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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Abstruse" data-source="post: 5941057" data-attributes="member: 6669048">First I'm going to nitpick the Lord of the Rings reference because, well, I can't stop myself. I don't think the hit Frodo took was a critical hit, but just a very powerful blow from a very powerful monster. Also, the armor he was wearing was mithril chain, which is more or less a magic item.The last bit of that leads into my argument...I would only want to see something like that in magic armor. Depending on how you approach the HP/AC abstraction, critical hits are basically that lucky shot that manage to find a gap in the armor or hits a vulnerable spot. That one-in-a-million (or rather, one-in-twenty) hit that manages to find a way to do much more damage. The only thing that should stop that is something beyond the norm - either magical armor or something pretty close to it, like mithril or adamantine.This argument is also a far scaled down version of "armor as DR" which is a concept I hate personally and only want to see as an optional rules presentation. Not even optional like "Here we have flanking and here we have AoEs and here we have..", I mean optional like a sidebar buried in a book no one bought on a page that no one ever reads. Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but armor as DR should be stripped from any other optional rules. It's far more realistic, but it doesn't just not "feel" D&D to me, it is directly opposed to the D&D feel IMO.However, something like this would be great as a property of a specific rare metal armor or as a small enchantment on magic armor. It's actually a good enough idea to put in the core rules, which would give the purists something to love since it has a (if slightly off from my interpretation) classic literary roots in the genre as well as the power gamer and min/maxer crowd more math to play with. It also has a great way to flip it into a cursed item - an opponent can hit you with a critical on a 19 or 20 as the curse tends to "funnel" attacks to the more vulnerable parts of the armor rather than protect them better.</blockquote>

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