QuoteTo score a critical hit in 4th Edition D&D, do the following:

Roll 20.

Simple enough, right? Just one number to remember. And more importantly, just one roll.

Yes, the confirmation roll is gone. So why did we get rid of it? Because we, like so many players, had rolled crits only to have the confirmation roll miss. And we didn't like it. We don't think that many people did. (I look forward to reading the posts of people who disagree.) Having one roll is faster, and it's more fun. It keeps the excitement of the 20, and ditches the disappointment of the failure to confirm.
Critical Damage

Here's the part that's going to take some getting used to: Critical hits don't deal double damage. This changed because doubling everything 5% of the time led to some pretty crazy spikes that were very unpredictable.

Let's say you roll a crit with a power that deals 1d10+4 normally. So the crit deals 2d10+8. The next turn, the monster attacks you using a power that deals 3d6+4 damage. He crits, dealing 6d6+8. Between the extra dice and the doubled ability modifier, that's a pretty huge difference! (And a pretty painful one.)

Instead, when you roll a critical hit, all the dice are maximized. So your 1d10+4 power deals 14 damage and the monster's 3d6+4 deals 22. Generally speaking, randomness is more of an advantage to monsters than PCs. More predictable critical damage keeps monsters from insta-killing your character.

Having maximized dice also helps out when you have multitarget attacks. You'll roll an attack roll against each target, so 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.
Beefing Up Your Crits

PCs also have some extra tricks up their sleeves to make their criticals better. 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). Monsters don't get this benefit, so PC crits outclass monster crits most of the time.

Crits can be improved in a couple of other ways. Weapons can have the high crit property, giving extra dice on a crit. Like this:
Weapon    Prof.    Damage    Range    Cost    Weight    Category    Properties
War pick    2    d8    --    15 gp    6 lb.    Pick    High crit, versatile

In addition, some powers and magic items have extra effects on a hit. So crits are doing just fine without all those dice.
Crits in Play

In playtest, it does seem like critical hits come up more often. The subtitle of this article is stolen from Chris Tulach, who sings a bit of, "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Crit-mas" whenever the natural 20s come out to play. Fortunately, hit points are higher, especially at low levels, so there's a bigger buffer to keep those crits from killing people too quickly. It still feels great to roll one, but the fight goes on.

We've tried to corral the numbers but keep the feel that a critical hit is a special event. So grab your d20 and your big, nasty magic axe, and get ready to crit for the fences!

Link: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/drdd/20080104&authentic=true

[Note: I made a few lines of interest bold]

This article has made me slip off the fence onto the doom and gloom side. It looks like PCs will have access to better critical hit abilities than monsters. It also looks like they will have a lot more starting hit points too.

The design philosophy does seem to be about not only defanging most things from previous editions, but also to add a lot of padding to the PCs at the same time too. It sounds like the scales will be tipping in favor of the PCs quite a bit in 4E.

This was predictable.

Yeah, right from the very first press conference it's been more-or-less a given that confirmation rolls are gone. I can definitely see the logic - nothing sucks more than failing the confirmation roll - but it's clearly made the maths go a bit whacky, and they've had to compensate in all sorts of different ways to make it right again, resulting in this horrible, overpatched monstrosity. I have to say, I'm beginning to lose interest in 4E too.

Here's how I'd handle crits, incidentally:

- You crit on a natural 20, no confirmation roll required.
- Crits do double damage, maximised.
- Monsters and NPCs do not get crits, period.
- PCs only get crits against monsters with at least twice their hit dice.

That way, the crits only come out to play when they're needed. There is nothing cool about eviscerating an orc with a crit when the orc would have been just as eviscerated with a normal roll. There is plenty cool about getting a crucial critical hit in against a dragon that is kicking your party's ass.

I would do this. Do a critical hit, roll damage as normal, but your opponent is stunned for a round, whatever it is.

I like the single roll, and while partial to "double damage" I think anything like:
* double dice-roll(s), then add bonuses
* maximized damage
* stun opponent / disarm / etc
would be okay.

Not allowing monsters and NPCs to benefit from a "natural 20" seems like it's unnecessarily easy on the players.  Each time they see that 20 they'll know they've got the training wheels on.

If WotC doesn't want character death in the game, why not just say: Characters are unconcious at 0 hp.  A character only 'dies' when agreed upon by the player and GM.

Quote from: jedimastertThe design philosophy does seem to be about not only defanging most things from previous editions, but also to add a lot of padding to the PCs at the same time too. It sounds like the scales will be tipping in favor of the PCs quite a bit in 4E.

We never used the confirmation roll in our group.  If you critted, great.  If you rolled again and got a 20, it was an insta-kill.  So it wasn't really confirming anything.

Quote from: jedimastertLink: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/drdd/20080104&authentic=true

[Note: I made a few lines of interest bold]

This article has made me slip off the fence onto the doom and gloom side. It looks like PCs will have access to better critical hit abilities than monsters. It also looks like they will have a lot more starting hit points too.

The design philosophy does seem to be about not only defanging most things from previous editions, but also to add a lot of padding to the PCs at the same time too. It sounds like the scales will be tipping in favor of the PCs quite a bit in 4E.

I told you so.

RPGPundit

I told you so first! :hehe:

I'm fine with single-roll, 20 = max damage. In fact, I'll probably use it in my D&D.

Of course, the comments about how monster crits are unfair to players only confirms how much WotC is sheltering whinging players from all scary and 'unfair' outcomes in the game (although I fail to understand what's unfair about PCs and their adversaries both having access to same abilities and dangers).

If 4E is about doing away with sacred cows to make D&D appealing to today's RPG market, then why keep PC death at all? It's clear that the most vocal RPGers in the market they're gearing 4E towards hate it. It seems absurd to keep PC death in the game, while at the same time allay the pissing and moaning of players by doing everything to make PC death all but impossible.

Looks good to me. They've removed the annoying part of crits like having to make more rolls and possibly fail, and needing to balance the 18-20 weapons against the 20 only ones. Removing the rolling means getting a crit actually speeds up your turn instead of slowing it down (not that the slow-down was usually very big).

I wish they'd gone whole hog though. They took away the need to roll crit damage, but then added in magical properties that require rolling. IMO they should have just made frost add 3 or 6 damage instead of 1d6.

I'll leave the discussion of whether or not we should bitch and moan about increased hit points to the thread that was already talking about it.

I can understand the logic behind these changes, although I'm pretty "meh" on the issue.  Personally, I think this change has some merit because of the "critical rape" rules we had in a group of mine:  any natural 20 was an automatic crit, no matter what.  This led to at least two TPKs and a number of pointless deaths.

Jeez, I remember the arguments between Arneson and Gygax over whether there even should be such a thing as a critical hit.  I remember when rolling a natural 20 meant you rolled double the normal number of damage dice.

I am officially old.

QuoteIt looks like PCs will have access to better critical hit abilities than monsters.

I'm not sure he meant that. From what I read beings with class levels and magic weapons have better critical hits than others.

Or do you seriously think that monsters won't be allowed to wield magic swords (provided they have hands)?

Still I find the name a bit odd. Maximising instead of doubling sounds more like a Solid Hit.

Quote from: 1of3I'm not sure he meant that. From what I read beings with class levels and magic weapons have better critical hits than others.

Or do you seriously think that monsters won't be allowed to wield magic swords (provided they have hands)?

Still I find the name a bit odd. Maximising instead of doubling sounds more like a Solid Hit.

Interestingly, it works out to have a somewhat similar result for a single die:

The average result of an n-sided die is (0.5n + 0.5).
Doubling this gives you an average result of n + 1 on a critical.
Just taking the maximum gives you a result of n on a critical.

The more dice you roll, the greater the difference is.  If I had designed this, I probably would have said that non-random modifiers still get doubled.  But if critical hits are going to become more common, it makes sense for them to be less powerful.

I'm not sure if they're becoming more common or not. Because of the 18-20 weapons, Keen magic, and Improved Critical feat it's possible to be rolling confirmation rolls in 3.x on a little under half your attacks (or over half if you really go insane). Whether that's going to mean more or less than 5% of your hits are crits depends on the attack bonus vs. AC ratio of the average opponent.