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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6414013" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is the correct answer.Unfortunately I have found that its a non-starter, so even at my table, there are criticals.   Ever since they've been introduced, players have loved them - even though that is entirely irrational.  Humans like to gamble.  What are you going to do?  So I do my best to manage them.Critical hits are the equivalent of 'die no save'.  In fact, they are probably worse than die no save because they involve no choice on the part of the players.  People who dislike die no save, and save or die, but who love criticals always crack me up.The way I handle critical hit mitigation is ensure that on the whole, players get far more out of criticals than monsters (and build that assumption into my game system) to counteract the problem that it matters more if a player receives a critical hit than if a monster does.   It's never game over just because a monster dies unexpectedly.   Additionally, I have a concept called 'Destiny Points' that are meant to protect against critical and fumbled saving throws.  Specifically, a player can spend a destiny point to convert a critical hit into a normal blow.I'm a big fan of mitigating bad luck.  If I didn't have bad luck mitigation, I'd try to remove critical hits from the game rules.  I've been in the current campaign for about 4 years.   There have been 9 PC deaths in that time.   There would have been 3 additional PC deaths if there wasn't the critical mitigation with destiny points rule.   There would have been 2 additional deaths if there was not the fumbled saving throw mitigation with destiny points rule.   There would have been 3 additional deaths if there was not the 'Divine Intervention' rule (2 of those were for the same character that had specifically spent resources in chargen on having the gods love them so that otherwise rare divine intervention would be more likely).   There would have been 1 additional death if it was not for the fact that there is not a path for 'raise dead' (in a very limited way) using the Heal Skill (and taking a feat that adds additional skill uses for Heal).  On the other hand, there would have been 8 fewer deaths if players had really learned the lesson to never split the party.  Some problems can't and maybe shouldn't be mitigated by the rules.</blockquote>

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