Where do crits come from?

[Asmor]

Actually, if you read his early "rants" in The Dragon, you'll see that AD&D was intended to be a system that was consistent from table to table. That way a player clould move about the country, play in different games, play in convention games, and not have to worry about rule variations.

OD&D was about riffing on the basic game system. AD&D was supposed to be about having a consistent set of rules.

That's pretty wild. Having never played it, I can only rely on what I've heard, and I've heard that pre-3.0 D&D was plagued with rules inconsistencies between different products and sometimes even within the same product.

And here we are in 3.5 which actively encourages customization and house ruling and I'd bet dollars to donuts most players could play with most groups without much of a problem.

 

[Squire James]

The idea behind critical hits was to emulate popular works of fiction where the hero slew the Monster with with One Mighty Blow. Unfortunately, in D&D and most other systems, any Monster worth its salt had more HP than could possibly be taken away with One Mighty Blow.

Trying to re-enact "The Hobbit" in an RPG was seriously compromised by this sad fact. Just how did the Fighting Man named Bard do it? Surely he didn't use Poison, since that would be Evil and he was obviously no Assassin! Even if he rolled a Mighty 20, at most that Black arrow did 6 points of damage or so (or 11 if we assumed he had a single +5 arrow inherited from ancestors, which seemed to be the case). Surely mighty Smaug had more than 11 HP (probably 88, the standard figure for Huge, Ancient Red Dragon)?!

Saying that "The Hobbit" is a book, while D&D is a game was not a satisfactory explanation to all, and the idea that the 5,000 or so arrows that was shot at Smaug before actually did 77 points of damage without really showing up as anything is repugnant! Therefore, Bard must have scored a Critical Hit! There, crib up some table where there is some small chance of the Monster going down with One Mighty Blow regardless of HP, and we're good to go! Bard did something unlikely, not something impossible!

I imagine the idea that heaps of Player Character corpses might result from these rules was a nice bonus... and so it began.

There, does that sound good?

 

[Kahuna Burger]

(or 11 if we assumed he had a single +5 arrow inherited from ancestors, which seemed to be the case).

Hey, that thing was +5 bane vs dragons! And he had to have a mighty composite longbow! And weapon specialization!

I'm not geeky....

 

[Father of Dragons]

I'm pretty sure I remember playing naval minatures in the early 70's that had critical hit tables for such relatively rare events as engine and magazine hits. And at least in my neck of the woods, a lot of the early D&D players were also wargamers of various stripes, so the idea would have seemed logical to them.

 

[Warbringer]

1066.

Real eye opener that one

 

[RFisher]

Ironic that that attitude seems to contradict both EGG quotes in your sig.

(9_9) If you ignore context.

I imagine he might also say: "People who take my rants about a frickin' game too seriously are poopy-heads." (^_^)

...but in high Gygaxian, of course.

(OK, I apologize in advance if that comes across as too flame-ish. I mean it to be good natured rather than mean spirited, whether I succeeded or not.)

 

[RFisher]

Saying that "The Hobbit" is a book, while D&D is a game was not a satisfactory explanation to all

Yeah. & I agree that this was probably a factor in the appearance of critical hits.

But I think it was a mistake. If you want a game to emulate fiction that way, you've got to make more fundamental changes.

 

[mmadsen]

I'm pretty sure I remember playing naval minatures in the early 70's that had critical hit tables for such relatively rare events as engine and magazine hits. And at least in my neck of the woods, a lot of the early D&D players were also wargamers of various stripes, so the idea would have seemed logical to them.

As I understand it, the whole notion of Armor Class came from a naval wargame. Anyway, think how different the same basic rules play out when every attack does 1d6 damage, and every character (or vessel) has 1d6 hit points. Every successful hit effectively has a 50-percent chance of being critical, not because of any special rules for critical hits, but as a natural outgrowth of using AC as the primary measure of toughness, rather than hit points, which stay at the same scale as damage.

Imagine how D&D would look if each level meant +1 AC, not one more hit die -- and perhaps you rerolled your sole hit die at each level to see if it went up.

 

[Pagan priest]

Bear in mind that 1E AD&D had an odd feature on the combat tables. A natural 20 tended to cover a larger number of AC values than the other values on the table. It wasn't quite a natural 20 hits everything but it was definitely better than a being one greater than a 19.

A natural 20 was not an auto hit, nor was a natural 1 an auto miss. But a natural 20 was the only way to get a number higher than 20. A roll of 19 +10 would equal 20. And if you were good enough to hit a low AC opponent on a 1, you might actually do more damage.

 

[Glyfair]

That's pretty wild. Having never played it, I can only rely on what I've heard, and I've heard that pre-3.0 D&D was plagued with rules inconsistencies between different products and sometimes even within the same product.

AD&D (1st) didn't have enough products for there to be many rules inconsistencies. Most products were modules, or accessories.

I'll also note that Gary wasn't against people having house rules per se. He was against them doing so and calling it AD&D (at conventions the common term was "Variant AD&D").

And here we are in 3.5 which actively encourages customization and house ruling and I'd bet dollars to donuts most players could play with most groups without much of a problem.

Then you've probably never been asked to sit in at a game and be told they have about 10 pages of house rules. Even worse, when they aren't written down and you find out about the, once you've been planning on doing something that you can't because the group decided they had "a better way."