3E/4E Critical Hit Fail

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sun May 10, 2009 8:09 pm

Okay, it's apparent at this juncture that critical hits are just way too friggin' swingy to be balanced.

In 3E, the system was that if you got in a critical hit, you did double damage--or more depending if you had certain equipment/expansion options. This was a very simple system and did make critical hits quite exciting. However, it had one major problem with it that you really can't ignore. It did too much freaking damage. Seriously, when a low-level a dwarven barbarian gets a critical hit from an axe-wielding orc raider, there was an extremely good chance that they'll go from healthy to dead in one hit. And this was a character primed for durability!

So the system was changed in 4E to make critical hits less likely to rock your motherfucking face off. And I sympathsize with this goal. However:

Maximum damage and +Xd6 damage for a critical hit was not the way to do this. Consider a 16th level ranger with their +3 bastard sword of whatever who scores a critical hit on their 3W power, Shot on the Run. A critical hit from this baby seriously does about an extra 25 damage, which isn't even the amount of damage they would've scored from landing a second hit on their Twin Strike power. And as people have pointed out repeatedly CdG does a piss-poor job of killing people now. At paragon level, it becomes almost impossible to assassinate someone unless you lock their 'unconscious' tag somehow.

Is that a problem? It depends. I definitely think that ubercrits in 3E were a problem but as far as 4E goes I don't think it's necessarily a problem in 4E depending on what the design goals were. ... to a point.

And what's the point? The problem nowadays is that the game designers are stuck in a mentality where the 'powerful' effects need to be triggered off of a critical hit. Here's a quick list of what you can get:

- Encounter and daily powers back.
- Extra attacks
- An attack bonus for future attacks (or a defense penalty to the enemy)
- Action points

And you know what? You can combine these things if you feel like it. For example, by level 21 a Half-Orc Tempest Fighter/Swordmaster/Punisher of the Gods can have a Bloodiron Double-Sword and the Ferocious Critical, Reckless Attacker and Two-Weapon Opening feats. This means that when they use Rain of Blows and score a critical hit, they get a +4 bonus to attack and damage rolls until the end of their next turn, they get three more melee basic attacks (and can chain critical hits off of two of them), they get their Rain of Blows power back, and they get another action point--which isn't restricted to the one AP per-encounter limitation.

And it's only going to get worse. Critical hits in 4E are an impressive piece of work; they're not only fundamentally unexciting for 80% of characters but they're also ridiculously overpowered for others. The game designers need to get out of this mentality that awesome things can only happen when you crit.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Sun May 10, 2009 8:12 pm

In 3E, crits were fine. The fact that a warrior can kill another warrior in one shot with a crit isn't a big deal, given that wizards had instant kill effects that took someone out on a mediocre roll.

4E crits had the problem of being too necessary at high level. You pretty much needed to crit quite a bit at paragon and epic to kill anything reliably.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sun May 10, 2009 8:16 pm

In 3E, crits were fine. The fact that a warrior can kill another warrior in one shot with a crit isn't a big deal, given that wizards had instant kill effects that took someone out on a mediocre roll.

It was a recurring problem at low levels, since low-level PCs are subject to more attack rolls than any monster. Until you reached a 'safety zone' of hit points usually around level 5 or so you were playing a dangerous game where one good roll on a monster's behalf caused you to have to rip up your character sheet.

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Sun May 10, 2009 8:31 pm

Critical hits as a concept are fucked and unworkable. Any situation where Iterative Probability is a factor means consistent, reliable results are the ONLY way to go. In other words, PCs get nothing out of them, even if they're the ones dealing them because if they can't do consistent and reliable damage they're not going to kill things in time, thus said things kill them. So you either get your level appropriate damage without them, in which case they aren't doing anything for you, or you're only getting it with them which means the moment you stop rolling 15 or better you die. And that doesn't take long.

Monsters on the other hand love them for pretty much the same reasons but in reverse perspective. After all, they only need to win once.

So basically, crits are a fuck you from game designer to player. And if the DM intentionally makes a crit focused character, and it isn't high level where you're expected to just be immune to that he's throwing in a fuck you as well.

Caedrus · Post by **Caedrus** » Sun May 10, 2009 9:37 pm

Roy wrote:Critical hits as a concept are fucked and unworkable.

I call bullshit, Roy. Seeing as, conceptually, critical hits are really "a hit that hurts more," and that can be represented by things ranging from precision damage bonuses to, you know *rolling variable damage,* it's rather silly to label the entire concept as unworkable.

Even the idea that they affects PCs more than NPCs is not necessarily true, because you could totally have a system like, say, Spycraft 2.0 where you need to use a resource that is for the most part monopolized by PCs to perform a critical hit.

Just because a system handles it badly doesn't mean it's impossible to implement well.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Sun May 10, 2009 9:39 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote: It was a recurring problem at low levels, since low-level PCs are subject to more attack rolls than any monster. Until you reached a 'safety zone' of hit points usually around level 5 or so you were playing a dangerous game where one good roll on a monster's behalf caused you to have to rip up your character sheet.

Well honestly, most of the time you didn't care about monsters attack routines. While it was true that monsters would toss out like 3 attacks per round versus your PC's 1 attack, a monster natural attack had a 20 threat range and probably didn't do all that much damage on a critical to kill a PC. The damn orcs with axes were the most dangerous, or the grim reaper wannabe skeleton that used a scythe.

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Sun May 10, 2009 10:38 pm

Caedrus wrote:
Roy wrote:Critical hits as a concept are fucked and unworkable.
I call bullshit, Roy. Seeing as, conceptually, critical hits are really "a hit that hurts more," and that can be represented by things ranging from precision damage bonuses to, you know *rolling variable damage,* it's rather silly to label the entire concept as unworkable.

Even the idea that they affects PCs more than NPCs is not necessarily true, because you could totally have a system like, say, Spycraft 2.0 where you need to use a resource that is for the most part monopolized by PCs to perform a critical hit.

Just because a system handles it badly doesn't mean it's impossible to implement well.

Except that ya know, it's possible for most of damage to be static. And in 3.5 it is, because you will seriously do something like 2d6+50 or whatever damage. So that isn't nearly the same thing. As for SA dice, funny how most of them get some kinda static damage bonus (Craven) or a reroll (Deadly Precision) now isn't it? Often, both.

And a system where crits aren't random, while interesting also would fall under 'consistent, reliable results'. See above.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Sun May 10, 2009 11:21 pm

Well, cgd obviously shouldn't be a crit unless crits are deadly, and you want crits to just be good, not deadly.

So those are opposite design goals.

-Crissa

SunTzuWarmaster · Post by **SunTzuWarmaster** » Mon May 11, 2009 12:17 am

You could always do what we did in 2e...

Wait for it...

Crit Tables!

No, really, I'm serious. For the most part in 2e, the crit tables represented a status effect. You hit them so hard that they were dazed for the next round, or fell down, or took a penalty on future hits for a while.

Although, when you start adding in 6 attacks in a round and a crit forces a -2 to attacks, this tends to explode pretty quickly. However, you could pretty easily slap a duration and a 1x/round limit on that. Your sample crit could pretty easily be a:

Player chooses, limit 1 per round:
- knock opponent out of position (move 1 square per size modifier, or 1 extra square per size modifier if your effect already induces movement. Provoke AoOs from other players as appropriate.)
- Expose weakness (-PC_level to AC for 1 round)
- trip (monster falls down)
- daze (monster loses move action, cannot full attack)

--
obviously these are not balanced relative to each other, but I'm not a game designer either.

This way something cool happens on every crit, high level characters with more attacks make more crits without them exploding, and low level characters don't die when monsters to it to them (usually).

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Mon May 11, 2009 2:24 am

So. What's a better solution to critical hits (aside from crit tables)? (Personally, I think those are fun, but a lot of people don't want to deal with that. It also probably brings nightmares about Rolemaster.)

Caedrus · Post by **Caedrus** » Mon May 11, 2009 2:37 am

Psychic Robot wrote:So. What's a better solution to critical hits (aside from crit tables)?

Depends entirely on your design goals. What do you *want* critical hits to accomplish in your system?

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Mon May 11, 2009 2:44 am

Jadeclaw gives each weapon a default critical effect. That seems like it could work, so axemen are cleaving, swordsmen are hamstringing, and macemen are... knockdowning.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Mon May 11, 2009 3:13 am

Caedrus wrote:Depends entirely on your design goals. What do you *want* critical hits to accomplish in your system?

This is the problem with critical hits as 3E, 4E, and D&D in general (including every teen age DMs house ruled critical hit, critical fumble tables) deal with it.

They're design goal is both a bit silly and rather poorly realized.

The basic idea behind critical hits is "Wouldn't it be cool if SOMETIMES an attack was really extra special interesting!"

And then it is implemented as something like a 1 in 20 purely random event to achieve and "interesting" is "does double damage" or something. So it ends up unbalancing the system at the extremes of results, causing unpredictable behavior, killing PCs, and ultimately not being all that more "interesting" anyway.

It fails on principle because really it would be nice if attacks were just ALL more interesting anyway. But if you want some to be even more interesting than that I think it would be much better to kick "crit ranges" and "natural 20s" in the ass and do it with combo attacks, charge up attacks and finishing blows.

It would also be nice if the "more interesting" bit might be something other than just double damage.

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Mon May 11, 2009 3:31 am

Yeah, I agree with PL - I'd want crits to be attacks that open up new and unique combat options. Which would actually work well with his combos concept. Say usually you could combo a tiger knee into A B and C, but scoring a crit on the tiger knee enabled you to 'animation cancel' then do somehting else (a fireball?)

ckafrica · Post by **ckafrica** » Mon May 11, 2009 5:12 am

This is just off the top of my head but

what if you got crit points depending on how good a hit you got. So if I roll a 15 and I needed a 12, I get 3 crit points. You then use these crit points to activate extra abilities. So double strike where you strike through one opponent into another requires 6 crit points. If I my current roll gets me 6 crit points I can choose to do it. You might also allow crit points to be saved so that if I don't get many on my attack this round I can save them for next round to hopefully get off a real nasty attack.

The question you want to answer is are they savable, and for how long? Are they only applicable against the opponent I got them from or can I save them throughout the combat? Do the begin to dissipate if you don't act?

TavishArtair · Post by **TavishArtair** » Mon May 11, 2009 5:46 am

I'd like to just state one complaint about critical hits that you have to keep in mind when you're dealing with them. See, 4e has "moves you can do after a critical hit." But the problem is, if they're only things you can do after a critical hit, they aren't worth picking up (especially in exclusion of anything else), because you can't meaningfully branch tactical decisions off a critical hit. Anything that a critical hit provides in terms of maneuvers must be gravy, i.e. I should have it on my character sheet by merit of having a character, not at the cost of some character-building resource, even if I have a ton of that resource (feats), because it's basically never going to be worth it to base even a fraction of my build off something that could come up never, as opposed to All The Time. Preferably, what a critical hit does interacts with what is already going on, rather than being its unique thing.

Mind, that I'm assuming a paradigm akin to 4e or (very early) 3e with respect to critical hit frequency. If you've created one of those late-3e builds which crits on over half the die, well it's not very critical, now is it.

Caedrus · Post by **Caedrus** » Mon May 11, 2009 5:47 am

Some "critical hit" agendas:

1) Precision damage and stuff that just *comes from abilities.* You got a critical hit because you used the "Critical Hit" warblade maneuver or something. A Coup De Grace might just be an ability that can be used as a full action on helpless people that *does massive damage* or outright kills them.

2) Attack roll overflow turns into damage, like in Frank's 1/1 attack/damage tradeoff system. Basically, this is a "critical hit" because the flavor here seems to be "you more accurately strike a more crucial, critical spot, and thus deal more damage."

3) Attack rolls add a sort of tension and exhilaration to the roll of a d20 (or set of d10s, or whatever). The threat of a critical hit providing the chance to turn the odds can lead to player excitement at the table. Thus, there are mechanics like exploding dice, d20 criticals, or variants thereof. In pursuing this, Spycraft just decided to go straight for the players: critical hits require the equivalent of Action Points to activate a threat, so most NPCs just don't get them (and thus there isn't much of an issue of iterative probability arrayed against the PCs). This is changed in the grittier "campaign quality" options they offer that make the game deadlier and you're seriously supposed to throw out character sheets when you get shot at like it was Call of Cthulhu or something. Either route (terribly deadly to PCs or not) is an entirely defensible goal depending on what type of game you want to create. So are routes in-between, where a Crit won't actually *kill* a PC outright on its own, but at least will change the tide of battle and maybe put an offensive side on the defensive. And this just goes back to the entire point of why you have an RNG in the first place: the random chance is exciting for many players.

4) Critical hits add some extra "interesting" extra effect like hamstringing. This is probably one of the worse ones, IMO, because you should have a lot of interesting effects in general, not just reserve them for a natural 20. "Moves you can do after a critical hit" is easily my least favorite mechanic. If I'm going to invest in Critical Strikes abilities, I'd rather have something more like the Assassin's Critical Strikes skills from Guild Wars.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Mon May 11, 2009 6:57 am

cthulhu wrote:Say usually you could combo a tiger knee into A B and C, but scoring a crit on the tiger knee enabled you to 'animation cancel' then do somehting else (a fireball?)

That's not what I meant.

I meant combos should be replacements for critical rolls. So instead of sometimes doing something special because a natural 20 is "special" you instead sometimes do something special because you had to charge up your combo to get the special combo move attack to activate.

Sometimes your attacks should be special. But they should be special in a less random, more interesting and better balanced manner. That means "natural 20" is not an appropriate trigger for specialness, combos that require prior moves or status effects, charge up abilities that require prior time or action investment and finishing moves that only work when your attack kills someone anyway, THOSE are appropriate triggers for "extra specialness" of an individual attack.

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Mon May 11, 2009 7:18 am

Yeah, makes sense - maybe crits can just fill your combo meter faster as it where?

Assuming that we want some specialness just because of the traditional 'its a 20' factor, that preserves the 'specialness' because its likely to lead into a big attack.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Mon May 11, 2009 7:52 am

cthulhu wrote:Yeah, makes sense - maybe crits can just fill your combo meter faster as it where?

Or... not. If moves being more successful is what opens up access to your "extra special" attacks then rolling high already does that and it isn't special. If you are giving out additional charge up by some large margin just for rolling a big round number like 20 then you have basically ALL the same problems as if you gave out extra damage for it.

Assuming that we want some specialness just because of the traditional 'its a 20' factor

I'm not on board with that assumption at all.

It's the biggest number on the dice, isn't that enough for you?

The idea here is a game that is giving you an alternative more controllable means of having an occasional extra special attack moment. Why the hell do you need to ALSO get something because "its a 20!".

Indeed still giving out some shit just because its a 20 is really defeating a large part of the point of moving to a controllable tactical alternative special attack triggering mechanic.

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Mon May 11, 2009 8:52 am

You know, you seem to be approaching this from the standpoint that "swingy-ness is the devil!". But why is that the case? A combat system where you can predict exactly when someone will drop is, for many people, not the desired goal. If the desired goal is that combat should be swingy to a certain extent, then crits accomplish that.

Crits add an unpredictability which makes tactical decisions more interesting. If you're at low health and attacks deal fixed damage, then you either know you can stand another shot, or know you have to retreat. At that point, there is no decision involved. The swingyness which critical hits provide makes this a more complex decision, with multiple strategies possible. And yes, it adds the thrill of danger - at least to a greater extent that fixed damage does.

Paying attention to the RNG is good, keeping things balanced is good, but if the end result is a system that looks like this:
* To hit, roll a d20 - an 11 or more hits.
* All attacks deal 10 damage.
Then most people aren't going to be interested.

Caedrus · Post by **Caedrus** » Mon May 11, 2009 9:36 am

Ice9 wrote:You know, you seem to be approaching this from the standpoint that "swingy-ness is the devil!". But why is that the case? A combat system where you can predict exactly when someone will drop is, for many people, not the desired goal. If the desired goal is that combat should be swingy to a certain extent, then crits accomplish that.

Definitely. It's a perfectly reasonable and defensible design goal.

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Mon May 11, 2009 10:01 am

It was pointed out to me that that the more randomness means that time until the combat being 'over' but you still need to spend time just closing it out.

So there has to be balance between the two.

SunTzuWarmaster · Post by **SunTzuWarmaster** » Mon May 11, 2009 10:13 am

The randomness is good, to an extent. However, you also can't let it kill players.

Everyone appears to be having difficulty grasping PLs idea (self included?), but my interpretation was:
You rolled a 20 - activated a [daily] power on one enemy now.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Mon May 11, 2009 10:16 am

Caedrus:

That's why we have a to-hit roll.

Shadowrun uses nearly-fixed damage (or it SHOULD, fucking Body modifier) and no one thinks that system is boring.

But really, I'm baffled how you could say that it's tactically interesting. How many times have you heard someone say 'oh man, we could retreat but there's a chance I might get a kick-awesome critical! So let's fight to the end!' or 'we got these orcs on the ropes but we'd better run, since they might get a critical!' ... you don't, because critical hits (at our current rate) don't actually change the combat metric all that much because they're too rare to predict or plan for. If you're not something ridiculous like a 3.0E vorpal weaponmaster, if incorporate them into your strategy in more than a perfunctory way then you are actually making poor tactical decisions.

It's like if the DM told you, 'okay, I'm going to roll a d20 every round. If it comes up a 20 while you're in combat, I drop an anvil on your head'--how much do you think that player strategies would change? You might find players being a bit more careful with their hit points (like players do when fighting orcs at low level) but that's it.

Boring.