Eliminate the Confirmation Roll with the CritAC

[Hrothgar Rannúlfr]

If you want to eliminate the confirmation roll, do just that: eliminate the confirmation roll.

It's not just eliminating the confirmation roll that I'm after, Chando. It's making Critical hits more about skill than luck for all characters, not just those with Improved Critical or Power Critical. And it has to do with making DnD combat make more sense in the way our group imagines sword-and-sorcery combat to be. We've went to a houseruled variant of Vitality and Wound Points from Unearthed Arcana because of the general dislike we have for the abstraction of what Hit Points are in the game. And, we've tried the Class Defense Bonus combined with Armor as Damage Reduction, too, but it left us less than satisfied. Applying Damage Reduction for every hit just got to be a chore with creatures with more than a few hit points and decent damage reduction when the weapons weren't dealing very much damage to begin with.

So, with this, we're going for Armor as Critical Reduction. In fact, I almost thought about turning armor's defense bonus to AC into various degrees of Fortification. In other words, Armor would add nothing to your AC, but if you suffered a Critical Hit, you'd roll percentiles and if the roll was right, you're armor would negate the Critical Hit. But, armor wouldn't affect AC, at all. But, there are some wrinkles in that system, too.

when you roll a 20 with an great axe, you do x3 damage. When you roll a 19 with a longsword, you do x2 damage. just don't roll the confirmation. it will increase the crits for players and monsters but not by much, as the confirmation is many times just a formality, and other times is frustrating to roll a natural 20 and roll really low on the confirmation (like 2-5).

Oh, I agree that rolling a Natural 20 and then missing the confirmation is really frustrating. One of my players hates it. He had a fighter that had a Vorpal Weapon in a long running 1E AD&D game and that character is "lejendary" at our table. The confirmation roll frustrates him to no end on a Natural 20. And, even moreso for Critical Fumbles on a Natural 1.

Someone else, in this thread, posted about removing the Confirmation Roll from Natural 20's. I'll probably do that no matter what else I do. And, I'll remove the Confirmation Roll from Natural 1's for Critical Fumbles, too. Just to be fair.

Thank you, Chando!

 

[Hrothgar Rannúlfr]

I just eliminated the Confirmation roll when I ran my game. No biggie. Sure, crits happened more often. That was part of the point.

The idea.... honestly, it seems awfully fiddly for no payoff. You eliminate a Confirmation roll *shrug*. You've replaced the extra time you would have spent making a 2nd roll with having to learn a whole new subsystem, having to rejigger feats, and mess around with weapon stats.

If the goal was to make things easier, you're heading the opposite direction.

Oh, I agree... But, the goal isn't just to make things easier. It's to shape DnD Combat more in line with how the folks at my table envision it in the sword-and-sorcery novels. And, it's an experiment, for me, also. I like experimenting with houserules almost as much as playing the game.

If the goal is to try and make crits happen more often, you're just doing a shell-game.

I understand that, but that isn't the goal. The goal in this aspect is to make critical hits more about skill than luck, whether you have Improved Critical or Power Critical or not.

It also means that against a character like my 12th level Fighter with a 24 AC, monsters are going to be critting him quite frequently. Monster to Hits increase a heck of a lot faster than PC BaB and AC.

That's a good point. Thank you for reminding me of that.

I'm a fan for E6. And, as such I haven't played into the higher levels of 3.5. So, I'm not as familiar with that as I am the lower level games. I have had some thoughts about how I'd like to redesign monsters, given the time, though. But, that's more from a Vitality/Wound Point perspective than from a Critical Hit perspective.

Thank you for pointing that out about monster to-hits, Scurvy_Platypus!

 

[Hrothgar Rannúlfr]

In 2.5E Combat & Tactics tackles this by saying you're only critted when the roll is a crit and hits by a margin of 5. So effectively your crit AC was your normal AC +5.

Thank you, Thanael. I knew I'd seen this somewhere in a DnD book. But, couldn't find it. I still have my 2E books, but honestly, I really only reference 1E for stuff from the old days. Especially, the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. Great book!

 

[Hrothgar Rannúlfr]

With this approach, all I see is a lot of extra record keeping and calculations for something that can just be done by eliminating the confirmation roll period.

Well, the extra record keeping, I could do without. But, if it's no harder than checking to see if you beat the CritAC, I could deal with that. I was already planning on revising the weapon charts, anyway. I was going to adjust it in favor of the characters by increasing the damage dice by one step for most all weapons when wielded by a PC or an elite NPC (especially, ones that I make up). We did this in 1E and it worked very well. And, no one noticed that part of the reason the PC's were so successful was because they did slightly better damage, on average, than the monsters because their damage dice were improved, a little over the monsters'.

And the posts above are correct, this will increase the number of crits that occur. However, IMO that's not a problem. I like fast, brutal, high crit games.

Me, too. Grim-n-Gritty is, also, one of my favorite houserules. But, it's just a little too brutal for my table.

The way I do it is simply eliminating confirmation rolls for natural 20's (just like it used to be in 2E), but keep confirmation rolls for the rest of the threat range. So, 20's are automatically crits (not just automatic hits), and any other roll (15, 16, 17, 18, 19) all still need confirmation rolls.

I really like this suggestion, El Mahdi! It's simple and workable. As I said, above, I'm eliminating the confirmation rolls on Natural 20's and Natural 1's, immediately. No reason to keep them. As more fun equals better! (Usually.)

This approach increases the amount of crits, but not as much as it would if any hit with a roll in the threat range was considered an automatic crit. And, it doesn't nullify any feats that concern critical hits. It also saves you from adding any extra record keeping and makes it the responsibility of the players to pay attention to whether rolls fall within their threat range.

And, if I fully adopted this option, this would be why, El Mahdi. It's beautiful in its simplicity and elegance. I'm just not sure that I'm ready to give up trying to flesh out this houserule, yet.

 

[Ashtagon]

Simpler version:

* Any roll inside the threat range is always a hit, regardless of AC.
* Any roll inside the threat range that beats the base AC by 5 or more is a critical hit.

This eliminates the confirmation roll, while also preventing the glass jaw problem, where all hits would be criticals.

 

[Eldritch_Lord]

* Any roll inside the threat range is always a hit, regardless of AC.

This one's not a good idea. Wielding a rapier and taking Improved Critical would then mean you automatically hit 30% of the time, regardless of AC, and that wouldn't be balanced at all. Automatic hits should stay on natural 20s only or things get out of hand fast.

 

[Hrothgar Rannúlfr]

Simpler version:

* Any roll inside the threat range is always a hit, regardless of AC.
* Any roll inside the threat range that beats the base AC by 5 or more is a critical hit.

This eliminates the confirmation roll, while also preventing the glass jaw problem, where all hits would be criticals.

This one's not a good idea. Wielding a rapier and taking Improved Critical would then mean you automatically hit 30% of the time, regardless of AC, and that wouldn't be balanced at all. Automatic hits should stay on natural 20s only or things get out of hand fast.

Whew! That looked good, in print, at first glance, Ashtagon. But, I think Eldritch Lord is right about the problem it creates.

Thank you, Eldritch Lord, for catching that! ENWorld's people are the best when it comes to talking about houserules. So many times, the person that comes up with an idea can't see the flaws, right away. This forum really helps put the ideas to a test before they ruin a night's gaming. Or, a campaign!