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Message: <blockquote data-quote="moxcamel" data-source="post: 5345765" data-attributes="member: 67954">I'm always a big fan of doing what works for your gaming group.  So take my comments as just how I see it.  Not trying to tell you how to play your game, just some food for thought.Anyway, the big problem I have with big effects on criticals is that when you have 5 players, the odds of a natural 20 coming up is almost 23% every single turn.  So during my carefully crafted encounter, during any given turn there's almost a 1 in 4 chance every turn that the odds will shift dramatically.  To off-set that I could construct tougher encounters, but then on the fights where the dice just don't line up the PCs could be in very, very big trouble.Critical failures are even worse.  To paraphrase another poster, is it really all that heroic (or even realistic) for your fighter to have a 5% chance every turn to drop his sword, or for your ranger to have a 5% chance of breaking his bow string every turn?  And just like the odds of one in your party of 5 to roll a natural 20, the odds of rolling a natural 1 are also about 23%.  So, almost a 1 in 4 chance that if your wizard isn't tripping on his robe, your thief is tripping over his boots or your cleric drops his holy symbol or some other calamity.  This is less like D&D to me, and more like The 3 Stooges. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />One of the biggest things I love about 4e is how much mathematical "chaos" was removed from combat.  When I played 3 and 3.5, I always felt like it was blind luck when an encounter went well instead of winding up too hard or too easy, because during one encounter the fighter could get lucky and take out half my mobs in a couple rounds, while another fight at the same CR he'd struggle just to keep from being overwhelmed.  Maybe that's a comment on my DM'ing abilities, but I think it has a lot more to do with the maths staying in a tight range of sanity.Finally, I'm a big proponent of "what's good for the player is good for the monster."  If I'm going to allow special crit/fumble rules for the players, it's only fair to have them for the monsters.  Otherwise it cheapens the wins for the players. ("...great fight, without those two very lucky criticals, things could have gone very differently for us, and let's not discuss how many 20s the bad guys rolled and just did normal damage...")  I agree that players and monsters aren't the same thing, but when they're going toe-to-toe, they should have access to the same combat mechanics.I think the 4e rule on critical hits (critical = max damage) is almost a stroke of brilliance.  It both gives the player the satisfaction of dealing out a lot of damage, while keeping the numbers within the bounds of the encounter.  Maybe a better crit mechanic will come along, but so far I think WotC got this one right.</blockquote>

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