Scrying The 4e Crystal Ball - Critical Hits
Since I'm catching up on lost time and this news is still very fresh, I decided to post a late version of Scrying the 4e Crystal Ball rather than just waiting until next week. Dungeons and Dragons Insider just released a design and development article on critical hits. The good news... that dastardly confirmation roll is gone, the bad... so is double damage.
Apparently random doubling of damage is considered to punish players more than monsters. As someone who has written adventures as a freelancer, I'm not necessarily surprised by this move. It's long been a tenant of writing for D&D (at least for Dungeon) that you should avoid, or at least use judiciously, items that have higher crit thresholds... the x3 and x4 multipliers. The random effect of crits with these sorts of modifiers tends to be character death - and to many PCs it is a meaningless character death. Really, who wants to be taken out at 2nd level by a goblin wielding a heavy pick that just got a really lucky roll. Since many of the "death by bad luck" effects have been taken out, it's not surprising to see the doubling of a crit go either.
So what's replacing it? Maximum damage - a d10 attack that crits will do 10 points of damage automatically. There are some additional elements to this (some weapons give additional crit dice on top of the max damage, for instance) and monsters don't get all the same crit effects as PCs. These changes sound interesting and unlike a lot of 4e news don't immediately make me cringe. We'll see what else is coming up the pike in 4e news on Thursday at our regularly scheduled post.
[via Dungeons & Dragons Insider]
Faerie Dragon
Posted to Roleplaying Games on 5 January 2008
· Comments (4)
Other stuff like this: 4e, critical hits, d&d, rpgs
This sounds like a good change to me. Anything that can reduce the likelyhood of a "stupid" or pointless death is good in my book. We've recently implemented a new system for rolling hit points in our campaign that has eliminated the possibility of getting 1 hit point when you level up which is just plain not fun.
The system involves rolling a die that is smaller than the "official one" and adding some points so that you can get up to the maximum that the old die would have given you, but you will always get at least half that number.
So for example if you had a d6 as your hit die you would instead roll a d4 and add 2 points to whatever you roll. so your minimum hit points are much higher and the average HP's are a bit higher, but the maximums remains the same.
(for things like d8's it gets slightly more complicated with a d5 being involved, but you just roll a d10 and half the results).
This of course is also used for calculating HP's for encounters so the creatures and such get more powerful as well, but it's just no fun to level up and then roll a 1 (this happened to me several times in our current campaign, and it made encounters far less fun than they normally would be because I had to be extra careful about not dying.
Now that we've retroactively recalculated our hit points I'm ready to get in there and really deal some damage like rogues should!
The more I read about 4th edition the more excited I am to play it.
Dr.Oct: In my group, d4 = 3 HP plus con bonus, d6 = 5 HP plus con bonus, d8 = 7 HP plus con bonus, d10 = 9 HP plus con bonus, d12 = 11 HP plus con bonus. Of course, I'm a bit of a Santa Claus. We also do 32 point buy, and combined feat/ability progression, with a feat/ability at every even level.
I'm ashamed.
@Dennis
I had forgotten, but we do actually add constitution bonus' to our scores as well, I just forgot about it as my current character doesn't actually have a constitution bonus so it's never really been an issue.