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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6663446" data-attributes="member: 4937">I started critical hits with a group that used the Dragon article. It quickly occurred to me that critical hits favored NPC's over PC's.  There is an unending stream of NPC's and it really doesn't matter how they die, but your PC can only get lucky for so long.On the other hand, despite the fact that it is against their own interests, players themselves love criticals.  Emotion trumps logic here.   While arguably the game would be better without them, virtually every modern RPG embraces criticals because players enjoy them in the same way gamblers love to gamble.  Most RPGs that use criticals tend to have means for mitigating against them.  For example, they tend to make criticals from NPC's less frequent and less powerful than those available to PC's - particularly compared to PC's that invest resources in generating criticals.   In all D20 games, this is generally true in that most monsters can only generate 20/x2 criticals, where frequently you see players with 19-20/x3 or 17-20/x2 critical hits (or larger).   4e preserved this aspect to a large extent, and if anything over nerfed NPC criticals relative to player criticals resulting in broken math at higher levels were it was hard for a monster to challenge a PC party and things could get grindy if you weren't careful.   In my game, I further mitigated against criticals by the use of destiny points which could among other things cancel a critical hit made against a PC.   This helps mitigate against a PC getting one shotted by a lucky orc with a great axe or any similar sort of situation (power attacking frost giant with a great axe, critical hit with a disintegrate spell, etc.).Critical hits that cripple characters should be generally avoided.   Maiming a PC is generally worse than killing one from an emotional standpoint.  A maimed PC generally has to be abandoned unless magic to overcome the disability is so readily available that the maiming itself it meaningless anyway.  Otherwise, a maimed character is effectively dead to the player but without catharsis.   Losing a character always hurts, but if the character is dead the player has at least (hopefully) a good death story to remember and the excitement of character gen.   Maimed characters that are retired haunt the process.   Maiming however realistic also makes combat so unpredictable as to make a joke of attempts to balance encounters.  It's more or less impetus to avoid combat as a focus of play and the story, not the least of which is because playing out combat will probably also be burdensome as you try to resolve damage and its effects.  And in general, it tends to make combat less fun, since the first telling blow tends to win the fight and reducing the fight to a death spiral of greater and greater gimpiness.  So unless your goal is simulating a real era, I'd generally avoid critical hits (or just hits) that leave lasting non-ablative wounds.   One alternative here however would be maiming as death mitigation, where the system tends to replace deaths with maiming specifically to allow for recovery in a system were raising the dead isn't usually possible but recovery from catastrophic injury generally is.  I can see doing this in many science fiction settings, and in certain fantasy settings.  In my own system, this maiming replaces death shows up in a few limited ways, notably replacing D20's standard 'massive damage' rule.I generally agree with you that the 5e approach is logical.   But as I said, the player preference here is an emotional one and not a logical one.  It remains to be seen whether players will enjoy the less impactful critical or if we'll see house rules for more potent critical hits become more common.</blockquote>

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