Critical Hits, Fails, & Luck: New Card Accessories for D&D 5E

Nord Games is producing a Critical Hit Deck for D&D 5E over on Kickstarter. They've sent me along a few previews of the cards themselves, which you can see below. There are four card decks - Critical Hits for GMs, Critical Hits for Players, Critical Fails, each with 52 cards showing four different outcomes per card, plus a Luck Deck. The Luck Deck is a new mechanic with 26 good luck and 26 bad luck cards.

The difference between the player and GM critical hit decks lies in the nature of the results. The GM deck contains options which rarely killPCs outright; the player version has simple results and finishing moves which are easy for the GM to track. You can find the Kickstarter here - it's halfway through and already funded 13 times over!


Critical Fail Back.jpgCritical Fail Front.jpgGM Critical Hit Back.jpgGM Critical Hit Front.jpgPlayer Critical Hit Back.jpgPlayer Critical Hit Front.jpg​
 
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Morrus

Morrus is the owner of EN World and EN Publishing, creator of the ENnies, creator of the What's OLD is NEW (WOIN), Simply6, and Awfully Cheerful Engine game systems, publisher of Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition, and co-host of the weekly Morrus' Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk podcast. He has been a game publisher and RPG community administrator for over 20 years, and has been reporting on TTRPG and D&D news for over two decades. He is also on the socials.



I know this is just an advertising thread, but I've always had issues with critical fumbles (or hits).

A dual-wielding high level fighter is going to fumble or crit far more often than any other class. When you have a 25% chance or more of fumbling every single round, and the fumbles have significant impact, it's not fun. Losing/dropping/potentially breaking your weapon multiple times in a combat gets old.

At the same time I've always played with the NPCs/monsters following the same rules as the PCs. So if you throw a ton of lower level monsters at the group, the monsters are going to crit far more often than the players.

If you have ideas of how to mitigate these and make critical hits/fumbles an occasional fun add-on to the game without slowing things down too much I like the concept. Just not the executions that I've seen.
 

I used Pathfinder's critical fumble deck for 1 session before abandoning it as ridiculously disruptive.

I like the idea of separate critical hit decks, though.
 

I got a smaller sample deck in my Dungeon Crate this month. I really, really like it. Usually fumble and crit tables are way overblown, but what these add are flavorful and not game stopping. There's some really fun ones.

It also came with a d4 table that was essentially a table of another one of the decks.

Edit: When I get home from work I'll post up more info about the sample deck and table if people are interested.
 

Oofta said:
I know this is just an advertising thread, but I've always had issues with critical fumbles (or hits).

A dual-wielding high level fighter is going to fumble or crit far more often than any other class. When you have a 25% chance or more of fumbling every single round, and the fumbles have significant impact, it's not fun. Losing/dropping/potentially breaking your weapon multiple times in a combat gets old.

At the same time I've always played with the NPCs/monsters following the same rules as the PCs. So if you throw a ton of lower level monsters at the group, the monsters are going to crit far more often than the players.

If you have ideas of how to mitigate these and make critical hits/fumbles an occasional fun add-on to the game without slowing things down too much I like the concept. Just not the executions that I've seen.
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For the critical hit element, I instituted a rule some time ago called the Armor Check. If an ogre rolls a critical hit on the Fighter, the Fighter gets to make an Armor Check to turn that critical into a normal hit: he rolls a d20 and adds his armor defense rating (+1 for leather armor, +3 for chain shirt, +8 for plate, etc). The DC is [14 + prof bonus of attacker]. Likewise if the Fighter crits the ogre... It's been a great success.

a) it gives the PC a bit of hope to avoid a good thrashing
b) it somewhat mitigates the more die rolls = more crit chances of multiple foes
c) it gives the various armors a bit of much needed boost in my opinion.
 

Syntallah said:
For the critical hit element, I instituted a rule some time ago called the Armor Check. If an ogre rolls a critical hit on the Fighter, the Fighter gets to make an Armor Check to turn that critical into a normal hit: he rolls a d20 and adds his armor defense rating (+1 for leather armor, +3 for chain shirt, +8 for plate, etc). The DC is [14 + prof bonus of attacker]. Likewise if the Fighter crits the ogre... It's been a great success.

a) it gives the PC a bit of hope to avoid a good thrashing
b) it somewhat mitigates the more die rolls = more crit chances of multiple foes
c) it gives the various armors a bit of much needed boost in my opinion.
Click to expand...

That's an interesting idea. Do you do anything with fumbles?

I played around with some ideas myself a few years ago, but never found anything that fit the feel of D&D.
 


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