D&D 5E (2014) Critical Hit Decks?

[Jack Hooligan]

Looks like there was a neat little deck of cards for 4e that made coming up with various Critical Hits easy. I see they were made by Paizo, but there's some Nord Games one also. Any difference? Which is best to convert to 5e?

 

[commandercrud]

I made my own deck using the 4e one as inspiration, but included several other ideas of my own. With multiple copies of cards, you can tune it to your group's playstyle. My deck is around 100 cards, half simple things like drop your weapon, bowstring breaks, your backpack strap tears and spills out, you damage your weapon, etc. Maybe 20 or so gain a level of exhaustion. Several minor wounds, just physical scratch no effect. Just a few broken bones, chopped off limbs, etc. And one beheaded.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Looks like there was a neat little deck of cards for 4e that made coming up with various Critical Hits easy. I see they were made by Paizo, but there's some Nord Games one also. Any difference? Which is best to convert to 5e?

Nord Games has crit decks for 5e that one of my tables uses. We like them, but treat them as optional (you can choose to just take a regular crit instead of drawing).

 

[Retreater]

When I used the PF (1e) critical hit deck, it really upped the lethality against the characters. As long as you're okay with that - because more die rolls are usually made against PCs than any given monster, they're subject to more critical hits. So I'd be wary of anything too punishing, unless that's your style of game.

 

[Fanaelialae]

When I used the PF (1e) critical hit deck, it really upped the lethality against the characters. As long as you're okay with that - because more die rolls are usually made against PCs than any given monster, they're subject to more critical hits. So I'd be wary of anything too punishing, unless that's your style of game.

The way the Nord Games decks solved this issue is that they have different crit decks for players and monsters. The monster deck is significantly less lethal than the player deck IME, although there are a few nasty effects in there (I think that one PC ended up with a broken arm for several weeks).

 

[Shiroiken]

I'd be careful with these types of things. Minor benefits for critical hits/fumbles can make the game interesting, but major ones can swing combats way outside of the norm, making them too easy or too hard. The old AD&D ones were super lethal, even if non-lethal damage was used.

 

[Voadam]

One option is to make them feat activated, so that a player who spends a feat on super critting adds them on but not every monster crit will remove a PC's limb.