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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ShockMeSane" data-source="post: 4199169" data-attributes="member: 64606">Well, a Scimitar, with no feats that improve crit range would roll to confirm criticals 3x (18-20) as often as the 4E stuff we have seen. A 3.x Fighter with 18 strength would on average hit a kobold, what... 50-55% of the time at level 1? Which is about comparable to 4E from my playtest. So, in the time you got one 100% crit in 4E, you would have gotten 1.5 2x crits in 3.x. It gets somewhat complicated here because the Fighter in 4E has a 1-handed weapon that does 1d10. But in any case, if we keep even to the 3.x Scimitar vs the 4E one-handed Warhammer, you get 1d6(3.5)+4=7.5x2=15 damage for a single crit on average (10 minimum, 20 max), whereas the Warhammer will always crit for 15. Of course, the real rub here is that in 3.x, monsters at level 1 generally have between 4 and 12 hitpoints, making a crit a guarenteed kill (at these low levels), whereas given the information we have about 4E, crits obviously don't auto-kill at any level. And while that philosophy is fine and certainly not a deal-breaker to me, I think the statistics show pretty plainly that you are getting significantly more mileage out of your crits at level 1 in 3.x. That is where the sense of disconnect is coming from. I've ran 3 3E campaigns from level 1 to the high teens and one all the way to 20 over the last 5 or so years, and me and my players are just used to any crit (albeit confirmed) to either be a kill or a very close thing in those formative levels. Now, critting with Daily Powers probably is crazy in 4E, but that didn't happen in my game... sadly a majority of them missed!This isn't even a criticism, more of an observation about how a paradigm shift (hitpoints at low levels) rolls over into other subsystems with results that jarred a few of us on first experience.</blockquote>

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