The latest Design & Development article from Wizards tells us most of what we need to know about a subject near and dear to our hearts: Critical Hits. In fourth edition, a natural 20 equals a critical hit, and a critical hit does maximum damage. This fixes the syndrome that I always hated:
Roll a 20! (get excited) Roll for confirmation, didn’t hit (disappointment)
AND
Roll a 20! (get excited) Roll for confirmation, hit (get excited), roll damage… 3 (disappointment)
Plus if the image with the article is any indication, all monsters can take critical hits. Of course, some of us have been doing that already…
Yep, pretty much same here. We took the crit roll as an auto success. It just slowed down the game having to make two rolls for each crit; that was just like rolling two hits, then rolling two lots of damage – in other words, no bonus at all.
It’s good to have it becoming official, and I’ll be interested to see what the rules changes are for weapons with higher crit ranges, rapiers in particular. Rapiers are our favourite weapons š
We’ve always done the old nat 20=auto crit rule at my table…and we made a few exceptions to the crit immunity rules (like the time a player rolled 27 nat 20s against constructs in the same dungeon)…
The new rule may be a bit saddening for players who only do a handful of damage dice, i.e. halfling daggers = š but that seems like a good solution for unlucky rolls…I wonder how long it’ll take for players to begin doing massive damage with their weapons…
My table has also employed a crit/fail %table which adds extra little details to those extremes to spice up the game…there is some risk in employing the table (1st lv. kobolds can kill 20th lv. barbarians with lucky hits), but it feels great to kill a purple wyrm with a single charge…
Rev- have you seen Paizo’s Critical Hit deck? Sounds like it might be right up your alley.
I prefer keeping those kinds of things abstract in D&D, but I definitely see the appeal of limb removal!
That’s an interesting variant on the idea, but I’ll be sticking with the crit table that the group has tweaked to our enjoyment…not that I wouldn’t look into purchasing an actual Deck of Many Things given the opportunity, but I probably won’t buy the cows from which I receive free Ice Cold Milk…