Critical hits in DnD

[josephbt]

I hate them. I hate that you have to get lucky and then get lucky again. I hate that you can't optimise crits, except with one dumb feat and one lame feat.
And i particularly hate the fact that some monster can't be crited although everything points otherwise. Zombies and vampires, i'm looking at you. I know i can crit you, i've seen people do it on the television. You've got heads and hearts, so why can't i hit them?

[Catharz]

1169547731[/unixtime]] Zombies and vampires, i'm looking at you. I know i can crit you, i've seen people do it on the television. You've got heads and hearts, so why can't i hit them?

D&D tries to have a more realistic & logically consistant system of rules than other games. Almost every rule like this dealing with undead reflects the fact that undead are incorporeal negative plane-channeling/corrupted spirits, sometimes animating animal remains.

Skip Williams has clarified this by stating that, while incorporeal undead have the power to remain on the material plane by 'force of will' alone, corporeal undead are bound by the bodies they animate. Destroy the body, and you destroy the spirit's link.

So, cutting off a zombie's head or running it though the heart isn't enough to send it packing. You actually have to take it apart until there is so little left that the spirit can't hold on any longer. How else could you animate heartless of headless corpses?

So, ya, D&D doesn't always fit with movie mythology, but at last usually makes a lot more sense. If you were to have a voudou zombi (basically a permenantly charmed & feebleminded person), they would be suceptible to critical hits.

[Crissa]

Yeah, but hacking apart a body still has the points where you smash the arm, the head, a leg, etc. D&D uses hitpoints, so crits don't take off my head or heart or stop me until you've hacked me to pieces...

...So why do these particular creatures get treated differently? If they're merely more durable because you have to hack them to pieces - make them have DR or regeneration or something. 'no crits' seems entirely too common an ability in D&D.

And why are there no feats/class features, skill uses/synergies to allows crits on mechanical, crystalline, etc creatures?

-Crissa

[Endovior]

I've seen various classes/feats that do this (not WotC, IIRC), but they suck. Really, don't bother. There are magic items that do this, too; get one of those, instead. That way you don't waste feats/levels.

[Essence]

Wonderous Item of Grave Strike. 2000 gp according to item-creation rules. You're welcome.

[Username17]

I hate that you have to get lucky and then get lucky again.

I don't. This is actually a marvel of game balance and really good design that is in total extremely impressive.

Here's how it works: if you hit on N numbers on your d20, and you threaten on a 20, then you threaten 1/Nth of your hits, and confirm a threat N/20ths of those threats. N cancels out of that equation and you then critical 1/20th of your hits. If you instead threaten on a 19-20, you threaten 2/Nths of the time and critical 10% of your hits.

That's beautiful. It means that a x3 weapon (which adds 2x damage on one hit out of 20) is balanced against a 19-20 weapon (which adds 1x damage one 2 hits out of 20) over the long run. That's friggin awesome.

--

That being said: vampires have special rules for what happens if you stake them - which you can't ever do because they have DR that isn't bypassed by stakes and immunity to critical hits. That's retarded.

The game hands out crit immunity like candy, and it's counter immersive and totally dumb. Even Oozes shouldn't be crit immune in many cases, and plants, constructs, and undead definitely shouldn't be.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1169660341[/unixtime]]
The game hands out crit immunity like candy, and it's counter immersive and totally dumb. Even Oozes shouldn't be crit immune in many cases, and plants, constructs, and undead definitely shouldn't be.

I would have actually prefered something like "critical resistance" for plants, constructs, undead, that lowers the crit multiplier of a weapon by 1. In some cases, like rapiers and most swords, they wouldn't be able to land crits on undead. An axe however would still be able to chop them up. And that's generally what you want for zombies and such. Axes are good against them while shortswords and scimitars generally aren't. So you'd bust out the heavy weapons against them.

The only things that should be truly critical immune are incorporeals, elementals and probably oozes.

And as far as immunities go, they really are handed out like candy. Not just crit immunity, but immunity to mind-affecting abilities, immunity to poisons, disease, elemental attacks, etc.

It's kind of sad because at high level, creatures and PCs are immune to virtually everything.

[Crissa]

Hey, what about this old thread?

-Crissa