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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Matt Black" data-source="post: 3981349" data-attributes="member: 5477">To be honest, I don't see what's wrong with those unpredictable spikes in damage that occur in 3.x. We're trying to simulate lethal combat here. When you're stabbing at a fleshy body with a sharp piece of metal, there's really no such thing as 'maximum damage'. The maximum damage you can do is that you'll stab your enemy in the right place and kill it. And that should be all the more likely if you're well practiced at stabbing things.For that reason, the ideal critical system would give occasional spikes in damage that are somewhat dependent on the relative skill of the combatants. My preferred method would be the following:Critical hit: on a natural 20 if that roll also hits your opponent's AC, or if you exceed your opponent's AC by 10 or more. Result: roll damage die twice (or more for high crit weapons). Static bonuses and non-weapon dice are only applied once.A natural 20 is always an automatic hit., but it is only a crit if the roll would otherwise have hit.This system does the following:* it makes crits easy to resolve (no confirmation rolls; adding/subtracting 10 is easy)* it reduces the size of the damage spikes to some extent (no multiplying of bonuses) while still preserving the occasional hefty crit (and the round table high-fives that follow)* it allows high level combatants to mow through mooks relatively quickly, which is heroic and speeds up combat and lets them smack their way to the fun battle with the BBEG more quickly.</blockquote>

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