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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Marius Delphus" data-source="post: 1303332" data-attributes="member: 447">The DMG offers the following rationale:Creatures of the Construct, Elemental, Ooze, Plant, and Undead types are immune to critical hits, as are Swarm-subtype creatures. Objects are also immune to critical hits (animated objects count as Constructs).Why are Constructs immune to critical hits? They have no vital organs, but depending on how they're constructed they might have points of weakness and unless they are spherical they all appear to have differentiation, depending on how you define differentiation.Why are Elementals immune to critical hits? Harder to guess; some elementals would appear to have all three qualities but others (such as the thoqqua) appear to have less than all three.Why are Oozes immune to critical hits? All three qualities.Why are Undead immune to critical hits? No vital organs. Possibly no points of weakness, depending on what they look like, but again unless they are essentially spherical they have differentiation.Why are Swarms immune to critical hits? No differentiation.Why are objects immune to critical hits? No vital organs. But the DM is entitled to permit double damage from any "especially successful" attack, such as, say, piercing attacks against full waterskins, slashing attacks against taut ropes, or chopping attacks against trees.So apparently all we need is one of those three things to be true for a creature to be immune to critical hits.Why, then, are Plants immune to critical hits? Well, as said before, at the game's level of abstraction, plants have no vital organs. (I accept that that isn't *really* true, from a botanist's or biologist's perspective, but at some point I have to decide to leave the textbooks alone and roll dice.) And the biology of a Plant-type creature may even be completely alien: nobody has ever dissected a treant. The game fudges. The game handwaves. We know that; this is just another example. Who wants to play?If you're asking whether the critical-hit rules make perfect sense when considering real-world biology (plant *and* animal kingdoms), then I'd say they probably don't. If you're asking whether they make perfect sense *in the context of an RPG*, then I'd say they appear to.(That D&D is not utterly realistic can't be a big surprise. I mean, when I played Phoenix Command once (only once), it modeled gunshot wounds and the resulting shock trauma with a frightening level of detail. Was it realistic? I have no idea. Of course, when my character was blown backward off a balcony, I couldn't find any falling damage rules....)And if I say "I think the critical hit rules are sufficient," does that make me a WOTC apologist? I'm curious: what would that advantage be? Just how many plants need killing (without destroying) in your campaign? Does this really justify assuming something is terribly wrong with the critical hit rules?I suppose that, to me, the in-game difference between a living tree and a dead one is basically background information. "This dead tree won't support the weight of a character/creature of larger than Small size who tries to climb into it." Stuff like that. Again, just how many trees need killing (without destroying) in your campaign?True, and were that to become important in a game I was running, I'd probably take the easy way out and rule that applying Chemical X to a plant does Y hp damage to it and strangling a plant causes Z hp damage to it (perhaps it's even an "especially successful" attack... turns out lots of attacks on living plants end up being "especially successful" *because* they are living)... or some other handwave that doesn't implicate the critical hit rules, because as I say I'm fairly satisfied they're internally consistent, and they work all right for me.[EDIT] Whoops! If you treat trees as objects, the difference between a living tree and a dead one is *not* reflected in the tree's hit points! Again, object hit points represent their structural strength, not their life force. Which means any method of killing a tree without physically "ruining" it doesn't affect its hit points, as far as the game is concerned. Sorry for the confusion. [/EDIT]Incidentally, it sounds like all these "nonviolent" ways of killing plants aren't things you can do in 6 seconds, or at least you don't see the results within 6 seconds. I could be wrong, but at combat scale it sounds like a lot of these things will do *no* damage to a tree... until after many, many rounds have elapsed. Assuming your DM doesn't just say, "Okay, the next day the tree is dead. Now you need to chop it down."Nor should there be, IMO. Animated objects do not vary *biologically* from their inanimate counterparts; they are ordinary objects made to move by magical force. (We're asked to ignore the fact that such an object would break if such force were *really* applied to it, because, once again, it's magic.) Plant-type creatures are *creatures*: they have life cycles distinct from the plants they resemble. Now, what I want to know is: as Construct creatures that are still objects, do animated objects lose their vulnerability to "especially successful" attacks? I've got this treant mad at me.... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Well, for one thing I roll fewer dice and don't have to multiply anything when my character's target is immune to critical hits. So in that regard not having to deal with a critical hit is a little simpler.Do either of you, by any chance, play druids? Anyway, you've constructed a false dilemma in that there's at least one more possibility.</blockquote>

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