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View Full Version : D&D 5e/Next Trying to Make an Interesting Critical Hit System for My 5e Campaign. Ideas?



flabbergast
2017-10-05, 02:38 PM
I'm about to DM a new campaign soon and both myself and my players have expressed interest in spicing up critical hits to be more dangerous and impactful. I've wanted to do this by making critical hits deal more damage as well as by applying the possibility of some lingering effects to them. I've taken a look at a few other critical hit tables online but a lot of them felt either over-complicated by a billion possible effects or they just had weird arbitrary effects that didn't really make sense. Anyway, here's an outline of the current system I've worked out.

CRITICAL HIT TYPES

Normal Critical Hit: Roll the damage di(c)e of your attack twice.

Dangerous Crit: Add the maximum value of the crit damage di(c)e to your initial roll.
Examples:
A critical hit with a weapon attack that deals 1d8 damage would now deal 1d8 + 8 instead of 2d8 as normal.
A critical hit with a spell that deals 2d6 damage would now deal 2d6 + 12 instead of 4d6 as normal.
This increases average critical hit damage by up to 40%.


Deadly Crit: Deal double the maximum damage of the attack instead of rolling for damage.
Examples:
A critical hit with a weapon attack that deals 1d8 damage would now deal 16 damage instead of 2d8 as normal.
A critical hit with a spell that deals 2d6 damage would now deal 24 damage instead of 4d6 as normal.
This increases average critical hit damage by nearly 100%.


With these different types, I was either going to ask my players which type they want to have and limit which type the enemies could have based on that, OR I was going to consider having them roll a second time after critting to see how hard they crit. Also, I totally realize "Deadly Crits" are kind of insano-mode so I will likely not use them unless my players actually seem really interested in hoping RNGsus is on their side. In that case, I totally warned them.

CRITICAL EFFECTS

I don't have an actual roll table for these effects yet because I'm not sure what kind of odds each effect should have yet. I more so want to know what you guys think about the effects themselves first. My goal was to create a varied-but-concise list of effects that would all be roughly equal in terms of how powerful they are.

None: The damage you deal is grave, but only surface level. The target suffers no lingering injury.

Crippled: The target's leg buckles beneath your strike. Until the target receives healing, their movement speed is halved and they roll disadvantage on DEX checks.

Disarmed: The target drops whatever weapon or item they were holding out of sheer pain. Using a bonus action, you may snatch or kick away the dropped item with a DC10 DEX check.

Winded: Your hefty blow knocks the wind out of the target, causing them to suffer 1 level of exhaustion. As well, the target's movement speed is halved unless it uses an action to pass a DC10 CON check to catch their breath.

Concussed: You strike hard against the target's head, causing them to be stunned until the end of their next turn. Until the target receives healing, they also have disadvantage on INT, WIS and CHA checks.

Bleeding: Your attack rips deep into the target's flesh, causing a terrible bleeding wound. The target suffers 1d4 bleeding damage per round until they receive healing.

Floored: Your powerful strike throws the target off-balance then knocks them prone. While the target is off-balance, you may also choose to shove them up to 10 ft in any direction.

ENEMY CRITICAL HITS

In a (perhaps feeble) effort to balance this system, I decided that every single rando goblin probably shouldn't be able to benefit from it since there's only so many players up against every enemy in the world. So here's a loosely tiered list of enemies that could be tagged with different types of crits.

Minor Foes: These weaker enemies cannot make critical hits.

Normal Foes: These common enemies roll the effects of normal critical hits.

Dangerous Foes: These hardened enemies roll the effects of dangerous critical hits as well as critical effects.

Deadly Foes: These truly powerful enemies roll the effects of deadly critical hits as well as critical effects.

...
Well that's it. Honestly though, I want any suggestions you guys have that might make this system better but I'm not concerned about it being perfectly balanced. If I were concerned about my campaign being perfectly balanced, I wouldn't even bother rolling for damage. I'd just have every hit do average damage. Actually, I'd probably go play Warhammer or something.
P.S. After I figure this one out, I want to make a *magic* critical effect table for spell crits as well. Looking forward to destroying my game balance with that too lol.

Rerem115
2017-10-05, 02:45 PM
In order to really recommend whether or not that's a good idea, a little context would be good; my last DM to use a custom crit table also allowed flanking. We had a Champion fighter, and his sheer number of crits broke the campaign when it came to combat.

flabbergast
2017-10-05, 02:50 PM
In order to really recommend whether or not that's a good idea, a little context would be good; my last DM to use a custom crit table also allowed flanking. We had a Champion fighter, and his sheer number of crits broke the campaign when it came to combat.

Oh right, I will not be using regular flanking rules. Instead, flanking will be a +2 to hit in my game. Also, part of the reason I left the actual percentages for the effect table ambiguous was because of crit bonus abilities like the champion's stuff. I think I need to really think about what those odds should be because of that. Maybe I should allow just the damage and not allow critical effects on 19s?

Rerem115
2017-10-05, 02:58 PM
A good workaround would be to only let 20s trigger the special events; other crits just roll as normal. That way, the Champion and Hold Person can still feel useful, but lets you have fun with fancy crits at the same time.

flabbergast
2017-10-05, 03:00 PM
Yeah that's definitely a good work around for that issue. Otherwise though, are there any potential issues with the effects? Or suggestions on which ones should be most/least likely?

Rerem115
2017-10-05, 07:03 PM
Hmmm. Just spitballing here, but the confirmation system could look something like this:

1-10: Normal crit + minor effect
11-15: Dangerous crit + moderate effect
16-19: Deadly crit + moderate effect
20: Deadly crit + major effect

You could make it more or less complicated, depending on what sort of effects you are running, but this way, rolling a crit is always at least as good as a "standard" crit; some of the crit tables I've seen actually wind up doing less damage because only the upper tiers add damage, leaving the lower tiers to effects only.

Andrezitos
2017-10-23, 03:05 PM
One option is to use in-game Exhaustion table to provide the effects of critical hits. You can add that every time somebody gets hit by a critical, it takes a level of exhaustion. Getting hit would be much more risk than before, specially if you don't have a buffer in your team. You could give the target a chance of saving against the debuff, a limitation based on the constitution modifier to how many levels the target can get, etc. The point is to provide a more drastic effect for crits beyond the mere HP loss. I totally approves this as well as others options that give more dept for this traditional mechanic.

Sariel Vailo
2017-10-24, 12:35 AM
Id like to see a rewrite of how this works after all is said and done. If you need help for spell efdects just pm me we will come up with something.

Composer99
2017-10-24, 08:01 PM
I'm kind of brain-fried right now, so I don't know that I have anything sensible to say about specific critical effects. But I think I can speak to general ideas of the system (so to speak... er, write).

I'll echo the suggestion that only a critical hit scored on a roll of 20 on the die triggers the additional effects.


If you're going to have a second "critical" roll, I'd suggest one of the following options, depending on how many tiers of rider effect you want:

Simple (one tier each of enhanced damage and rider effects)
1-10: standard critical hit (roll weapon damage twice)
11-17: either enhanced damage or an rider effect
18-20: both enhanced damage and an rider effect

Enhanced damage can be either of the following, as is your wont:
- Roll weapon damage three times
- The base weapon damage is maximised, and roll weapon damage a second time (that is, your dangerous crit effect)

Not so Simple (two tiers of enhanced damage and one tier of rider effects)
1-6: standard critical hit
7-12: either enhanced damage or an rider effect
13-18: either superior damage, or enhanced damage and an rider effect
19-20: superior damage and an rider effect

Superior damage could be either of the following:
- Roll weapon damage four times
- Your deadly crit effect

Complex (two tiers each of damage and rider effects)
1-5: standard critical hit
6-10: either enhanced damage or a lesser rider effect
11-15: one of superior damage, greater rider effect, or combined enhanced damage and lesser rider effect
16-18: either superior damage and lesser rider effect, or enhanced damage and greater rider effect
19-20: superior damage and a greater rider effect

If you want to avoid giving low-grade monsters access to super-powerful criticals, you could either go with a trait you can add to monsters, or have monster critical hit access scale by either CR or by proficiency bonus. (If you went the latter route, you could do the same for adventurers.) Using the second approach, low-grade monsters just don't get enhanced criticals unless you specifically want them to (by adding a trait), instead of having to assign a tag to each monster you use in an adventure.

Edit to Add: I think this idea is cool, incidentally.

Mith
2017-10-25, 01:46 PM
One idea that I read from an old Dragon article that I found online gets rid of the 1 and 20 and suggests this instead:

-Roll 1d20 and add relevant attack modifiers to see what AC you hit. If you just hit the AC, normal damage.
- If you surpass the AC, roll a percentile. If you roll within the range set by the difference between your attack roll and the AC, you critically hit. If not, you do normal damage.
- If you miss, roll percentile. If you roll within the range set by the difference between the AC and your attack roll, you fumble.

This means that a higher level PC will be more likely to critically hit and less likely to fumble, especially with better equipment (+X weapons).

For a champion's Crit boosting class feature, I would say that they gain an automatic crit range of 5% on a hit that increases when then gain crit boosting features to 15% plus the amount they beat the AC. This buffer is subtracted from the fumble roll, meaning that the Champion fighter is the least likely to fumble, as they have to fail by over 15%. With an attack mod of +6 prof. + 5 Str = +11 they have a minimum roll of 12 which means that they have a 1% chance of fumbling against an AC of 28.

For your concern about lower level monsters, I think this would also reduce their chance to critically hit a PC as they do not have the fall back of a flat 5%, and an increased chance to fumble against a high AC target.

When this idea was introduced, Attack matrices were still a thing, so one could roll the attack roll and percentile simutaniously and state "I hit X AC and critically hit Y AC" without needing to know the opponent's AC.

Mith
2017-10-30, 05:52 PM
I know this is a double post, but I thought of an add on to my previous idea, and I don't think the edit function would bring it to attention: if you use the variable crit chance, instead of a second roll to determine effects, use the crit percentage as the scale, something like below (numbers are not fully thought through, just a concept of scaling severity of the criticals):

01 - 05% = Double damage dice
06 - 20% = Double damage dice plus a chosen rider effect
20 - 30% = Maximum damage
30%< = Maximum damage plus rider

This makes the martial classes more or less like this, IMO:

The classes like arcane tricksters, rangers, and eldritch knights have other tricks up their sleeves, and are likely not going to do anything really fancy with their criticals. Battle Masters can do on demand fancy things with attacks with maneuvers.

Paladins are not going to be doing fancy criticals, but they have smites to further boost the damage effects

Barbarians have a lot of crit effects as part of the class, and their higher attack stat at lvl. 20 assuming 24 STR means that they can do some regular rider effects, but are likely not maximizing brutal criticals.

Champions at high levels are more likely to crit, and are often pulling off rider effects if not maximizing damage. Doing both occurs rarely.

I realize that implementing this system needs to modify the crit range expansion, and thinking about it, I am not entirely sure how I would like to do so.