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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8756502" data-attributes="member: 4937">Critical hits as a system almost entirely exist to punish the player.Players perception of critical hits is that they exist almost entirely as a reward.I am not a huge fan of critical hits but they have been wildly successful as a mechanic across multiple systems and as such they are almost impossible to get away from because players will demand them even when what they are really demanding is for the game to be more punishing.There has been some amusing conversations really with players demanding critical hits but realizing that they are punishing so demanding that the can do critical hits but never receive them.  This is mostly amusing because player critical hits rarely matter except as a thrill.  As the video notes, they rarely add significant damage dealing capability in the long run unless your system deliberately gives ways to abuse them.In my homebrew system I use critical hits in a couple of ways, because rooting them out of the system when players love them so much is just too much work.a) I use critical hits to keep combats from being too predictable.  One of the advantages of a hit point system is that you can very accurately gauge how challenging a combat is and very carefully weight the combat in the PC's favor.  But when every combat is subtly weighted in the PC's favor, combats can get grindy and pointless.  Critical hits provide random 'swinginess' where combats suddenly get tense that weren't tense before.  I use a narrative currency system to mitigate against excessive 'swinginess' but even being forced to spend your narrative currency and losing your safety net is itself tension inducing.b) I use critical hits to create verisimilitude of realism.  One of the original design goals of critical hits was to explain serious maiming wounds which are otherwise impossible in an abstract damage system.  The rules support that maiming wounds can exist all the way back to 1e, but without critical hits they were silo'ed off into special cases like Swords of Sharpness.  In my homebrew, being dropped by a critical hit is one of the things that has a good chance of causing a traumatic injury.  Dying and bleeding out is a common situation in most games I run because I run games that typically leave a large margin for saving a dying colleague.  Critical hits create occasional color of brutality and critical injury most commonly to NPC's, but occasionally to PC's that are out of narrative currency as well.  Conversely, having a critical injury system described by the rules in concrete ways lets me handle those special cases in a straight forward manner in a way that they weren't handled even when mentioned.  Think about it.  In 1e, 2e, 3e, 4e, or 5e, where would you go to to quickly look up what it meant to have a PC's arm removed at the elbow?  In 2e, I think you could turn to a sidebar on the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords in the module of the same name, but that's pretty obscure.  Most of the time the rules just say, "DM, make up something."  Well, I did, then I wrote it down.c) I use critical hits as a mechanism for helping martials keep up with casters.  I have a lot of ways for martials and especially fighters to gain advantages in the ability to deal critical hits and I typically do that instead of adding bonus damage.</blockquote>

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