Critical Hits - why, and why not?

[Cleon]

That seems unnecessarily complicated. If the goal is to reconcile HP damage with the narrative description of that loss, then a 10HP wound would have to be the same whether it comes from the top of your pool or the bottom, given that they both take the same amount of mojo to reverse.

From a narrative viewpoint I'd prefer a critical injury to actually be life threatening, which from a purely hit point view in D&D usually means the target's in the negative HPs.

Some version of the Massive Damage Rule like you suggest is a possibility, but as has already been mentioned on this thread that may make it impossible for a low hit point character to take anything more severe than a light wound. (e.g. if a "moderate wound" is, say, 20 hit points, a creature with 9 or fewer hit points would never take one, since a 20 damage hit will kill them instead).

Also, I'd prefer it if to be very difficult to inflict a critical wound on a high CR creature with full hit points "right off the bat", since it'd cut down their screen time to a round or two. It's a similar issue to save-or-lose spells, where it's rather anticlimatical if the final boss monster goes down to the first spell it's hit by.

Whichever approach is used, it's important to consider how critical hits tend to make combat way more swingey.

A friend of mine once told me of a campaign he'd been in which revolved around a Demon leading a monstrous army invasion. The DM obviously wanted them to see the army in the first session, then spend many adventures levelling up with secondary adventures before having a grand finale fight against the Demon. The PCs launched a frontal attack against the Demon at the head of his army in their first encounter. They were very low level, so in normal D&D they'd have had no chance, but the DM had introduced a homebrew critical system which led to the party slaying the Big Bad with a few lucky crits and ending the entire campaign before it had even begun.

Whether that's a bug or feature is up to individual tastes, but having major criticals usually only occur after you've "whittled down" an enemy's hit points ought to make for more protracted and, hopefully, interesting combats.

 

[N'raac]

@Cleon, while I agree with your points, I think the argument most often advanced for lethal critical hits is that "combat is very random, and a single bolt from a crossbow accidentally fired by a toddler might hit right between the eyes, killing the most powerful of beings". Assuming we accept that as a premise of the game, then I think that suggests major criticals occur at random, whether or not you've "whittled down" an enemy's hit points. Throwing a horde of low-powered, inexperienced mortals against the Demon Lord simply leverages that aspect of the game's "reality".

That's a major argument against critical hits for a lot of gamers - that randomness, for them at least, makes the game less interesting rather than more fun. But if it's considered necessary that a Kobold crossbow bolt have a chance of taking out a 25th level warrior, it seems that must come with a chance that a random commoner's pitchfork can, with lucky rolls, take out the Demon Lord. Of course, we can make the Big Bad immune to critical hits - but that seems like an admission they weren't such a great idea overall, at least as I see it.

I played a L1 game this weekend. It did not escape me that a PC death from a 3.5e Crit was pretty likely, while the PC's scoring a crit was largely meaningless since it just meant the downed opponent would be that much closer to, or already, dead.

 

[Cleon]

@Cleon, while I agree with your points, I think the argument most often advanced for lethal critical hits is that "combat is very random, and a single bolt from a crossbow accidentally fired by a toddler might hit right between the eyes, killing the most powerful of beings". Assuming we accept that as a premise of the game, then I think that suggests major criticals occur at random, whether or not you've "whittled down" an enemy's hit points. Throwing a horde of low-powered, inexperienced mortals against the Demon Lord simply leverages that aspect of the game's "reality".

That's a major argument against critical hits for a lot of gamers - that randomness, for them at least, makes the game less interesting rather than more fun. But if it's considered necessary that a Kobold crossbow bolt have a chance of taking out a 25th level warrior, it seems that must come with a chance that a random commoner's pitchfork can, with lucky rolls, take out the Demon Lord. Of course, we can make the Big Bad immune to critical hits - but that seems like an admission they weren't such a great idea overall, at least as I see it.

Contrariwise, the "reality" (for want of a better word) of D&D is clearly different from that of our world. Depending on edition, some D&D characters can reliably fall from the lower stratosphere onto hard rock and walk away, or swim in molten lava for a couple of rounds without dying. Compared to that, a kobold's crossbolt bolt in the eye is barely a tickle.

Also, the most powerful beings in D&D are way more formidable than any creature on earth. In principle, it makes as much sense for a peasant to kill, say, Azathoth with the first thrust of a pitchfork as it would for them to destroy an aircraft carrier.

In the case of roughly human high-CR creatures like the aforementioned 25th level warrior it makes a bit more sense for them to be vulnerable to the occasional fatal critical, but the chance of that occurring ought to vary with the level of attacker so it's vanishingly unlikely for a 1st level commoner to get that fluke "arrow in the eye" result.

That's a common issue with homebrew D&D critical hit tables - they make the hits way too common, so a combat between many low-CR beings and a few high-CR ones becomes more a matter of critical luck than hit point attrition.

Whether that's a good feature or not is up to the D&D group, of course.

I played a L1 game this weekend. It did not escape me that a PC death from a 3.5e Crit was pretty likely, while the PC's scoring a crit was largely meaningless since it just meant the downed opponent would be that much closer to, or already, dead.

Yes, I believe that point's already been brought up several times on this thread.

Of course, if you have a critical wound system, there's no necessity for the critical to always involve damage multipliers or bonuses. A critical might apply some kind of penalty instead - i.e. a "leg critical" restricts movement. Additional damage could be applied over time rather than instantaneously, using some kind of "bleeding" mechanism. e.g. the injured character loses X hit per round until the wound is treated.

Criticals that are potentially fatal could involve some kind of saving throw, so a mortal head wound might require a "save vs. decapitated" instead of having a massive damage multiple, and if the target saves they ducked in time and just take the hit points and maybe a lesser wound penalty.

 

[Celebrim]

oops