D&D 5E Sneak Attack Critical

[Blue]

One of my houserules is going to be to change crits.

Change to max damage plus one extra roll of weapon dice and that's it. No doubling SA dice, or smite dice, poison etc - it's just overkill/unnecessary, especially for paladins.

And the standard crit of just double dice can sometimes result in wonky, very average damage crits... which is most irksome to me!

Absolutely! Rogues keep up with other weapon wielders that get extra attack by adding bonus damage - their base damage is not a big part of what they devilver. Rogue have less chances for crits so we should also make the effects smaller when they get them!

Or, well, not.

Though I see your point about paladins. Their post-roll-resource-expendature-Nova does work exceedingly well with a crit where you can drop your biggest spell slot that won't cause overkill.

 

[aco175]

Darn, I was just doubling the actual weapon damage and not all the sneak attack dice as well. Not that I made a lot of criticals. It was less dramatic that I get a crit and pull out the 1 extra d4 and yell- Take that.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

In the d20/1e mashup game I was running before 5e a nat 20 was just auto max damage. I prefer that to the nutty crits you can get in 5e. But so far just using standard rules.

 

[Coroc]

If it's a gnome ninja/pirate with a katana then just grab as many dice, of whatever type, that you can hold in two hands and roll all of them.

Which will not be that many, assuming the age of said ninja gnome and related hand size

 

[Gwarok]

Not at all. I like crits. I just dont like crazy huge crits, which is what you get with the standard rule and SA, or worse, a paladin with smite and poison.

Assassin rogues also can wrack it up. Had an NPC 17th Lvl Assassin with death strike do 188hp on a hit in the surprise round. Killed the person it was meant to kill to advance the story line but also kinda freaked me out. And that was not counting the 8D6 poison damage that your typical back of the MM assassin gets. He had it, but I just forgot to add it in there were so many dice rolled. On the plus side, my PC's at 13th level with around 100-120hp went from super cocky to conveniently if belated respectful of the best assassin in town. Man has a base 27 stealth check, they realized he could sneak up on them pretty easily unless they stayed in a hyper paranoid state all the time.

 

[Staffan]

One of my houserules is going to be to change crits.

Change to max damage plus one extra roll of weapon dice and that's it. No doubling SA dice, or smite dice, poison etc - it's just overkill/unnecessary, especially for paladins.

And the standard crit of just double dice can sometimes result in wonky, very average damage crits... which is most irksome to me!

That's a horrible nerf to rogues, especially assassins whose main raison d'être is that if they line things up just right (surprise AND win initiative), they get to deal a buttload of damage.

I can see the issue with the conservative paladin who only spends his spell slots on smites if he crits, but I think that would be a losing strategy in the long run, because that's a lot of attacks that aren't crits and thus don't get smite damage.