Critical Success/Failures - question for the DM's

[just__al]

Our house rule (which is one of the variants mentioned in the DMG):

Natural 20 roll is treated as a base 30 skill check.
Natural 1 is treated as -10.

Thus there aren't any automatic successes or failures, but rolling the extremes does increase the chances that you will succeed or fail. It also gives an incentive to rolling over taking 20, since you can potentially get that "better than 20" skill result -- at the risk or really badly missing your check.

It's worked out quite well in practice. PCs can occasionally accomplish the nearly impossible, but still can't accomplish the truly impossible (which the natural 20 = success allows).

My group rotates campaigns and DM's about every 4-6 months so we all get to play. In my campaign we used this variant for everything requiring a D20 except initiative.

The current DM is using it only for combat. I (obviously) like my way better, but whatever.

 

[ST]

The thing is, 10% of the time you roll a d20, you're going to get a 1 or a 20. I just can't imagine a world where one-tenth of all my roll-worthy activities end in something surprisingly wonderful or terrible.

 

[oromancer]

Just remember that there's a big difference between a fumble and a critical miss, the former being a variant rule and the latter being part of the core rules.

This is not techincally true; automatic success/failure is part of the core rules for attack rolls & saving throws, and critical hits are part of the core rules, but critical misses are covered in a variant rule.

 

[CalrinAlshaw]

As far as critical misses for weapons go, my DM like to do reflex saves (DC15) to not drop the weapon, if you roll a 1 on that reflex save, something happens, like the weapon flies into a comrade, it's randomly rolled. A friend of mine even once accidently slew the enemy with that.

Calrin Alshaw

 

[kreynolds]

This is not techincally true;

Yeah, from a purely semantics point of view, that's true. The term "Critical Misses" is also lumped with (Fumbles) in the DMG. But hey, there's gotta be a term for a natural 1, so I just rolled with that. Guess I'll refer to a natural 1 on an attack roll is a "Gooble-wipe" from now on. That way, there's no confusion.