Modifying criticals

[DanMcS]

I'm fiddling with the 'threat range' system for criticals. A low level character has roughly as good a chance of scoring a threat as a higher level character (though not for confirming), and a higher portion of a low level character's hits will be threats than a high levels. If a character hits on a 19-20, and threats on a 20, half of his hits are threats, where if he hits on 11-20, only 1/10 of his hits are threats. The larger hit range will confirm more often, though, so that's not really a problem, except that if you threat half the time at low levels, maybe you ought to threat half the time against the same target at higher levels.

What would happen if you made a threat occur whenever you hit by 10 or more? Improved threat ranges would subtract from that 10 points, so a longsword would threat on 9 or more, Improved critical longsword would threat on 7 or more, keen improved critical on a 5 or more. So if you're after AC 20, you need to hit a 30 to threat normally (for a 20/xY weapon).

10 might not be the right range, it might need to be higher, but 10 seems right in my head for the moment.

The first problem I see is that the 'keen' enchantment becomes redundant. All magical weapons effectively make threating more likely, and a keen is actually less likely to confirm than an equivalent weapon with straight pluses. Not sure if that's a problem or not, or if keen should just be done away with.

You'd end up needing to be rather strong and maybe weapon focused to threat moderate AC targets at low level, but as your BAB went up you'd threat them more often than not, but high AC targets would be a challenge still.

So let's see, a 20th level fighter (+20 BAB, +4 str, +4 feats/magic/whatever, total +28) could threaten an AC 38 target if he rolled a 20, or up to AC 20 even if he rolled a 2.

Level 1 (+1 BAB, +3 str, +1 feat) could threaten an AC 15 character if he rolled a 20, or threaten an AC 10 if he rolled a 15. A wider range for those critable, but impossible to crit higher AC foes.

What do you think? I'm just tweaking for fun. Side tracks like this give my mind time to process hard problems at work

 

[Crothian]

I think it's going to be a little or a lot more work for the players and the DM. As a DM I don't like to tell the PCs the AC of their opponet so I'd have to be paying attention to see if they happened to score 10 or greater on their attack.

It's an interesting idea though.

 

[Geoff Watson]

A threat isn't sufficient, they need to roll again to confirm the critical, so low levels don't get criticals more often than high levels.

A threat is meaningless, it's whether they confirm the critical that matters.

Geoff.

 

[DanMcS]

A threat isn't sufficient, they need to roll again to confirm the critical, so low levels don't get criticals more often than high levels.

You know, it seems like I said that several times in my original post. Oh wait, I did. I'm trying to make it so the higher level people get threats more often.

 

[Crothian]

Well, Improved Critical does that ns you could create other feats for that as well.

 

[Happiest_Sadist]

The number of threats is irrelavent as it has no game effect.

If you think high level charachters get less crits, your math is wrong. The proportion of critical hits per total hits is constant regardless of what you need to roll to hit, provided the whole crit range is a hit.

Chance of a crit = (% threat)*(%Confirm)= (crit range/20)*% chance to hit)

So the number of crits as a proportion of hits is.

(Crit range/20)*(% chance to hit)/(%chance to hit)
The chances to hit cancel out leaving you with the number of crits [per 20 attacks being the Crit Range.


I reccomend against this because you would have to make some changes. First you would have to get rid of True Strike, as it gives you essentially an auto crit. Second you would have to get rid of multipliers other than 2 because this would break the balance. A longsword would no longer get twice as many crits as a battleaxe, so a battleaxe would be a far superior weapon. Also improved critical and the keen enchantment give higher level charachters more crits anyway.