient in returning higher level characters to play.

The advantage of the traditional approach to healing magic is, though it is not realistic, it has good math as the ability to heal can be matched from level to level against the ability to do damage so that healing is not excessively stronger or weaker of a strategy compared to dealing damage.

 

[pemerton]

I don't disagree, but my post is less focused on arguing for the addition of critical hits and fumbles than on the assumption we will have them and, if so, why is there no result between "add a few more hp damage" and "consult limb loss subtable". We played with a model of varying severity of critical hits, but we had to assess how the various curative-type spells would interact with these longer-term effects.

<snip>

if they are viewed as desirable, or even essential, the justification tends to be "realism" (as you note, often at the cost of "heroism), then "arms are either hale and hearty or severed - no possibility exists between these points" isn't very realistic

Of fantasy RPGs that I know, Rolemaster goes the furthest in trying to address this. Its critical charts (which really are best thought of as damage charts because they are consulted for nearly every successful attack) have results ranging from "light bruise, -5 penalty" to "shattered bone" to "arm severed" to "you're dead". And the healing system has a comparable degree of granularity. (I should add that RM is a d% system, so -5 is a very light penalty.)

If you injure, break or sever the Orc's arm, so what? He's dead in a couple more rounds, tops, either way. But the PC has to get by with a wounded/useless/missing arm until it heals/gets healed/gets regrown/gets replaced with The Arm of Vecna/whatever. It creates a death spiral as the PC's keep getting more and more battered as the scenario goes on.

This goes to the issue of time in the campaign, and how the system handles it.

In my last Burning Wheel session, one PC suffered a mortal wound. She spent the requisite fate point to live, but healing time will be in the neighbourhood of 18 months. Another PC suffered a "midi" wound, which has a healing time of around two months. Burning Wheel has other mechanics to support a "slowing down" of play (eg practice rules, earn-money-by-getting-a-job rules, etc) which try to integrate these "realistically" long recovery times into the play of the game, rather than make them headaches for play.

It also has advancement rules which can sometimes make it easier to advance a stat or skill when making a check with it at a penalty. Which means that it's not always a strictly bad thing for a player to have his/her PC make checks while at a penalty.

Of course many of those penalised checks will fail, but BW also has rules and techniques to handle frequent PC failures - as one of the pioneer games for "fail forward", failures thwart a PC's immediate desire but nevertheless propel the game forward in the general dramatic/thematic direction that the PC and his/her player care about.

Whether or not one actually enjoys this particular system implementation, I think it is an illustration of how the relationship between crits and the broader game have been thought through in thorough detail, rather than just patched on without any regard to how it will affect the broader dynamics of play. The same can't be said for most D&D crit systems, once you get beyond the simple "max/double damage on a natural 20".

 

[N'raac]

The major issue with something like this is, if you define wound levels in terms of fractions of total HP, then a low-level character is far more likely to suffer an incurable grievous wound than a high-level character, and the low-level character doesn't have access to the tools required to treat that sort of wound. For example, if you set the critical wound threshold to 50% of your total HP in a single attack, then most enemy attacks will cause a lasting injury to a first-level character.

I am reminded of a player who tried to avoid speaking in GameTerms. His character was suffering from three critical and two light wounds (as he worked the damage back through averages for cure spells) and that quickly went away.

 

[Celebrim]

Burning Wheel has other mechanics to support a "slowing down" of play (eg practice rules, earn-money-by-getting-a-job rules, etc) which try to integrate these "realistically" long recovery times into the play of the game, rather than make them headaches for play.

Even so, this can be very difficult. The reason that I dropped training time back in 1e AD&D days is that when you moved from a purely gamist construct to play that was supporting a story, it wasn't always possible from the established fiction to slow down the story. Slowing down the game is easy, but once you've established in fiction that Sozein's comet will be here before the end of the year, that the death star will be completed in just days, that the warlord's hordes will launch a spring offensive as soon as the snow thaws in the past, that the bridge must be taken in 40 hours or the army will be trapped, that you've got just 4 hours to save the kidnap victim from suffocation, that you have to cross the burning sea and you are now three weeks from civilization in every direction, or any number of other deadlines established by the created fiction, you lose the ability actually maintain the story while the hero spends 18 months in bed. It's so easy to cripple a character that way from just fluke bad luck, that it basically just unredeemably sucks. Sure, it's great to have an idea what the characters do in the down times established by the fiction, but that's a different issue.

 

[pemerton]

when you moved from a purely gamist construct to play that was supporting a story, it wasn't always possible from the established fiction to slow down the story. Slowing down the game is easy, but once you've established in fiction that Sozein's comet will be here before the end of the year, that the death star will be completed in just days, that the warlord's hordes will launch a spring offensive as soon as the snow thaws in the past, that the bridge must be taken in 40 hours or the army will be trapped, that you've got just 4 hours to save the kidnap victim from suffocation, that you have to cross the burning sea and you are now three weeks from civilization in every direction, or any number of other deadlines established by the created fiction, you lose the ability actually maintain the story while the hero spends 18 months in bed.

Burning Wheel at least aims to have the capacity to handle this issue - in part through connecting that sort of content generation more closely to player-initiated skill checks (which gives players more control over what stakes they are venturing), and in part through being more oriented towards the PCs failing yet the game going on.

 

[S'mon]

I'm using 4e style 'max-damage on a 20' crits in my Mentzer Classic D&D game, seems to work well there, the players asked for it though it ups the lethality a fair bit.

 

[Cleon]

The major issue with something like this is, if you define wound levels in terms of fractions of total HP, then a low-level character is far more likely to suffer an incurable grievous wound than a high-level character, and the low-level character doesn't have access to the tools required to treat that sort of wound.

True, but that could be a feature rather than a bug. It makes sense that a "green-behind-the-gills" low level adventurer is more likely to suffer severe injury than an high level one.

For example, if you set the critical wound threshold to 50% of your total HP in a single attack, then most enemy attacks will cause a lasting injury to a first-level character.

The other way to go about it would utilize absolute HP values. You could say that a Light Wound is 10 HP, and a Critical Wound is 30 HP, so you shouldn't have to worry about getting hurt so badly that nobody can ever fix it. The only drawback to that model is the way low-level characters can die from a minor injury, but even that fits well into the notion that a level 1 character is just some chump.

I think a hybrid approach that used wound thresholds works better.

A critical injury, by common definition, is one that is life threatening, so it could be a wound that does a certain amount of damage (expressed as a fraction of total HP, an absolute HP value, a proportion of the victim's Constitution or whatever) AND also drops their hit points into the negatives - the "dying" condition in 3E terms.

You could set it up so a target can only suffer a "critical" or "serious" wound if they're knocked down to low hit points, while if they've got most of their hit points left they usually suffer a "light" wound on a critical hit or, at worst, a "moderate" one.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

You could set it up so a target can only suffer a "critical" or "serious" wound if they're knocked down to low hit points, while if they've got most of their hit points left they usually suffer a "light" wound on a critical hit or, at worst, a "moderate" one.

That seems unnecessarily complicated. If the goal is to reconcile HP damage with the narrative description of that loss, then a 10HP wound would have to be the same whether it comes from the top of your pool or the bottom, given that they both take the same amount of mojo to reverse.