Talk:Crit Dice (3.5e Variant Rule)

Discussion

Alright, but the likelihood of ever getting more than a double crit never goes much higher than 8%, with 22 crit dice. Even so, you're saying you dislike this rule, but the reasons you give are the goals of the rule. It isn't meant so much to fix balance, but to reduce the chances of a crit and allow for crazy results on a super lucky roll. Alcyius (talk) 12:48, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

I find it interesting, but I probably wouldn't actually use it only because it is a lot of extra rolling. PbP could make use of it though. I was in chat crunching the numbers with Alcyius and I do think the idea is pretty cool. You can see the probabilities here: http://anydice.com/program/2994. So, Alcyius isn't correct with the 8% for 22 dice. It's actually about 20% for a double crit and 8% for a triple crit. Which I still think is fine. If you have a 9-20 crit range normally, you'll crit 55% of the time, but with this system, it is 43% of the time.

One thing to note is that if you value a double crit as twice as good as a normal crit (and similarly for a triple crit, etc.), then the only difference with this system is that there are no crit confirmation rolls. Allow me to explain. Take, for example, the probability distribution for 5d20 (16-20 range):

"Probability distribution for 5 crit dice",0.25,0.48733971724044817,0,5
#,%
0,77.37809375
1,20.36265625
2,2.1434375
3,0.1128125
4,0.00296875
5,0.00003125

If we multiply each percent by the number of crits inflicted, we get:

"Probability distribution for 5 crit dice",0.25,0.48733971724044817,0,5
#,%
0,77.37809375 * 0 = 0
1,20.36265625 * 1 = 20.36265625
2,2.1434375 * 2 = 4.286875
3,0.1128125 * 3 = 0.3384375
4,0.00296875 * 4 = 0.011875
5,0.00003125 * 5 = 0.00015625

Sum them up and you get exactly 25. Which is the same as the crit on 16-20 distribution (25%). So yeah. You can expect the same results. It adds some more randomness to the amount of damage being dealt through crits, but the overall average damage remains the same.

The cool thing about the variant is that it can allow DMs to come up with new feats to interact with the crit system. Rather than just being about range and multiplier, you can have strange stuff like exploding crit dice (if you roll a crit on one of your crit dice, reroll it and keep adding more crits until you fail), reroll missed crit rolls, add special critical effect dice (so maybe a blue die that is rolled in addition to the crit dice will freeze the opponent if it matches).

All in all, I don't think it's a bad variant, just requires quite a lot of dice and adds a bit more random swing to the game. --Aarnott (talk) 14:27, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

More randomness is not necessarily a good thing. In the forum games we played, one of us once coined a houserule that if you rolled 20-20-20, that that's not a critical hit; you killed it. Now I freely admit that you might be able to play a dozen games without this 1 in 8000 chance actually happening. It would be sort of like finding a shiny Pokemon. There's just the nagging probability that that shiny Pokemon happens to be you. Also like I said, I am not a fan of variant rules that make the numbercrunching and dicerolling part of the game drag on intensely. The 'economy of mechanics' I like to call it. Preferably, the framework of a roleplaying game is something of which I don't even want to notice that it's there. Now this variant may just work fine when you're dealing with a party of low-level adventurers tackling their very first dungeon. They only get one attack per round, anyway. Even at a mid to high level it might work, sort of, if it is one of the few houserules and homebrewed articles used in the game and the DM has a severe fetish for dicerolling. But when, say, a Thri-kreen sivatar with Extra Arms and Perfect Multiweapon Fighting wielding 10 keen speed scimitars starts grabbing for his d20, the DM will end up with carpal tunnel syndrome before he's done checking for crits. Not that I would gladly play in games with such unbalanced player characters, but there is no denying it kind of breaks flow. I suppose I was a bit quick to be so negative, so I'll revise my rating to a neutral one, but I don't see myself wanting to use this. --Sulacu (talk) 15:52, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

I wouldn't use it either in a RL game because there is too much rolling, yes. I'd have the player roll the crit dice though: the DM really doesn't need to. Then they can roll dice of different colors: say black for an attack, red for crits for that attack, or something like that. This still forces attacks to be rolled individually, which is a pain. However...

An interesting way to do this variant with multiple dice could be like this:

• Roll 1 set of crit dice for each weapon you use (since they might have different ranges). So if you have a 17-20 range, you'll roll 4 crit dice. This set lasts for the round.
• Roll all of your attacks and compare these to the crit dice.

So 4 attacks with rolls 8, 12, 14, 15 and 4 crit dice with 12, 14, 16, 18 would yield 2 crits. The math will end up giving something different than the current crit rules and I'd need to crunch the numbers to see just how different, but it could be quite interesting. --Aarnott (talk) 16:15, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, as I said, this wasn't meant to simplify so much as just being a different way to do things. Though, it might be easy to just roll crit dice for each player at the beginning of combat and note the numbers. The, if a player used action points, they could reroll them or add more for a round. This'd cut down on rolling immensely, and would make it much better for an RL game. Thoughts? Alcyius (talk) 16:46, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

That would work although it kinda goes against the main idea of a crit range that sometimes compresses into several crits for a single number on the die. Like, if a player rolls all 20s on 5d20 for the crit dice, it would be a bit weird to have super crits all battle. It would make the variant all the more swingy with randomness imo. --Aarnott (talk) 17:29, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

I would like to note that your probability distribution is not quite complete, Aarnott. It occurred to me a little while after I responded that listing the probabilities of a hit or crit is meaningless if you don't account for whether you hit or miss in the first place. I think this mechanic may come to terms with its limitations if you are fighting a dangerous foe with a comparatively high AC. Using regular critical hit rules, you will often score a threat against such an opponent. If the DM rolls crit dice at the start of your turn for all of your attacks and none of them are particularly high, then you get to eat it. On the other hand, there are such feats and class features that give you a bonus to your crit confirmation rolls, which I would say is a far more economical way to increase the chance of a critical hit.

Even worse are the in-game consequences it poses. If a player's crit dice for the turn (or worse, for a whole combat) end up on the low end, he may consider switching to weaker targets to increase the chance of critically hitting. It may actually preclude him landing a crit on certain foes entirely. I am not in favor of rules that can be exploited in the metagame. --Sulacu (talk) 14:04, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Ratings

	Aarnott likes this article and rated it 3 of 4.
	As put in the discussion, I think it is balanced well enough that it can simply be swapped with the normal crit rules without changing the game drastically. The advantages come with the ability to get creative with new ability ideas for feats, abilities, items, etc.

	Sulacu is neutral on this article and rated it 2 of 4.
	As a rule, I am not a fan of rules that greatly increases the amount of rolling between actions, but that is generally not enough to warrant a dislike. Still, Aarnott went to great lengths to show that it is a functional enough variant rule, so there is that.