D&D 5E Is there a way to negate critical hits without adamantine armour?

[Rhenny]

Note that the Bless spell uses exactly the same verbiage as Cutting Words: it affects "the roll." If "natural 20" is interpreted to mean "after accounting for things that affect the roll, but before modifiers" then Bless will increase the incidence of critical hits.

It will be interesting to hear Crawford explain himself on this one, so thank you for asking him, but after thinking about it for a bit I'm pretty sure that I'm not ever going to use this interpretation of critical hits/misses. For me, natural 20 = crit, and nothing can affect that except things which explicitly manipulate the dice roll: disadvantage and being Lucky.

No response yet, but I totally agree with you. I'm pretty sure that a crit, is a crit, is a crit.

 

[Inconnunom]

Note that the Bless spell uses exactly the same verbiage as Cutting Words: it affects "the roll." If "natural 20" is interpreted to mean "after accounting for things that affect the roll, but before modifiers" then Bless will increase the incidence of critical hits.

It will be interesting to hear Crawford explain himself on this one, so thank you for asking him, but after thinking about it for a bit I'm pretty sure that I'm not ever going to use this interpretation of critical hits/misses. For me, natural 20 = crit, and nothing can affect that except things which explicitly manipulate the dice roll: disadvantage and being Lucky.

With Bless it becomes a wash, if 20 is the only number you get a crit with. Because a normal 20 roll would not be a crit anymore since you would have yet to add the d4. I wouldn't care either way.

With bardic inspiration, if your players are really using it to try to get 20 on a number, I would smack them at the waste of a resource. You only get a max of 5 per short rest. I don't know about your campaigns but we typically get 5 to 7 serious encounters throughout the day (about 2 short and 1 long rest).

The only value that this ruling creates is cutting important crits of large enemies. A cyclops cirtting with a 4d8 boulder is a big deal.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

With Bless it becomes a wash, if 20 is the only number you get a crit with. Because a normal 20 roll would not be a crit anymore since you would have yet to add the d4. I wouldn't care either way.

If you roll a normal natural 20, you just decline to add the extra +d4. According to the spell, it's a "can" not a "must."

So Bless ends up doubling the number of 20s you roll, and according to Crawford's interpretation that doubles the number of crits. I don't like that. It's too complicated and counterintuitive, and Bless is already plenty good for a 1st level spell without that effect.

A Cyclops critting with a boulder... meh, doesn't seem like a big deal to me. It's not even as much damage as two normal hits. Either you'll burn a Lucky die to negate it (possibly turning it into a miss), or you'll eat the damage and just heal up afterwards with Aura of Vitality. From a game balance standpoint, it's actually questionable whether you should burn inspiration dice on this usage instead of on turning hits into misses. So if I disallow this interpretation of Cutting Words at my table, I don't think my players will be missing out on anything.

BTW, if you're worried about a Cyclops critting you with a boulder, consider just lying prone. If an enemy isn't already in melee threat range, it's a completely free way to impose disadvantage on the cyclops, which makes crits almost impossible. (0.25% chance of crit instead of 5%.)

 

[dmnqwk]

Bless adds d4 to the result, not the dice. Thinking it affects the d20 roll is like assuming anyone who has a +5 to hit can critical only if they roll a 15 on the dice. Same with cutting words (unless I am missing somewhere where the d20 is considered "the roll" as opposed to the roll being another way of saying the result.

But I agree you can always modify the Heavy Armour Master rule to prevent critical hits, instead of reducing the damage. The sub 5% damage prevented by this is not that overpowered after all.