4E: Crits.

[Draco_Argentum]

maximized dice keep you from needing to roll a bunch of dice over and over -- you can just write your crit damage on your character sheet for quick reference.
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Magic weapons (and implements for magical attacks) add extra damage on crits. So your +1 frost warhammer deals an extra 1d6 damage on a critical hit (so your crit's now up to 14+1d6 damage in the example above).

I'll spare you the facepalm ascii art but its really appropriate here.

[Cynic]

1199593680[/unixtime]]

maximized dice keep you from needing to roll a bunch of dice over and over -- you can just write your crit damage on your character sheet for quick reference.
.
.
.

Magic weapons (and implements for magical attacks) add extra damage on crits. So your +1 frost warhammer deals an extra 1d6 damage on a critical hit (so your crit's now up to 14+1d6 damage in the example above).

I'll spare you the facepalm ascii art but its really appropriate here.

I was just about to comment on the flip-flop issue.

Usually when someone reneges/says the exact opposite of what they had said originally, it takes weaseling/sliding to get to the other side. But Wizards has a innate knack of just canceling out that middle man and taking sentence A and turning it upside and inside-out right there in sentence B.

~_~

Also, are they trying to get the damage-curve to resemble a bell curve somehow? If so it's retarded.

Even in 3.0/3.5 -- only certain weapons's damage output (based on crit-range) came close to resembling a bell curve or some sort of semi-standard bell curve.

Scimitar/kukri (without keen/i.crit) would give you a straight-line damage output until 17-20 and then it would shoot to double the number and plateau again.

The longsword did this for 19-20. The scythe did this on 20 but that's quad-damage. SO there is no sense of bell curve in any of these.

Now take the 3.0 extreme example of keen/i.crit scimitar on weapon master and you have some insane levels of damage output starting at 10-20.

But again, nothing even barely resembling a large data range.

Technically, we have something similar being done in 4.0, just thinking the argument through now.

If you take the direpick of d8 with +4 str damage. I'll leave out all the other situational modifiers for now and say average damage on all attacks except the crit.

So for 1-19 -- you have the straight line graph damage of 4.5+4 or 8.5 damage. But for 20 you have straight 12 damage. yes, that's not double damage but 1.5 (1.41 rounded) damage.

BUt the curve s has only been slightly lessened.

If you add the high crit property to the pick now for another d6 damage.(again average), then you get a total of 12+3.5 or 15.5. So that's again not 2x damage but barely less than the original.

So the graph hasn't gone down. I'm going to assume a high crit weapon (bad to assume, I suppose) is probably going to become fairly common in 4e. So you have in essence a weapon that does about 1.9x (give or take) damage on a crit 5% of the time.

Currently that's 2x damage done on a confirmation roll on that 5% (i can't begin to think about how to calculate the secondary confirmation crit percentage, so if someone can get me that number, I'd appreciate it).

So, am I just missing something or is 4e crit more powerful rather than less.

[Neeek]

1199585514[/unixtime]]

1199585167[/unixtime]]Are there actually cases where making the monster less accurate will raise its average damage?

No. Making the monster less accurate raises its damage per hit, but not its damage per phase. So getting into situations where attacking more times at less accuracy is generally worth it.

So, basically, this makes the TWFing, flurrying Monk better.

[SunTzuWarmaster]

I don't want a damn bell curve, no one does. Bell curves suck when hitting monsters for damage. Bell curves mean that when you do damage, you do medium damage. You actually want a curve that is is heavy on the right side, indicating that when you crit, awesome happens.

That being said, crit-monsters were just too easy to make. Use a Scimitar/Rapier/large range weapon, double the range, multiply the crit. The same goes for charge builds, simply add the "you do 5 extra damage on a charge" to the Leap Attack "triple all charge damages". Mostly, that is retarded. The fact that you have to rely on these mathematical tricks/inconsistencies to contribute sucked.

Something like "Add twice your BAB in damage on a natural 20" would stop it from sucking and make a Full-BAB class crit worth something more than a wizard crit (which is currently crazy-good because wizards crit with whatever the best critting weapon is).

"You do max damage on a Nat. 20" could be good or it could suck. If you are doing 8d6 in damage (Tome Knight at level 6, one attack, THF with a greatsword), you are almost never going to hit the 48 damage cap. However, if you are fighting with a 1d10 weapon and doing 1d10+38 damage at the same level, you will be hitting max damage 10% of the time and critting won't cause you to care. For that matter, rolling that d10 won't cause you to care.

They are right about 1 thing though, reducing randomness is good the the players. However, in order to reduce the randomness, they made criticals MORE RANDOM. ARGH.

At any rate, it depends on how damage is rolled/calculated as to whether that rule will matter (is my Sneak Attack maxed? What about my flaming weapon? What about the bonus damage that I get from Rhino Armor on a charge? etc.).

[Cynic]

1199645404[/unixtime]]I don't want a damn bell curve, no one does. Bell curves suck when hitting monsters for damage. Bell curves mean that when you do damage, you do medium damage. You actually want a curve that is is heavy on the right side, indicating that when you crit, awesome happens.

That being said, crit-monsters were just too easy to make. Use a Scimitar/Rapier/large range weapon, double the range, multiply the crit. The same goes for charge builds, simply add the "you do 5 extra damage on a charge" to the Leap Attack "triple all charge damages". Mostly, that is retarded. The fact that you have to rely on these mathematical tricks/inconsistencies to contribute sucked.

They are right about 1 thing though, reducing randomness is good the the players. However, in order to reduce the randomness, they made criticals MORE RANDOM. ARGH.

At any rate, it depends on how damage is rolled/calculated as to whether that rule will matter (is my Sneak Attack maxed? What about my flaming weapon? What about the bonus damage that I get from Rhino Armor on a charge? etc.).

Just to clarify, I didn't say that I want it as a bell curve, I was just wondering if they were leaning towards that direction (without actually trying to get it to match that model.)

I personally don't think reducing randomness is good. How is it good for the players?

We don't know too much about the new system (scratch that, I don't know too much about the new system) to wonder if Sneak attack or rhino armor gore damage is doubled or whatever.

But the crit system as posited for 4e is retarded. It's really not that much better than 3/3.5 crit system at the lower end. but as you start going higher and higher, it just gets worse.

[Confused_Jackal_Mage]

1199526238[/unixtime]]

How is it imbalanced mathematically?

In 3rd edition, a 20 threat crits on 5% of attacks. A 19-20 threat crits on 10% of attacks, and an 18-20 threat crits on 15% of attacks. So a pick or scimitar does an extra 15% average damage, and improved critical doubles that to +30%. Shockingly elegant.

Well, how much crit damage do you inflict in 4e?

[die size/2 - .5] / (Static bonuses + [die size/2 + .5]) / [20 - Opponent's AC + Attack Bonus]

Seriously, that's the actual formula. As you do more damage and hit more often the crit bonus to damage actually falls. It makes the most statistical difference to those whose attacks are the worst.

But of course, I can't actually evaluate that number without all the inputs, because it's both complicated and circumstantially variable.

-Username17

This is a lie, Frank. There's really no kinder way to put it. You are stating something outright and massively incorrect about 3e crits, and then massively complexifying the 4e crit far beyond how it actually plays out in battle.

3e crits are not a simple 5% per point of threat range. Confirmations make that vary quite a bit, based on the difference between your attack bonus and the opponent's AC. As well, if you have any additional damage dice, they aren't multiplied, reducing the percentage damage boost of the crit even further.

So, the "shockingly elegant" 3e system actually involves an additional die roll against a different number than the threat range and requires you to separate your damage into multipliable and non-multipliable sections.

Your 4e crit damage formula is not only massively more complicated than it has to be, it's actually expressing an entirely different thing. It shows you the average damage boost that a crit gives you averaged over all possible attack rolls. This is clearly not what you expressed in the 3e crit formula, even ignoring all the complexity that you left out of that. You're left with only the first two terms which is just "extra damage over normal damage". This is *substantially* simpler than the actual 3e formula for figuring extra average damage.

In play, even that much complexity won't exist. We already separate our weapon dice from all our other damage. When a crit occurs, you just use a static, easy-to-figure-or-write-down value instead of your weapon die. You might be adding a few extra dice that you have written down in your crit-damage section. That is simpler than the 3e crit where, after you've rolled and checked a second time to make sure that you really did crit, you have to roll your weapon damage again, double one segment of your additional damage, but leave the other segment of your additional damage alone and just add it.

Finally, your crit bonus to damage never falls. The percentage increase does, but that's a different thing. And the exact same thing occurs to a lesser extent with 3e crits (they contribute less average damage as you hit more often).

If you're going to make mathematical arguments, please do so honestly and use your terms consistently. Otherwise you're just obfuscating the point to be a jerk.

Only if you hit on better than a 15+ - if you need a 17 or higher to land a blow, you crit more now. So crits happen more when you are being swarmed by goblins. Also the new system does more bonus damage relatively for weak attacks like goblins than it does for player characters of decent level.

So uh... they made the new crit rules be something where it periodically hurts a lot to melee large numbers of weak enemies.

Let's actually look at numbers, shall we?

4e crits happen a flat 5% of the time. 3e crits happen a variable number based on what numbers you can hit on. They drop below 5% when you threaten on an 18+ but need a 15+ to hit, threaten on a 19+ but need an 11+ to hit, or anytime when you threaten only on a 20.

However, 4e crit damage is substantially smaller. For a creature with *no* bonus damage, just a plain weapon dice, 4e crits will deal 1 point less than the average 3e crit. The 3e crit also has the possibility of jumping substantially higher, up to twice the 4e crit damage. This is most significant when dealing with small weapons that deal 1d6 or 1d4 damage (coincidentally, exactly the damage dealt by normal goblins). A goblin critting with his thrown javeling will deal 25% MORE damage on average with a 3e crit than a 4e crit! What's more, the worst case scenario for a 3e crit is 2 less damage than the 4e, but the best case is 4 more damage.

If the creature has some bonus damage, then 4e crits fall even further behind. For every point of bonus damage, the difference between crits widens by a point. It's impossible to know how they've changed weapons that currently have a wide threat range, but an orcish javelin (1d6+3) can still be compared easily enough. A 4e crit with it will deal 9 damage. The average 3e crit will be 13. Worst case 3e damage is 7 (2 below 4e crit), but best is 18 (9 above 4e crit)!

Care to continue arguing that mobs are automatically deadlier with 4e crits? When the mobs are severely outclassed they'll be critting a bit more often but for substantially less damage, and the damage itself is much flatter with less chance of a lucky high-damage shot. The fact that they're so outclassed means the PCs will have an easier time killing them; this becomes even more true with the implied PC access to more attack options, which will certainly include some area attacks for every class.


Overall, Frank, I'm really quite surprised at you. I read the Tomes ages ago and have been lurking these boards for some time, so I feel like I know your general preferences, and you *hate* multipliers. They kick numbers well out of normal ranges and encourage massive specialization. It really surprises me that you're so down on 4e crits then, since they're dumping the multiplier for a much flatter damage bonus. At higher levels crits are less exciting, sure, but that's where the extra dice come in. They add bonus damage to crits in an additive fashion, not a multiplicative, which is inherently more balanced.

I personally don't think reducing randomness is good. How is it good for the players?

In general, lower randomness is good for PCs. This is because the PCs are in it for the long haul, while monsters only need to show up for a few rounds. If the PCs get lucky and deal a heavy-damage crit to a monster, they've taken one enemy out a few rounds earlier than normal. Woop-de-doo. If the monsters do the same to the PCs, you've got a PK on your hands, which can easily slide into a TPK once it starts (especially if it happens early in the battle). Then you've got to throw money at the death until it goes away, lowering your wealth, and in the meantime the dead player is out of the game for a bit.

You can compare this with gambling. If you have to maintain a bankroll for a while and gamble hundreds of times, you want the least volatile games you can get. You're shooting for maximum play-time, and the less likely it is that you lose a large chunk of money at once the better. The monsters, though, are like gamblers who've just been given a chunk of change and are told they get one shot at using it. They want to head straight for the roulette table and put everything on red. They're likely to lose, sure, but when one of them wins they win BIG. Since that's their only shot at fame and fortune, this is their best strategy.


To address the second point, I'm almost certain that sneak attack damage and such won't be maximized. 3e crits had the unfortunate side-effect of being really good for damage-bonus builds but really bad for damage-dice builds. If 4e maximized *all* dice, it would just be creating the opposite problem. I highly suspect that they'll just maximize the weapon die and leave the rest of damage alone so that it's equally good for everyone.

[Username17]

3e crits are not a simple 5% per point of threat range. Confirmations make that vary quite a bit, based on the difference between your attack bonus and the opponent's AC.

No they don't. While the confirmation chance varies by your chance to hit, so does your chance to hit. So at a threat range of 20, 5% of your hits are criticals. At a threat range of 19-20, 10% of your hits are criticals. At a threat of 18-20, 15% of your hits are criticals.

Period. End of fucking story, because your chance to hit is in the numerator and the denominator of that equation and it fucking cancels.

Don't accuse people of telling lies before you reduce a fucking fraction.

-Username17

[Confused_Jackal_Mage]

That would be relevant had you said "hits" in the original post. The quote's right up there - you are saying "attacks".

You meant hits, and I'll accept that. It does ignore a slight wrinkle, though - when you threaten numbers that won't hit, your average damage is lower. Still, if you're talking about elegance, we can't just ignore all the non-elegant details.

[ArtD]

1199645404[/unixtime]]I don't want a damn bell curve, no one does. Bell curves suck when hitting monsters for damage.

When roges got sneak attack dice that did bell curve damage in 3E, no one got upset. It's seriously not a big deal. Anytime you roll lots of dice at once and add up all the totals the possible outcomes will lie along a bell-shaped curve.

[RandomCasualty]

1199645404[/unixtime]]
That being said, crit-monsters were just too easy to make. Use a Scimitar/Rapier/large range weapon, double the range, multiply the crit. The same goes for charge builds, simply add the "you do 5 extra damage on a charge" to the Leap Attack "triple all charge damages". Mostly, that is retarded. The fact that you have to rely on these mathematical tricks/inconsistencies to contribute sucked.

Most of the problems with criticals came in what you multiplied as opposed to the fact that you multiplied stuff. I've always though for instance that power attack damage shouldn't multiply, neither should stuff like smites. In fact, most of the power attack/charge bullshit just got out of hand to begin with. It all had to do with them deciding if you were going to either get multiplied damage on a charge or a full attack. When you allowed both, chaos ensued.

[Confused_Jackal_Mage]

After thinking through it a bit, I should have realized that you were talking about average damage on a successful hit. The last term in the 4e crit percent-damage formula threw me off, I think - it resembles what you'd be using if you were figuring average damage per attack.

I apologize for calling you a liar on that point. I am, in fact, an idiot. The rest of my post still stands, as well as my observation that even when figuring damage per successful hit, 3e crits are more complex than you wrote due to the degenerate cases.

[Username17]

The rest of my post still stands, as well as my observation that even when figuring damage per successful hit, 3e crits are more complex than you wrote due to the degenerate cases.

I'm unconvinced of that, as the degenerate cases exist for the 4e stuff as well. Pretty much the same degenerate cases as it happens, with High Criticals weapons getting in some amount of extra dice readded into the end.

Basically it comes in three steps:

1. They determined that criticals were too complicated, and involved too much rolling of weird dice. So they removed the confirmation roll and all the weird critical shenanigans about what is and is not doubled. This simplifies things, as advertised.
   
2. But then they noticed the same thing we noticed before the announcement was official: that makes horde monsters who only hit you on an 18+ critical on a full third of their hits. Heack, in any situation where the PCs are up against 5+ skeletons a piece, they are taking a "critical hit" every turn. This was extremely fatal. So they made the critical hits themselves not matter. Causing that problem to go away as advertised: player characters were no longer exploding left and right to a steady rain of criticals.
   
3. But then they noticed that criticals, having been made to not matter, didn't matter. Seriously, players got criticals or not both for them and against them and didn't notice or care. The critical hits came at a steady rate and weren't different from the non-critical hits and it made people say "meh." So they put in new mechanics to cause some weapons to get all explody on criticals anyway, which brought the excitement back to critical hits.
   
4. And now I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop where they notice that they have just made it no longer simple and also put us in the same situation that prompted part 2 - namely that 20 skeletons with War Picks get a new explody critical hit every round and player characters will explode in a predictable and shocking fashion. The solution to part 3 actually reverses all the progress made in parts 1 and 2 while still putting in all the cumulative changes. And if they catch the problem in time, their fix is going to be with another patch rule rather than doing something sensable like starting over.

-Username17

[SunTzuWarmaster]

Here is the quick low-down: Why randomness is bad for players

Let's say that everyone is rolling d20s, which is a fairly justified assumption in this system, and that everyone criticals on a 20, which is how it is in 1e, 2e, and 4e.

Players are in this for the long haul (as stated above) and need to win every encounter. This is made slightly easier for them by the fact that they can roll a 'nat 20' and explode a monster (as Frank has mentioned). However, let us compare the monsters that a level 3 player is fighting:
Wymling Dragon - 3 attacks
Centaur - 3 attacks
Cockatrice - 1 attack + petrify
Derro - 1 attack + poison
Dire Ape - 3 attacks
Dire Wolf - 1 attack + trip

This means that the monsters are rolling more d20s that the players (using 1e, 2e, 4e encounters that are balanced against a player character). If they are encountering monsters below their level, they get to encounter more of them and the problem persists. The problem eventually gets to the "Horde of Skeletons" problem that Frank mentions where every 'hit' that a skeleton lends is a 'critical blow' to a player.

To give another example, I once played in a game system where conflict resolution was done by drawing cards from a stack (which had 4-5 decks of cards in it). Because of the large number of decks, you raised the chance of getting 'nothing' (a 4 and a 9), but when you got 'something' it was often amazingly good (3 kings, 5 aces, a flush, etc.). Because of this encounter resolution, enemies and players would 'miss' until they got something good, which would then kill.

Decreasing the randomness of the situation allows the players to use the 'player-character edge' (special abilities, drawing cards, adding an extra strength bonus, etc.) to their advantage. When it comes right down to it, player character are better than monsters/NPCs: they are stronger, faster, smarter, wiser, better abilities and more spells. If you increase the randomness of a situation, it is more likely to result in a player death because the PC-abilities will not have as large of an impact (unless you ramp up the PC abilities) and the monster abilities will have a greater ability to hit the 'special circumstance' that results in opponent explosion.

Taking the 'reduced randomness is good for the players' example to the extreme, we can look at a situation in which their is no randomness in damage. The PCs do slightly more damage than monsters and kill slightly more monsters than monsters kill them. Taking the example to the other extreme, we can look at a situation in which damage is completely random (1-100), and the PCs have a bonus to their damage that is small (+5), although the PCs will do more damage on average per hit than monsters do, the monsters will be killing more PCs because they have more attacks (and there are more of them).

In short, PCs win through strength, planning, tactics, battlefield control, wise decisions, better abilities and essentially being in control of the risks, and monsters win because of superior numbers, critical hits, and 'holy crap, I hit with 2 claws and bite and a Rake'. When the risks are hard to minimize (or cannot be, in the case of criticals), the PCs will perform poorer against the monsters.

edit: I kept going down the monster filter to make sure that the monsters either had 1 attack and a special or multiple attacks when I came to the Grick, which has 4 tentacles, and a bite, which is more attacks than most parties at level 3.

[RandomCasualty]

Well you'd think the solution would just be not to give the explosive critical damage to the monsters. Given that monsters and NPCs are supposedly being made differently in 4E (using totally different rules than PCs), that kind of thing might be possible.

I mean, it's actually not too bad to have horde monsters always roll max damage, as it tends to make hordes a bit more dangerous, and PCs may have DR at that point, which nullifies a good fraction of the hits of weenie monsters. So since only 1 in 10 skeletons ever hit, those hits mean a bit more. And that's okay when you think about it. PCs have a lot of hp anyway so taking away a few hits isn't bad. I mean, if anything packs of monsters need an upgrade. In 3E, numbers counted for basically shit.

It also lets you critical hit anything and not really care mechanically, since a crit just means you rolled well on damage.

Still, I just get the feeling that criticals are going to suck, even with the +1d6 explosive damage abilities. You're just going to look at the crit and not even really care. The days of getting excited over criticals are over.

[Confused_Jackal_Mage]

I'm unconvinced of that, as the degenerate cases exist for the 4e stuff as well. Pretty much the same degenerate cases as it happens, with High Criticals weapons getting in some amount of extra dice readded into the end.

You must be talking about a different degenerate case. I'm talking about the situation where a rapier wielder only hits on a 19+. Rather than the crit adding 15% to average damage on a successful hit, it only adds 10%.

This situation won't occur for 3e weapons that only crit on 20, and so by definition won't occur for 4e crits either (unless/until we find that there *are* further complications that let you crit on lower numbers).

# And now I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop where they notice that they have just made it no longer simple and also put us in the same situation that prompted part 2 - namely that 20 skeletons with War Picks get a new explody critical hit every round and player characters will explode in a predictable and shocking fashion. The solution to part 3 actually reverses all the progress made in parts 1 and 2 while still putting in all the cumulative changes. And if they catch the problem in time, their fix is going to be with another patch rule rather than doing something sensable like starting over.

By the time you're giving skeletons war picks, though, we're already doing something different. Compare that to giving a 3e skeleton a war pick - we move from 1d4 20/x2 damage to 1d6 20/x4. Higher base damage, and double the crit damage.

...craps. Time to leave work now and go eat. I'll finish this tonight.

[SunTzuWarmaster]

It is an inherent conundrum, you want the monsters to explode when the players roll a 20, and you want the DM to cry about how the monster crits don't mean anything when he rolls a 20. The critical confirmation was initially about reducing the randomness (a monster that rolls a 20 only means that he hits, not that the player explodes), but fell off the chart when they made sure that you only fought one monster of your CR (Dire Bear) that had more attacks than you did at a higher attack bonus than you had.

They are attempting to say the following: "crits don't really mean anything unless you have a crit weapon, which we will give to the players but not the monsters".

The problem, as pointed out by Frank is: "how long will it be before a smart wizard equips his zombie army with crit weapons that he conjurers out of the air?"

and is related deeper to the problem of: "this is a PC toy not a DM toy, the PCs don't have access to Gape of the Serpent because that is a DM toy... oh wait".

You may still be able to get excited about crits, however. If you roll lots of dice (see: Sneak Attack, Fireball, and others) and the crit will maximize all of your damage dice, you can still be excited. Yes, I heard that spells have a d20 roll associated with them now as well.

[RandomCasualty]

1199739911[/unixtime]]
and is related deeper to the problem of: "this is a PC toy not a DM toy, the PCs don't have access to Gape of the Serpent because that is a DM toy... oh wait".

Well this actually is an inherent paradigm of 4E, given how they're doing the monster rules. Monsters don't look anything like PCs anymore. They don't have feats, they don't really have anything similar, so DM toys are going to actually remain DM toys in 4E, unless you get some kind of shapechanging thing that lets you gain abilities from monsters.

I heard rumors that NPCs might be the same way.

You may still be able to get excited about crits, however. If you roll lots of dice (see: Sneak Attack, Fireball, and others) and the crit will maximize all of your damage dice, you can still be excited. Yes, I heard that spells have a d20 roll associated with them now as well.

Well I also heard that they were dumping the 1d6/level damage for fireball. So who knows what we're looking at now.

I hope they don't go the direction of taking meaningful criticals away from melee types and handing them to spellcasters and rogues. That would suck bad. As if spellcasters didn't already have enough perks. And rogues already deal enough damage as it is. They don't need to get more so.

[Neeek]

1199739911[/unixtime]]

and is related deeper to the problem of: "this is a PC toy not a DM toy, the PCs don't have access to Gape of the Serpent because that is a DM toy... oh wait".

I'm actually okay with the rule being this:

"PCs, and only PCs, crit on a 20. All damage is doubled, all dice explode on max value. NPCs of any stripe do not crit ever."

My rule, which I certainly would use if I was DMing a game, solves all the major problems involved in critting, in an admittedly arbitrary way.

Players getting crits is fine: They are fun and flat don't matter at all. The enemy who got critted was going to die anyway or the campaign was going to end real soon (exceptions for recurring villains, but you just use the next guy as your recurring villain instead, no biggie).

NPCs critting is never super interesting, and has potentially disastrous results. For a D&D style RPG to work, the players have to win nearly every battle. Further, an individual PC is generally not considered an expendable resource. Throwing what is effectively a random death effect at the players actively thwarts the ability of the game to achieve it's primary function: Having fun while telling sword-and-sorcery stories.

[Confused_Jackal_Mage]

Okay. Skellies with picks. Scary. If they're the super-mob brigade and only hitting on 20s, then 4e's basically just given them a 3d6 weapon (6+1d8=10.5) and screw crits. The 3e skellies are still doing more damage that 5% of successful hits that are crits, but the rest of the time they're stuck with 1d6. That does suck.

This is, of course, the worst possible comparison. We're comparing weapon with no multipliable bonus damage when the difference in crit rates is highest. Just allowing the skellies to hit on 19s lowers their damage per hit significantly (though of course it raises their damage per attack).

The primary advantage that 3e crits have - multipliable bonus damage - really doesn't come into play in this scenario. 4e crits with a pick straight up deal an extra 7 damage on average, which takes a long time for 3e crits to catch up with (47 average damage, to be exact). Letting the skellies hit on a 19 makes this a lot better, because the damage crits add to your average is halved to only 3.5, while 3e critting is still doing the exact same.

So, we have two questions. One - do we care? Given the assumed emphasis on *less* bonus pushing, by the time mobs are forced to roll 20s just to hit something they're probably pretty insignificant. Is getting a lot of crits something that actually matters? I mean, 6+1d8 is nice and all, but considering they're only hitting on one number, that averages barely over half a point of damage per dude per turn. Since we're dealing with mobs and thus lots of attacks, the average actually *means* something; that number will accurately describe the attrition rate in battle. Being swarmed by 8 skeletons, then, means you're only averaging 4 damage per turn. Certainly larger than the 3e skeletons will be bringing at this point, but is it enough to give a fuck about?

Second, does it matter? How many rounds of swarming are we talking about? What's our per-round mook-kill rate? I'm pretty sure everyone's getting area-effect maneuvers. Just pulling WWA from 3e will guarantee 8 dead skeletons every round, if they're weak enough to exist in this example. How many, total, are we looking at? I'm thinking 20 at max. That means that you can't even totally swarm everyone, and they're still all dead in 2-3 rounds. As well, is AC our only determiner? We don't know how much of a role DR will play in 4e. The skeletons can barely reach around a DR 5 in 4e, but anything higher and they're pretty much impotent. The occasional lucky 3e crit, on the other hand, pretty much ignores DR, especially when average damage starts rising.

So, IF we care, AND it matters, then auto-critting when you can only hit on 20 is a bad idea. Everything else is pretty much fine - we automatically don't care about mobs that hit on 19, because they're close enough to 3e to write off. Wanna take bets on whether or not there'll be a rule that you don't crit if you are hitting because of the 20? At the very least, I expect it to be a common houserule. I'm still pretty sure I won't care, though.

"PCs, and only PCs, crit on a 20. All damage is doubled, all dice explode on max value. NPCs of any stripe do not crit ever."

I've never let NPCs crit. It doesn't do anything good, as you say. I'd rather have nice dependable little damage sources that do what I tell them and don't act up just because the dice are feeling saucy that day.

[JonSetanta]

Shit. Just take Neeek's example and house rule it if you don't like it.
True, it is disgusting that monsters > players in 3e or 4e when you count the number of crits rolling in, and thousands of gamers will be suckers for poorly planned math, but there is always errata from WOTC; like regular sunshine, you can count on the fact that it will keep coming again and again.

[Voss]

Mearls on yet another one of his design failures.

From a post on rpgnet, here.
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?p=8 ... r][br]Some fellow asked a question and got a response. unfortunately, it demonstrates the giant holes in what passed for logic in Mearls-land

Originally Posted by Professor Phobos View Post
Apparently 4e is being designed with a "combat role" and a "non combat role" for every class in mind. Or at least that's what EnWorld told me when I asked about it in a thread.

Yup, that's how the classes came together. The idea is to make sure everyone can contribute in a meaningful way in a fight.

Hopefully, the end result is that you can build whatever sort of PC you want to roleplay, making choices with an eye toward character concept and personality, without losing out on your character's basic ability to fight. We aimed to remove the "an interesting PC or an effective PC" choices in the game.

That doesn't mean that your character's non-combat stuff is diminished. If anything, it means we have more room for idiosyncratic or personality-driven options, since you can take those without hurting your character's baseline, expected combat ability.

As an example, you can play a fighter but spend all your feats to take and improve social skills, but in a fight you are still an effective defender. You aren't saddled with a lower than expected AC, attack bonus, or whatever because you built a fighter who was also a diplomat.

The fighter who goes all out on combat feats and stuff will (obviously) be more effective in melee than you, but the distance between you is measured in, say, meters instead of kilometers.

Meanwhile, the wizard, cleric, and rogue are just as happy with Lord Harran, dashing envoy of the Iron Throne, as they would be with Killmore Headbuster, swordmaster. Both those guys are effective, frontline fighters. Harran's player didn't have to sacrifice his "fightery-ness" to become the best Diplomacy user in the party.

So yeah, instead of also making sure that every class is also useful *outside* of combat, you can sacrifice some of your combat ability (even if all the feats suck, and it isn't a lot of effectiveness) to do something the class isn't designed to do. Hurrah.

Fuck. What would have been so difficult about just putting some non-combat abilities into the fighter class (and everyone else) in the first place. weapon & armor ID-ing, intimidation, knowledge of something or whatever.

I don't care if the difference in effectiveness is in a millimeters. You're still less effective than you would be, just because WotC denied you access to real skills in the first place.

[RandomCasualty]

1199759140[/unixtime]]
So yeah, instead of also making sure that every class is also useful *outside* of combat, you can sacrifice some of your combat ability (even if all the feats suck, and it isn't a lot of effectiveness) to do something the class isn't designed to do. Hurrah.

Fuck. What would have been so difficult about just putting some non-combat abilities into the fighter class (and everyone else) in the first place. weapon & armor ID-ing, intimidation, knowledge of something or whatever.

I don't care if the difference in effectiveness is in a millimeters. You're still less effective than you would be, just because WotC denied you access to real skills in the first place.

That quote from Mearls made me cry.

Why is it that wizards and rogues can get non-combat stuff for free, but a fighter has to bend over backwards and screw himself to pick up a few useful non-combat skills.

But now apparently you're not supposed to feel so bad because all feats suck and using your feats on non-combat ability won't cause you to miss out on much. Well... at least until the splatbooks come out that actually make useful feats.

[JonSetanta]

Everyone should get a seperate, identical track of feat slots and small number of skill points each level only usable on non-combat stuff.
This would include Craft, Profession, Diplomacy (which should be usable ONLY when not in combat), Gather Information, Magic Item Creation, sex feats, and such.

I'll pull a number out of my ass, like somewhere around... 1 feat every odd level and 4 SP (do not add INT) every level for non-combat.

[SunTzuWarmaster]

The problem is that we do care about the skeletons. Your Dwarven Defender has an AC of 50 and the skeletons hit him just as often as the hit the leather-armor dex fighter, the raging barbarian and the wizard. That's crappy. If you are using it to represent fatigue, then it sucks because the wizard/cleric is taking comparably more fatigue than the barbarian because they have a smaller hit die.

I would like to see the rule of:
"If you roll a 20, it is a critical if a roll of a 20 would normally hit the opponent's AC"
This would at least bring it in to the sanity realm, and re-institute the PCs crit monsters, big monsters can crit PCs, small monsters get shredded rule of thumb.

[Username17]

I just don't even understand why we're bringing in a system where having a better AC causes the worse hits to happen less often and the better hits to happen the same amount. If anything, we should just set an arbitrary point on the d20 and if you hit by more than that your hit is awesome. And then having a better AC would remove the best hits first and the least hits last.

You can even split it up for multiple levels of crits. Say, if you hit by more than 5 you do max damage, and if you hit by more than 10 you do double damage. And better crit weapons can reduce the thresholds which make things go into extra damage.

It won't be as simple to demonstrate the math as the 3rd edition system, but at least it would behave as advertised across all levels of play.

-Username17