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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4255229" data-attributes="member: 4937">It's drama/perception driven.  By giving lots of (largely useless) powers that give extra damage on a critical, they can excite the sort of person who is excited by criticals themselves. "OMG...I'm doing 9d10+9d12 damage!!!"They get this big impressive moment where they can be the center of attention because they did like 95 damage in one hit.And it can create stories of the sort, "I thought we were doomed, but then Bob rolled that critical and dropped the BBEG."But on the whole, I'm rather unimpressed by the whole 'do bonus damage' on a critical thing.Assuming you hit 50% of the time, critical 10% of the time when you hit, then a +1 bonus to damage on every attack is worth 10 bonus damage on a critical.   So for example, a bonus of 6d10 damage on your criticals is worth about +3 damage on every attack.  Which is more impressive, a +3 bonus to damage or a +6d10 bonus to damage on a critical?Which feels more impressive?That perception is critical to selling people on 4e, because there is alot of illusion of variaty going on.  From a balance standpoint, you could have made all the damage enhancing powers just a flat +X to damage.  But as someone else had said, that would have made everything feel like a variation on 'Iron Will'.  So instead, we have one power that grants +4 damage, another that grants damage equal to your strength bonus, another that grants +1d8 damage, and another that grants +4d10 damage on a critical hit. The real irony for me is that supposedly much of the design was supposed to reduce dice rolling, and yet because of the need to create certain perceptions at high levels we have people throwing 5-15 dice on every attack.</blockquote>

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