Critical Hit with Fireball!

[Simplicity]

I like the change, and actually it's a fairly intuitive one.
Think about it. We now know what a +6 wand does.
ALL spells that were formerly save spells, are now roll-to-attack.
But there's 3 types of defenses, SWSE-style.

I wonder what a critical charm does...

 

[Pyrex]

However, notice that the fireball crit only took out ONE troglodyte skirmisher. I'm wondering if fireball is no longer necessarily an explosive area-of-attack fireball by default.

My guess would be Fireball changing to an attack roll with primary damage to the target with (smaller) splash damage to anyone within 10'-20'.

 

[mearlus]

Recently in a blog, the comment I'm sure we've all read was that the wizard scored a crit with a fireball (Wizard/Warlord, I think) that killed just one troglodyte. There has been some confusion and outrage that fireball might require a hit roll and might not be an area effect. I have a theory on how spells are going to work in 4E, so I hope this is what we're seeing.

The wizard memorizes a spell (fireball). The spell has three effects, the once-per-day, once-per-encounter and at-will. Just hypothesizing, the once-per-day fireball effect is 1d4 per level (character level?) to an area. The once-per-encounter is a ray of fire, roll to hit, 1d4 per level to one target. The at-will is a close-range or melee range fire touch attack for 1d4 damage +1 per level. Using the per-day ability uses up the spell completely, so the at-will and per-encounter are not available. Using the per-encounter uses up the spell temporarily, so the at-will isn't available for the rest of this fight.

This three-level effect per spell would make sense from the descriptions we've been given and also make for better tactical play as the wizard has much more reason to hold back his spells than before.

It could also open up some other interesting uses, for instance the at-will bonus to Charm Person could be a something for use outside of combat, like a bonus on social rolls.

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

 

[Daniel D. Fox]

I like the change, and actually it's a fairly intuitive one.
Think about it. We now know what a +6 wand does.
ALL spells that were formerly save spells, are now roll-to-attack.
But there's 3 types of defenses, SWSE-style.

I wonder what a critical charm does...

Double damage for spell criticals likely means that any non-damaging spells have double duration. Or, so I would believe.

 

[Celebrim]

Celebrim- You can't be sure that's a problem without knowing the damage potential of a 4e fireball compared to typical hit points of characters of relevant levels.

If a typical level X character has 40 hit points, and a fireball at level X typically does 15 damage, a fireball critical isn't all that problematic.

That persumes that I'm only worried about fireballs. At some point either the problem is a valid problem or else area of effect attacks are pathetically weak. I don't think you can assume that in general, the most damaging area of effect spell available a given level (or say character level + 2 in the case of the BBEG) always does less than half of the character's hit points worth of damage (on a successful attack roll, formerly failed save). At some point the argument that, 'Well it's not a problem because area of effect attacks have been nerfed to compensate', runs into the problem of, 'If they do so little damage, why use them?' Are we to assume that monsters that characters of level X typically run into regularly have less than 1/5th of the character's hit points? Is it a whole world of mini-mooks?

 

[gothmaugCC]

Hmm...fireball crits...

I'm gonna have a red stamp made with a giant

FWOOOOSH!!

So I can stamp the character sheets of all the victims

 

[Reaper Steve]

As a DM who has for a long time been very uncomfortable with critical hits, this bothers me in much the same way that the attack roll replacing the saving throw bothers me.

Now, its not so much that the DM is going to ask, 'save or die', which was always problimatic enough, but now the DM (me) is going to be compelled to deal with, 'Guys, the goblin warlocks fireball crits you. Does anyone have more than 70 hp left?'

Yeah, but PCs have action points now. A single lucky (unlucky?) hit will not kill a character anymore. It will take several of those hits to make a guy blow all his save-his-@$$ points--or using too many for cool powers and not leaving a couple for a safety net.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

Imagine an homogeneous group of baddies.

This, of course, is in and of itself a conceit to speed up gameplay.

 

[Celebrim]

I don't believe I've seen confirmation for criticals, but if SW Saga is a "significant preview", I can see a return to the ol' tride and true "Nat' 20 always hits, always crits" from 1st edition.

That was a common 1st edition house rule, and I hated it. As a DM I saw it as a means to random pointless PC death.

I always used the admittedly overly complex rules laid out in the (IIRC) 4th Dragon Annual where you critted if the result of a d% was below the difference in what you needed to hit and your result. This typically meant PC's generated lots of critical hits, and most NPC's never generated critical hits. I didn't mind so much my PC's feeling cool occasionally for romping all over the opposition, but randomly killing PC's as a DM is a bad thing.

In 3rd edition, this wouldn't work because the brutes (things like Giants) can regularly overwhelm PC armor class. As a result, I've seen alot of random PC death to crits in 3.X, but for reasons I'll never understand, most players still seem to think critical hits are not only a good thing but favor the PC's. (They really need to teach logic in high school.)

 

[Reaper Steve]

I have a theory on how spells are going to work in 4E, so I hope this is what we're seeing.

The wizard memorizes a spell (fireball). The spell has three effects, the once-per-day, once-per-encounter and at-will. Just hypothesizing, the once-per-day fireball effect is 1d4 per level (character level?) to an area. The once-per-encounter is a ray of fire, roll to hit, 1d4 per level to one target. The at-will is a close-range or melee range fire touch attack for 1d4 damage +1 per level. Using the per-day ability uses up the spell completely, so the at-will and per-encounter are not available. Using the per-encounter uses up the spell temporarily, so the at-will isn't available for the rest of this fight.

This three-level effect per spell would make sense from the descriptions we've been given and also make for better tactical play as the wizard has much more reason to hold back his spells than before.

It could also open up some other interesting uses, for instance the at-will bonus to Charm Person could be a something for use outside of combat, like a bonus on social rolls.

Interesting concept, but not what I think we'll see. Remember it's been stated that a character/wizard that has used all his 1/day abilities is still at 80% power. Your model wouldn't allow this. I think we may see partial execution of it...the 1/day abilities may also provide a reserve spell/feat type benefit, but I doubt that every spell would function this way.