That is the rub isn't it. I was thinking about dice pools because my group explored a houserule for making crits much more deadly.
Okay, "I want crits to be more rare but more meaningful when they happen" is a reasonable sort of design goal.
However, they happen too often on a 1d20 and my group didn't like how deadly the game became.
Yeah. That's a problem when both the PCs and monsters have access to crits. Deadly crits... tend to kill PCs. I mean, they kill monsters too, but we are expecting monsters to die, so this merely changes how fast that happens.
I've thought about going to a dice pool (2d10) to reduce the chance of crits. but more recently I am thinking of going back to confirming crits.
If the only issue is the crits, I'd go for confirming, ratehr than dice pool. Dice pool will impact all hits, not just crits.