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)

Ratings

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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. The result of this rule is that higher threat ranges will be less statistically likely to result in a critical hit (22.62% vs. 30% on a 15-20 threat range, provided the assumption of unbiased dice), but at the same time, multipliers can easily grow out of proportion on a lucky roll. In other words, it is likely to create more balance issues than it solves.