D&D 5E Critical too easy?

[jayoungr]

When you roll a critical hit, you still don't know for sure that you are going to do a lot of damage. You roll twice as many damage dice, but you can still roll badly. Sometimes I score a critical hit but I do fewer points of damage than I would on a regular hit. This takes the place of rolling to confirm, in my opinion. Rolling high damage is like confirming the critical.

 

[Shiroiken]

Ok, ok, but another example:

Tipical party low lvl (4 PC lvl 3 or 4) fights againts low level CR (goblins maybe). In this case, goblins are easy to kill but they will be too many...Goblins will have high probabilities of crit in one-roll-attack per goblins. No confirmation is crit. too easy for weaking enemies but numerous.

Thanks,
Wiskeim

Yes, Critical Hits can swing a battle one way or the other. They are also more powerful at lower level, where everyone has fewer hit points. However, it also helps weak monsters remain useful at higher level when there is a lot of them.

If you have a problem with it in your game, you could easily remove it or require a confirmation roll (ala 3E).

 

[mellored]

Critical are easier, but they also deal less damage.
About 1.5 or 1.8x.
Compared to 3e's 2x to 4x.

 

[Syntallah]

Yes, Critical Hits can swing a battle one way or the other. They are also more powerful at lower level, where everyone has fewer hit points. However, it also helps weak monsters remain useful at higher level when there is a lot of them.

If you have a problem with it in your game, you could easily remove it or require a confirmation roll (ala 3E).

After decimating the Party one night with a bunch of lucky Crits I instituted an Armor Check Rule:

Armor has a defense rating of [AC-10], so Chain Shirt = 3, Plate Armor = 8, and so on. Whenever a critical is scored, the victim makes an Armor Check [DC = 14+attacker's prof mod] to see if it is mitigated to a normal hit. The Players love it when the chips are down (along with the healer...) and they turn a crit to normal. Not so much when the bad guys do it of course...

 

[Horwath]

After decimating the Party one night with a bunch of lucky Crits I instituted an Armor Check Rule:

Armor has a defense rating of [AC-10], so Chain Shirt = 3, Plate Armor = 8, and so on. Whenever a critical is scored, the victim makes an Armor Check [DC = 14+attacker's prof mod] to see if it is mitigated to a normal hit. The Players love it when the chips are down (along with the healer...) and they turn a crit to normal. Not so much when the bad guys do it of course...

you do know that as a DM you can fudge the roll's?

if you roll too much crits for your mooks, just turn some into normal hits.
There is no reason that you weaken the crits(that are already weak enough) because of a luck streak that happens once in a blue moon.

 

[Syntallah]

you do know that as a DM you can fudge the roll's?

if you roll too much crits for your mooks, just turn some into normal hits.
There is no reason that you weaken the crits(that are already weak enough) because of a luck streak that happens once in a blue moon.

Of course I do. I can, and do, fudge rolls quite often. I didn't institute the rule just because I rolled four crits one night. That was merely the impetus for something I had been considering for some time.

A Crit at my table is (max damage die + damage die roll + ability mod), so crits are not weak. In addition to that, I wanted to make armor mean something without getting into cumbersome DR rules and such. This was a good compromise.

 

[Psikerlord#]

I personally dislike confirmations for criticals - takes the "cheer" effect away!

I think crits should do max weapon plus half level damage. So a bit more than usual max. I really hate rolling double damage dice and doing very average or low damage. Gah!

 

[Shiroiken]

I personally dislike confirmations for criticals - takes the "cheer" effect away!

I think crits should do max weapon plus half level damage. So a bit more than usual max. I really hate rolling double damage dice and doing very average or low damage. Gah!

Something I played around with during the playtest (and recommended EVERY TIME in the surveys), is to have a "20" be max damage on the dice, with another attack roll. If the attack hits, you roll the damage again (and yes, another "20" would be maxed, with another attack roll). It worked out VERY well for weapons, but could become problematic with some spells. Technically, this allowed for anything to have a chance to kill anything else with a lucky enough attack, which my players really liked.

 

[Rhenny]

I think the "20" crit and how a horde of goblins may crit more often than the party crits is perfectly consistent with Bounded Accuracy. In 5e, the designers wanted to make sure that even low level monsters could become a threat against higher level PCs, especially when they swarm/attack in mass. Key point for PCs...try not to fight hordes of foes unless you have a great plan or a means to thin the ranks (using magic, etc.).

This is why a 10th level figher might fear taking on 30 goblins alone, or why a normal dragon will not often chance attacking a town/city that has an armed force of archers, etc. To me it makes perfect sense.

In the dragon's case (or any horrible abomination for that matter), if there were no fear of mass attacks (and the crits that they might inflict), these beasts would be able to attack towns and cities at will..nobody would be safe and these beasts would already have taken over the civilized world.

I like that crits happen, even if an unlucky 1 or 2 end up killing a PC from time to time.

 

[Lehrbuch]

I think the "20" crit and how a horde of goblins may crit more often than the party crits is perfectly consistent with Bounded Accuracy. In 5e, the designers wanted to make sure that even low level monsters could become a threat against higher level PCs, especially when they swarm/attack in mass. Key point for PCs...try not to fight hordes of foes unless you have a great plan or a means to thin the ranks (using magic, etc.).

The damage part of a 20 critical is not really that relevant to hordes of monsters. Critical hits just double damage. If the PCs are attacked by 20 monsters who can roll critical hits, it is much the same in damage terms if the PCs were attacked by 21 monsters without the critical rules. Likewise it doesn't make much difference for single monsters either. A monster who scored a critical hit in the second round of combat, but died in the fourth round, is much the same as a monster who scored no critical hits, but died in the fifth round instead.

Where critical hits make a difference for hordes of monsters (and individual monsters) is if the PCs' AC is so good that without a critical being an auto-hit, the monsters couldn't hit the PC at all. Perhaps an issue for very high level PCs (with lots of magic armour); but "bounded accuracy" tends to mean that PC ACs are not good enough for this to be a problem, usually.