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<blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 8755820" data-attributes="member: 6988941">I think part of why I'm never going to be onboard with taking away monster crits is that I think it is premised on wanting encounters to be much more fine-tuned, balanced, and balanceable than I approach them. My approach to encounter balance is to eyeball CRs to make sure I'm using creatures in the right league, but otherwise to build encounters based around what makes sense for story or dungeon ecology, and then let players make the decisions to engage, avoid, or run. If it is a major set-piece encounter, or if I am in any way railroading or tricking players into it, or if the danger isn't obvious, I'll also count up the rough number of attacks and other actions each side will get. At very low levels I worry a little more, and may even think of outs for if the players lose the fight. And of course I'm always applying my rough sense of what the particular party (or a comparable party) is capable of.But I never actually do the official math of how you are supposed to calculate encounters. This no-crit thing (and defenses of it) seems like it is partly about making the official math, which doesn't really work, work out better. I don't feel like monsters will or should be so finely tuned that occasionally doing double dice damage breaks anything.If WotC actually follows through and gives lots of new abilities to monsters to compensate for the loss of crits, I will appreciate having some cool new monster designs. At my table they will still crit though. And I don't worry in the slightest about that unbalancing anything.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Benjamin Olson, post: 8755820, member: 6988941"] I think part of why I'm never going to be onboard with taking away monster crits is that I think it is premised on wanting encounters to be much more fine-tuned, balanced, and balanceable than I approach them. My approach to encounter balance is to eyeball CRs to make sure I'm using creatures in the right league, but otherwise to build encounters based around what makes sense for story or dungeon ecology, and then let players make the decisions to engage, avoid, or run. If it is a major set-piece encounter, or if I am in any way railroading or tricking players into it, or if the danger isn't obvious, I'll also count up the rough number of attacks and other actions each side will get. At very low levels I worry a little more, and may even think of outs for if the players lose the fight. And of course I'm always applying my rough sense of what the particular party (or a comparable party) is capable of. But I never actually do the official math of how you are supposed to calculate encounters. This no-crit thing (and defenses of it) seems like it is partly about making the official math, which doesn't really work, work out better. I don't feel like monsters will or should be so finely tuned that occasionally doing double dice damage breaks anything. If WotC actually follows through and gives lots of new abilities to monsters to compensate for the loss of crits, I will appreciate having some cool new monster designs. At my table they will still crit though. And I don't worry in the slightest about that unbalancing anything. [/QUOTE]

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