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[3.5] Crit stacking?
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<blockquote data-quote="PaulGreystoke" data-source="post: 1013869" data-attributes="member: 10810"><p>Storm Raven said:</p><p>Because the game system already rewards these veteran combatants through higher BAB & multiple iterative attacks, which already increase the likelihood of successful critical hits. And because critical hits are in the game for flavor purposes, not for the purpose of optimizing damage for a certain type of character.</p><p></p><p>A character with multiple iterative attacks gets more critical threats than a character with fewer iterative attacks. A character with higher BAB confirms more of these threats. Thus higher skilled characters already critical more often than their lesser skilled brethren.</p><p></p><p>That said, criticals were not intended to be commonplace. They were intended to be rare, & thus special & memorable when they occurred. But by designing both a feat & a magic spell that increased threat ranges & by allowing these to stack, the game designers of 3E created something that they didn't foresee - that characters designed around increased crit ranges would become commonplace, which meant that criticals themselves would become less rare.</p><p></p><p>The math is clear - the stacking of critical threat range modifiers does not unduly balance the game. This goes to show that the original 3E designers did a good job of creating a balanced critical hits system. But the stacking of multiple threat range modifiers does dilute the original intended flavor of the critical hits system, so the 3.5 designers were justified in changing the rule for flavor reasons, if not for play balance reasons. Ultimately Andy Collins is right - critical hits are supposed to be "special". This rule is just an attempt to reclaim that.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="PaulGreystoke, post: 1013869, member: 10810"] Storm Raven said: Because the game system already rewards these veteran combatants through higher BAB & multiple iterative attacks, which already increase the likelihood of successful critical hits. And because critical hits are in the game for flavor purposes, not for the purpose of optimizing damage for a certain type of character. A character with multiple iterative attacks gets more critical threats than a character with fewer iterative attacks. A character with higher BAB confirms more of these threats. Thus higher skilled characters already critical more often than their lesser skilled brethren. That said, criticals were not intended to be commonplace. They were intended to be rare, & thus special & memorable when they occurred. But by designing both a feat & a magic spell that increased threat ranges & by allowing these to stack, the game designers of 3E created something that they didn't foresee - that characters designed around increased crit ranges would become commonplace, which meant that criticals themselves would become less rare. The math is clear - the stacking of critical threat range modifiers does not unduly balance the game. This goes to show that the original 3E designers did a good job of creating a balanced critical hits system. But the stacking of multiple threat range modifiers does dilute the original intended flavor of the critical hits system, so the 3.5 designers were justified in changing the rule for flavor reasons, if not for play balance reasons. Ultimately Andy Collins is right - critical hits are supposed to be "special". This rule is just an attempt to reclaim that. [/QUOTE]
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[3.5] Crit stacking?
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