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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ccooke" data-source="post: 6844884" data-attributes="member: 6695890">There are many who are of the opinion that, should the players get a natural 20, the effect should always benefit them. This is a perfectly reasonable and valid opinion, of course. It's just that I do not share it. I generally rule that a natural 20 (in a situation where critical success actually means something) should indicate that whatever the character wanted to do is successful to the highest extent that it can be in the circumstance at hand. Let's imagine, for instance, that we have a party of five PCs who are currently fighting two quite tough opponents.Let's imagine that they are all in a 15' square stone chamber, with locked airtight metal doors.Let's imagine that the party are chest-deep in (or, in the case of the party dwarf, treading) water.Let's imagine that the situation is looking quite bad.Let's imagine that one of the party decides to use an area-of-effect thunder attack.Let's imagine that said PC decides to enhance it using a daily power (this being a 4e game) that noticably increases the damage of thunder based attacks.Let's imagine that the PC rolls a critical hit on this attack.Now, given that thunder is a sonic attack and water is a much better conductor of sound than air, and that sealed stone and metal tend to reflect sound, and that the party are immersed in water in a very tight space...... it could be said that, while this attack did end the encounter and destroy both of their enemies, the party were extremely lucky that one of them just about managed to stay on the right side of positive hit points to save the rest of them.</blockquote>

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