Alternate critical confirmation bonus

[jaynus006]

Hey all, For as long as I've played we have never used crit confirmation rolls. Nat 20 auto hits and crits, if your weapon crits on lower such as a 19 if the attack hits you just roll critical damage.

I personally enjoy this variant, less dice rolling and makes crits a little more common for pcs an baddies alike.

I run into a problem with those rare abilities that affect the confirmation roll, specifically the war blade in this case. Adding int mod to confirmation roll. Does anyone play with similar rules and if so how do you handle abilities like this?

I had originally thought to add int bonus to damage on crit rolls, any other ideas

[Vaz]

A Critical Confirmation roll is there to prevent someone popping a Keen Scimitar OA Kensai to dealing a Critical on every other attack.

A Warblade with +4 to Crit Confirmation is simply getting a benefit that's "nice", but for the most part, something you wouldn't actively go for. If you're a Crit Fisher, possibly, you might increase Warblade to get to that level, but if you cannot fit the Level requirement in, it would be the +4 to Crit Confirmation you'd drop.

A Natural 20 auto-confirmation sounds like a decent streamline rule, but this could swing it in the favour of people who aren't building for Combat (i.e a Poor BAB Full Caster) just taking a Scythe, or whatever on the off chance that they roll a Natural 20. An Intelligence bonus would just make a Wizard all the more likely to do so.

It is one of those abilities like getting Leadership for free as a bonus feat. Leadership is broken, but it doesn't enhance your character unless you cheese out the Cohort, and spend a ton of time Bookkeeping. Some people enjoy that, but it can slow a game down.

A DM who says "no" to Leadership means that you'd automatically trade it out for something better; i.e if you got Bonus Leadership Feat, or any other Feat, for example, you could take just the free feat, getting something for nothing.

The same here, the bonus is only of a Slight benefit, and if you traded +4 to Confirm Critical in response for a +Int to Critical Damage (consider it with a Scythe again on a Warblade - they have high Intelligence, so would just slap out with doing immense critical damage.

Using Dragon Magazine, you can get Initiate of the Fae Mysteries or something; that's +Int to Health in place of Constitution; while this isn't always accepted, you now get less MAD, and means you can ramp up one or the other and get exponential benefit.

+Int to Crit Damage on Nat 20? Assuming 18 Int all the way through on Int (putting level up attribute increase to Str/Dex whatever), that's a free +80 Health, and every Nat 20, they get +16 Damage. That, in exchange for +4 to Critical Confirmation?

Nice, in a broken way. The Min-Maxers would love you.

[BowStreetRunner]

The intent of the original ability was to increase the frequency of critical hits. Now with automatic confirmation of crits already, you simply may not want to give them any additional advantage. However, since you stated that a threat on a 19 or lower doesn't auto-hit, you could just apply the bonus to threats rolled on less than a nat 20. So if I am a warblade with a +3 INT bonus and I roll a 19 on my attack with a longsword, then I get +3 to my attack roll, increasing the likelihood that it actually hits (and therfore crits).