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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Syrsuro" data-source="post: 4448124" data-attributes="member: 58162">If you see this as 'unobtrusive' you may be underestimating its effect (and my goal is not to talk you out of it, just to point out the ramifications of the change). Since I don't know what kind of game you are aiming for, I don't know if it will work for you or not in the end. If I were to institute a house rule with regards to criticals it would be to go in a different direction than you are. But as noted, I am not running as 'gritty' a game as it sounds like you are. I am not personally a big fan of criticals. Or rather, I am fine with the PCs crit'ing the creatures, but I'm not a big fan of the creatures crit'ingthe PCs. I don't like luck killing my PCs. I have no objection to killing them through (my) good or (their) bad play. I have no objection to killing them because the creatures wore them down. But I don't like taking a character from not even bloodied to dead because one or more hits during a round were criticals. It feels 'cheap'. At ;east they aren't as swingy as the old 4.x crits were. With this in mind, if I were to houserule a critical it would be to reduce the damage that it inflicts on the players during combat in exchange for effects that persist out of combat. Something along the lines of the nagging injury rules discussed above. And recovery would probably require ritual healing (as opposed to combat healing or surges) and/or true bed rest (not just camping out in the field).  Simple application of a healing spell or healing skill would not be sufficient because that would, imho, not provide sufficent difficulty to justify the added complexity.  But I just don't see myself going that way in the current campaign. But its something to keep in mind for the future.  This all gets back to a concept I've argued on other forums in the past: If you add complexity but that complexity does not provide challenge, the added complexity serves no purpose from a gamist perspective (it may or may not be worthwhile from a simulationist perspective, I'm just not interested in adding complexity for simulationist gains). My most common example of this concept is rations. If food is plentiful and cheap (compared to the PCs cash level), worrying about making sure the players always have food and drink is pointless because the added complexity adds nothing to the game's challenge. But if the situation is such that a requirement for food/drink is as challenge (desert travel, poverty, etc.), then the added complexity becomes worthwhile as it adds to the game. The value of the added complexity is dependant upon the challenge it adds. In this case, if it is too simple to overcome whatever critical effect you have added (i.e. takes nothing more than an encounter power or healing surge once the melee is over) then there is little challenge and thus little benefit from the added complexity. This is why the OPs idea of a cleric daily power to cure is actually superior (imho) to the suggestion by a later poster that any power with the healing keyword can overcome it. The latter makes the challenge negligible and thus makes the gain negligible and thus the complexity unjustified. (However, the daily power idea is flawed in another way, see #3 below)   The reasons I don't like the various suggestions so far are: 1) Critical Wounds slow healing in combat: Getting a critical is already a huge benefit. It is, imho, the swingiest part of 4E combat and I don't see any reason to make the deadliness of criticals during the current combat any greater. For this reason, I don't like any critical effect that either makes some damage unhealable during the combat or reduces the effectiveness of healing surges. PScrewhead's suggestion that the maximum number of healing surges be reduced without reducing the number of healing surges available in the combat would be better from this perspective. One option: Reduce the immediate damage done by a critical to compensate for the difficulty in healing the wounds.  For example, a critical hit does no extra damage but reduces the maximum healing surges by one till healed. 2) Critical Wounds harm PCs disproportionatly: I generally don't like penalties that disproportionatly affect the PCs. An effect that persists after the melee is over is irrelevant when applied to the creatures. This is part of the 'focus on creature abilities that are relevant to the combat and ignore the rest'. If the creature kills the PCs, there isn't anyone to care if he has a nagging wound and if the PCs kill the creature, he's dead. Thus this is really a blatant 'lets make combat more deadly for the PCs' rule. And this is aggravated by the fact that each individual PC will be crit'ed many times (often multiple times per day) while most NPCs will never be crit'ed (The PCs are involved in many fights with many opponents, the creatures are only ever involved in one relevant fight). No real solution to this one, but it is the reason I wouldn't seek to make them more frequent. 3) The party will accumulate Critical Wounds faster than they can heal them: Because of the above, critical already happen to the PCs often (when considered in terms of criticals per day). Statistically, every single character involved in melee will probably get hit by a critical on nearly every single day of adventuring (unless you are letting them rest fully after only one or two encounters). Never mind what happens if you increase the frequency as the OP suggested. If you can only remove one critical per day (as in the OPs suggestion) the party will quickly find themselves unable to function as everyone will be criticalled in short order, many of them multiple times (assuming you allow critical damage to stack). Unless your goal is to force your party to rest and recover dailies after every combat, either a) the effects of the critical must be ignorable (which brings us back to challenge versus complexity) or b) they have to be able to 'heal' multiple critical effects per turn. One Option: Allowing a ritual to heal the wounds. This forces the party to choose between spending resources and time to heal the wound, or pushing on and ignoring the effects till they can get some true bed rest. It puts the control in their hand while leaving them able to cure as many criticals per day as they need to. In conclusion, and imho: If you are going for a gritty ('realistic') game, you suffer the effects of that gritty universe (fewer encounters per day), because it isn't 'realistic' to rip through multiple challenging fights in a single day because 'realistically' people just don't recover from injuries that quickly. Instead, you need to design your game so that the party takes on one or two significant fights per day and then retreats to their lair to lick their wounds and prepare for their next foray.  If that is the goal, then this is a way to bring about that style of play. But if you are still expecting your players to handle multiple encounters per day you will run into difficulties. At least, that is how I see it. YMMV. Carl</blockquote>

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