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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6013351" data-attributes="member: 4937">Not in my games, but I knew a guy who got a vorpal sword and then obtained some oil of sharpness... only it turned out to be oil of slipperiness and the DM ruled that when he grabbed the blade, he fumbled and cut off his own head.Since the 1e era, I have used completely different rules for vorpal and sharpness weapons.  I used the old Dragon magazine tables for fumbles, and used the rules therein as written - besting the target to hit number granted you a percentage to obtain a critical hit based on the amount you beat the target by.  The way Vorpal and Sharpness weapons worked is, in addition to this ordinary chance of a critical, you also always obtained a critical with them by what was at other tables the common house rule that you scored a critical by rolling a 20.  This made such weapons far more balanced than their default incarnations.  The default weapons in my experience only turned up in the more Monte Haul sort of campaign, as they were completely imbalancing.Even so, I never dared to put a sword with such properties into the hands of players during the lifetime of any campaign I ran.  The closest I came was there was a magic sword with a +5% chance of producing criticals on a hit, which could be seen as a forerunner of the modern 'keen' property.  The forerunner of the 'masterwork weapon' concept was high quality non-magical swords often had +1% chance of producing criticals.I've basically retained these houserules into the 3e era, modified for the times, in that weapons with the Sharpness property automatically threaten to critical on every hit.  The most powerful sort of weapon in my game world would presumably be something along the lines of a +5 Brutal Great Axe of Sharpness, which would basically hit for 4d12+20 damage.   However, I have not directly retained the 1e era critical hit table that lopped off limbs or dealt lethal organ damage.  Instead, I have a similar sort of table that comes into effect when a critical hit drops a target to 0 or fewer hit points, or when a coup de grace attack is made (which in my game can be made against limbs as well as say, a neck).  However, I generally feel that systems which directly circumvent the hit point system are a 'bad idea' in that they are worse for PC's than for NPC's.</blockquote>

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