D&D 5E Critical Hits Appears to be Next in D&D Archive

[Dragonblade]

That's because strawmen are constructs.

You may be able to crit them in 4e, so rejoice.

Ha! Hilarious!

 

[Dragonblade]

Confirmation rolls are utter garbage.

Yes they are. Nothing sucks more than getting the 20, only to see it taken away with a bad confirmation roll.

Good riddance! The more I hear about 4e, the more I like it.

 

[Cadfan]

Frost weapons changed. A person who did 1d10+4 damage on a normal hit, and 14 damage on a critical, dealt 14+1d6 when his weapon was editted to be a +1 frost weapon, and gained a +1d6 on all criticals for being magic. If the +1d6 was an advantage of having a magic weapon on a critical, where did the frost damage go?

 

[IanB]

I thought most people had issues with fighters not doing enough damage at higher levels in 3.5e? And now the position seems to be that criticals did too much damage - one of the few ways a fightr could do lots of damage at higher levels with the right feats...

In my experience, crits at low levels were a far bigger issue than crits at high levels, power attack or no.

 

[Nikosandros]

I don't know what will be the typical damages for characters in 4e, but previously it was quite common to have huge modifiers on damage. With the new systems, in this cases a crit becomes almost irrelevant... maybe, if they kept the extra damage per level like in SWSE, it's in the form of additional dice?

 

[IanB]

I don't know what will be the typical damages for characters in 4e, but previously it was quite common to have huge modifiers on damage. With the new systems, in this cases a crit becomes almost irrelevant... maybe, if they kept the extra damage per level like in SWSE, it's in the form of additional dice?

Well, presumably if the B9S parallels hold true, we could see fighters critting on some special maneuver that normally does 5d6+blah for 30+blah, etc. That could be a significant boost at higher levels of dice.

 

[The Little Raven]

I don't know what will be the typical damages for characters in 4e, but previously it was quite common to have huge modifiers on damage. With the new systems, in this cases a crit becomes almost irrelevant... maybe, if they kept the extra damage per level like in SWSE, it's in the form of additional dice?

I think maximized damage better represents the idea of crits being the most effective strike you can make with your weapon, especially because of the big variability in rolling extra dice. After all, who hasn't gotten a crit, then rolled a bunch of 1s for some seriously weak damage? This way, crits are almost always more effective than your average hit, without the potential to actually make it weaker (I've had plenty of crits that do less damage than a previous, non-crit attack).

 

[rkanodia]

Frost weapons changed. A person who did 1d10+4 damage on a normal hit, and 14 damage on a critical, dealt 14+1d6 when his weapon was editted to be a +1 frost weapon, and gained a +1d6 on all criticals for being magic. If the +1d6 was an advantage of having a magic weapon on a critical, where did the frost damage go?

My suspicion is that the +1 frost weapon does one extra point of frost damage on every hit: the '+1' now modifies 'frost', not 'longsword'. I suspect this because it could fit into the example mentioned, and also, I haven't seen any vanilla +X items from 4E: it's a +1 frost longsword, or a +3 flaming longsword, or whatever. This would also seem to jibe with their statements about reduced dependency on magic items: losing a couple points of damage is not nearly as painful as losing the damage AND taking a loss on your hit roll.

 

[Fifth Element]

So a natural 20 isn't an auto-hit at your table, eh?

You missed the part where he said "3 damage", I guess.

 

[fuindordm]

(3E) Like investing in more criticals, Power Attack (PA) too is usually a fool's bargain--unless you have so high a to-hit bonus that some can be converted to damage without penalty. I've never played with high-level games (max. 11th or so), so I'm not sure how well that tactic works in practice. I'm not in the habit of using PA for monsters either... I usually replace it with some other feat, since monsters get so few actions in a combat I hate to see them missing.

The designers of 4E want to smooth out the fun factor, it seems: the low points should be almost non-existent, and the high points few and far between. I think there is room for the game to evolve in that direction, but I hope they don't take it to the extreme.

For non-abusable 3E-style crits, how about this:

1. Roll a hit in threat range: max damage.
2. Confirm threat: add extra weapon dice (1, 2, or 3) to the total.

This increases the power of criticals at low levels (because one die is maximized), and decreases their power at high levels (because static bonuses are counted only once).

A natural 20 is still special for everyone. You can easily add a rule that mooks (define however you like...lower CR, needing a 20 to hit, etc.) don't benefit from the first step.

Larger weapons are more attractive for crit-hungry players.

Boy, that was hard.