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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7740982" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Under normal circumstances, I hate crits. They favor the monsters (who make more attack rolls than the PCs and therefore have a statistically higher chance to roll them more often) and add almost nothing to the game. Critical failures attempt to balance this out, since monsters also have a statistically higher chance of suffering them more, but they feel bad for the players to roll, and often they don’t actually balance out the advantage critical hits give, because the effects GMs put on them are often worse for PCs than they are for NPCs (such as if you attach lingering injuries to criticals.)But I like what Paizo is doing with degrees of success, because despite their name, they fill a different design space than critical hits and fumbles innother d20 games. First of all, they’re achieved by beating or failing to beat a target number instead of by randomly getting the best or worst number on the die, which means they’re controllable. Instead of a 5% chance of an extra special or extra bad thing happening on every d20 roll in an otherwise binary task resolution system, it’s adjusting the task resolution system to make it not binary. And that means they can design around a four-degrees-of-success system, such as by tying damage multipliers to AoE spells depending on the result of the save. Or including Reactions that trigger on certain degrees of success being achieved. There’s a lot of design space opened up by having multiple degrees of success, and by tying those degrees to target numbers, making the odds of achieving them a thing that players can influence with their modifiers, it avoids the pitfalls of crits and fumbles being so swingy.I hate crits and fumbles, but that’s really not what PF2’s degrees of success are. They’re a way to fix the issues of crits and fumbles, while keeping the names for tradition’s sake.</blockquote>

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