three 20s is an instant kill (overpowered?)

[RitikMemknock]

Here is a homebrew rule I made up during a gaming session that stuck.

If you roll three 20 in a roll you instantly kill whatever you are fighting. that is to say in Pathfinder, and you crit with a 20, you confirm with a 20 then you have a magic chance of instantly killing your opponent.

I have playing for 10 years with the rule and it happens every 7-10 sessions.

but recently a new player and former dm, mentioned that is was overpowered. what are your thoughts?

[Altair_the_Vexed]

I find criticals in vanilla d20 3e+ series systems are hard to plan for - depending on the weapon they deal massively more damage than usual. This can lead to unexpected results - your encounter that was supposed to be overwhelming can be defeated by a high rolling critical. I've blogged on this topic about 5 years ago. (http://running-the-game.blogspot.com/2013/05/taming-chaos-probability-and-heroes.html) In my own games, I've been using a system of granting free combat manoeuvres to anyone who rolls a critical threat, instead of multiplying the damage - you hit the target so well that you've knocked them back, tripped them, disarmed them or whatever as well as the damage.

Your houserule of three 20s has a very low chance of happening - if my maths is right, it's 1 in 6000 - but in a typical PF game we roll a lot of attacks: a 1 in 6000 chance is going to happen a few times in a campaign. You said yourself it happens at about 10% of your sessions.

Now, how are you going to feel if a climactic plot-significant encounter is finished in the first round by three 20s? Imagine Darth Vader was cut down by Luke fluking his first attack at Bespin.

I think that maybe there ought to be some sort of limit on the level of target that can be affected by instant death - maybe up to +5 levels or something?

Or instead, you could rule that each time you get a critical threat on your confirmation roll, your damage multiplier goes up +1, and you get to roll again: a x2 critical becomes x3, a x3 critical becomes x4, and so on - plus the chance to increase it again each time.
That way Luke is very unlikely to instant kill Vader by a flukey hit, but he can deal him some significant damage.

So to answer your question - yes, I think it's overpowered, but then again, I think that of critical hits in general.

[aimlessPolymath]

It isn't precisely overpowered- it's a semi-symmetric effect which you can try to increase the odds of with lots of attacks (TWF on the part of the players, zerg rushes on the part of the DM). My concern is that it's a) extremely swingy, and b) over the long term, a significant source of character death that can't be avoided. Getting my character killed by pure RNG is not fun, even if I'm not particularly attached to him.

[Rynjin]

The question to ask with any houserule: what of value does this add to the game?

Before we answer the "overpowered" question, I'd need an answer to that more important one because I'm coming up blank.

[Jormengand]

Your houserule of three 20s has a very low chance of happening - if my maths is right, it's 1 in 6000 - but in a typical PF game we roll a lot of attacks: a 1 in 6000 chance is going to happen a few times in a campaign. You said yourself it happens at about 10% of your sessions.

1 in 8000 - 20*20*20=8000.



More to the point, it is overpowered, but not for the PCs.

Think of it like this: team monster, as a whole, rolls more attacks against any single member of team PC than team PC does against any single member of team monster, so any individual PC is more likely to be instagibbed by this rule than, say, the big bad. It's vastly more likely that you're going to lose the party paladin with this rule, but in return kill some random goblin or other with an attack that would have been critical and probably kill the goblin anyway.

Essentially, this rule means that random mooks will eventually kill your PCs by sheer fluke, which is probably the least fun thing ever.

[nikkoli]

I use this rule at my table, and it applies to PC and NPC and monsters the same. In a campaign I've had running for ~2.5 years,with weekly sessions, PC's have done it maybe 10 and monsters have done it once. We have also extended this to critical fumbles on yourself, 3 1's and you're out. But that's only happened once in this campaign.
On not killing super crazy things: I add the Divine Rank of dieties to the # of consecutive 20s you need to instantly kill them. So tiamat @ div rank 15(?) Would be 1 in ~3.27x10^19 chance to just get smashed.

[Lalliman]

"Overpowered" is the go-to word that people use when they don't like a mechanic and can't pinpoint why. The discomfort they feel towards it is probably because it's swingy and non-interactive. You can do everything wrong and still kill an opponent that you shouldn't have stood a chance against by virtue of rolling three 20s. And worse, you can do everything right but have your beloved character get killed anyways because a goblin rolled three 20s. For that simple reason, I would not be inclined to play in a game that uses this rule.

If you want to keep something similar that isn't completely random, I would suggest just increasing the damage on super-criticals. If you roll a 20 on your attack roll, you can make a confirmation roll to deal double damage. If you roll a 20 on your confirmation roll, you can make another confirmation roll to deal quadruple damage instead. I would cap it there, but you can also keep doing this ad infinitum. The result will be similar to the instant-death rule in many cases, except it will actually matter who you are and who you're fighting. A level 1 character isn't going to kill an ancient dragon, and a random goblin isn't going to kill a 20th level character, as it should be.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

1 in 8000 - 20*20*20=8000.



More to the point, it is overpowered, but not for the PCs.

Think of it like this: team monster, as a whole, rolls more attacks against any single member of team PC than team PC does against any single member of team monster, so any individual PC is more likely to be instagibbed by this rule than, say, the big bad. It's vastly more likely that you're going to lose the party paladin with this rule, but in return kill some random goblin or other with an attack that would have been critical and probably kill the goblin anyway.

Essentially, this rule means that random mooks will eventually kill your PCs by sheer fluke, which is probably the least fun thing ever.
D'oh - of course! Sunday morning elementary maths fail. Still, I got the right order of magnitude, which was the important part.

The chance of a PC being insta-killed by a pleb mook is easily overcome by not being symmetrical - ruling that only PCs get to insta-kill, or something like that. Even then, I wouldn't like to use such a rule in my game.

[AtlasSniperman]

Isn't that a rule option in the 3.5 book "unearthed arcana"?
Don't have access to the book right now but I'm sure I've seen it.

[MrNobody]

In my gaming group we also had this houserule, known under the name of "the Gygax" (an event so hard to happen that if it really happened it meant that the creator of the game must have wanted that creature/player dead).

Also, in my experience it was more a "rule of cool" than a real homebrew: when someone confirmed a critical rolling a 20 in a moment when an insta kill would have been cool, the dm would ask for a third roll.

[Solaris]

1 in 8000 - 20*20*20=8000.



More to the point, it is overpowered, but not for the PCs.

Think of it like this: team monster, as a whole, rolls more attacks against any single member of team PC than team PC does against any single member of team monster, so any individual PC is more likely to be instagibbed by this rule than, say, the big bad. It's vastly more likely that you're going to lose the party paladin with this rule, but in return kill some random goblin or other with an attack that would have been critical and probably kill the goblin anyway.

Essentially, this rule means that random mooks will eventually kill your PCs by sheer fluke, which is probably the least fun thing ever.

^ Pretty much precisely what I was going to say.
I dislike this rule. It comes up rarely enough that it's unlikely to have any meaningful impact when you want it to, but the PCs are subject to enough attack rolls that you either need to have them not be subject to the same rules as monsters (which is... really without precedent in D&D, and contrary to a central design theme of 3.X) or be prepared to lose a character to some unlucky rolls in the lamest way possible. Neither of those is particularly good for D&D's base assumptions.

[AtlasSniperman]

found it, this is a harder/rarer version of a variant rule in the 3.5 dmg on page 28 :P
I know it doesnt add anything to the conversation, but I figured you'd be interested to know that it was an officially stated variant rule that long ago.

[AvatarVecna]

The odds of rolling 3 20s in a row is 1/8000. To give an idea of what that looks like, a lvl 20 dual-wielding thrown weapons while permanently hasted is maybe looking at 9 attacks per round. That guy would have to full attack every round for nearly an hour and a half. Basically, you have to expect you'll get it once every maybe 8000 attacks or so on average, so the more attacks you make, the more often you can expect to see it happen...but unless you're cheesing hard it's still going to happen so rarely that the first time it happens for anybody in a standard game starting at lvl 1, you'll probably have at least reached level 10 and half-forgotten you even made this rule. Of course, this is a problem on the other side of the screen as well: the instant death triple-crit doesn't care how powerful or how weak you are, it's purely a matter of throwing enough dice at the wall that three of them stick at the same time...but that's not as much of a problem for the DM as it is for the PCs because of a couple big differences in how the game is played from that side:

1) NPCs Dying Is A Requirement, Not A Risk

The longer you DM, the more time you have to come to grips with the reality of DMing: your NPCs are going to die. Doesn't matter if you randomly generated encounters or painstakingly custom-built the encounter, 99 times out of 100 the PCs are going to murder them. That's just how it goes. That means that any kind of crit rule is inevitably going to be weighted in favor of the NPCs unless the PCs are optimizing for crits by an order of magnitude more than the NPCs. Sure, okay, under this rule there's a 1/8000 chance your NPC is gonna die because of random bull****. But if your NPC is fighting PCs, there's approximately a 99% chance they were going to die of random bull**** anyway (and the other 1% is bosses you'll save via fiat), so making that a 99.0125% chance of dying to random bull**** is no skin off their nose. But not only do PCs rarely die to random bull****, they rarely die period unless you're running a more meat-grinder kinda game anyway (in which case, such a small chance of auto-death probably won't ever be noticed for the same reasons the monsters don't care).

2) Party Size Is Capped, Enemy Party Size Is Not

"So what, big deal" I can hear people saying about the previous point. "That sounds pretty even to me, if every fight with a creature around my CR has us trading 1/8000 chances on every blow, it sounds like we're taking equal risks", and while that's true if your DM tends to run medium-to-hard fights with creatures close to your CR...that's not what the game is designed with in regards to what high-level encounters look like. 3.5 and PF are both balanced around a very particular playstyle that breaks down with the introduction of high-level tactics and magic. This style can be best explained by comparing it to another style: in "ES5: Skyrim", the enemies in the game get tougher with regards to your personal level, rather than actions they take in the game. That means that encounters are balanced against you; you can save your lvl 10 progress before entering a lvl 10 dungeon and murdering everybody, then reload your save, use cheats to make yourself lvl 100 or whatever, and walk in...and find yourself 2 in-game seconds later, in the same dungeon, with lvl 100 enemies. The world is balanced around you, to give you fun fights...but that's not super-realistic, most people just don't level at the same rate PCs do.

So what style was I talking about then? I was talking about a style of play where single target damage spells suck for a reason, and AoE blasts that are only effective against creatures no more than half your level. I was talking about a style of play where medium BAB isn't a death sentence for accuracy because by the time your accuracy is lagging behind full BAB, the enemy AC is lagging level-appropriate enemies too. I was talking about a style of play where taking Favored Enemy (Goblin) at lvl 1 is a viable long-term option. To use images, the problem with expanding crits like this...

https://source.superherostuff.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/han-and-greedo-1068x561.jpghttps://i.stack.imgur.com/rlREk.jpghttps://i.stack.imgur.com/vtfuy.jpghttps://www.sideshowtoy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/hs10.jpg
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/narutoprofile/images/c/c7/Shadow_Clone_Arrow.gif

The odds of any one of those stormtroopers or archers hitting you at all if you're high level is pretty close to 5%...because they got a crit. But when 20 of them do that at once, now you're gonna get hit at least once on average. 100 dudes shooting at you, there's a pretty small chance any of them is gonna get even a double crit...but give them a few rounds, and they'll have thrown enough dice at the wall. That arrow storm? One of those arrows, though you don't yet know for sure, might very well be the one in a million shot that bypasses all your defenses.

[Eldan]

[QUOTE=Altair_the_Vexed;23139404]I find criticals in vanilla d20 3e+ series systems are hard to plan for - depending on the weapon they deal massively more damage than usual. This can lead to unexpected results - your encounter that was supposed to be overwhelming can be defeated by a high rolling critical. I've blogged on this topic about 5 years ago. (http://running-the-game.blogspot.com/2013/05/taming-chaos-probability-and-heroes.html) In my own games, I've been using a system of granting free combat manoeuvres to anyone who rolls a critical threat, instead of multiplying the damage - you hit the target so well that you've knocked them back, tripped them, disarmed them or whatever as well as the damage.
/QUOTE]

That is a lovelyhouse rule. I'll have to steal that one. Though I may have to think about how to handle that with magic that requires attack rolls.

[Durzan]

I've done something similar to this houserule before just for rule of cool and fun. Here are the main points:

Critical Hits auto-confirm regardless of what happens.
If a player Crits, they roll again. Should that second role also crit, then it counts as a Double Critical and the damage multiplier increases by 1 step. Again, the Double Crit is auto-confirmed.
The player rolls a third time on a double crit, and if THAT roll crits, then it becomes a Triple Crit which maxs out all the base weapon damage rolls for that attack.


It allows my groups to avoid the disappointment of missing a crit threat but still keeping tension and fun.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

I find criticals in vanilla d20 3e+ series systems are hard to plan for - depending on the weapon they deal massively more damage than usual. This can lead to unexpected results - your encounter that was supposed to be overwhelming can be defeated by a high rolling critical. I've blogged on this topic about 5 years ago. (http://running-the-game.blogspot.com/2013/05/taming-chaos-probability-and-heroes.html) In my own games, I've been using a system of granting free combat manoeuvres to anyone who rolls a critical threat, instead of multiplying the damage - you hit the target so well that you've knocked them back, tripped them, disarmed them or whatever as well as the damage.


That is a lovelyhouse rule. I'll have to steal that one. Though I may have to think about how to handle that with magic that requires attack rolls.

Thanks!
For spells, we just quickly discuss what sounds reasonable for a combat manoeuvre for that spell, and let it happen. "Your spell was so awesome that it telekinetically knocked him off his feet as well as enervating him." Or whatever.