A good set of cards that should be agreed upon using in your game before hand.

.... and I wouldn't go back to plain old 'vanilla' extra damage.

The look on my players face when they are about to draw one of these is awesome!

Well worth the price and are a great combination with the fumble deck.

Here is a product that is the essence of a good product gone bad. Well, I shouldn’t say bad, exactly, but it didn’t live up to its potential. It had a strong premise, but a very poor execution.

The Critical Hit Deck is a way to spice up combat with a bit of variety here and there. However, there is a grand disparity in power between the effects of bludgeoning and edged weapons, to the point where while using them in a campaigns, no player would use a bludgeoning weapon. Many of the affects were more powerful than the base doubling as well, so most of the time the players eschewed all weapons except those with the greatest threat range. Inside of a few sessions, every player wielded kukri, rapiers, or scimitars. We even had a decapitation with a kukri by a wu jen on a gargantuan white dragon on the first round of a combat once.

There is little flavor and no artwork making the card format wholly unnecessary when a d% table would’ve sufficed for a much cheaper PDF, and carrying a more than $10 price tag this product, much like the Critical Fumble Deck, feels like a thinly veiled gimmick to grab money.

It seems that people I play with have mixed views on the Critical Hit Deck, but we decided to no longer use it. While the unexpected excitement in combat could be fun, overall the cards greatly rewarded a particular style of character over most others. I would actually be interested in picking up a new Critical Hit Deck if a 2nd version were ever to be produced, assuming the above issues were sorted out.

Overall, if you are just looking to add some randomness to your critical hits, you can find some better, free tables online, but you likely won’t regret picking up this product.

I am using this deck on a D&D 4E game and though some of the effects have to be reworded, my players are enjoying these. These cards certainly have shortened long combat encounters with great fun for all.

I've had these for a while and finally figured I'd post a review. I mostly run Castles & Crusades using my own homebrew setting and the Troll's default setting - Ahirde, along with their A-Series Modules (Assualt on Black Tooth Ridge, etc). C&C is my Fantasy Game of choice, and being OGL, I figured I'd give the Criticals (along with the fumble deck) Deck a try to see how it worked out. I run my game with a natural 20 being a critical and a natural 1 being a fumble. There is no confirming or threat. You roll it - it happens. In the past what this meant for a critical, was simply double damage (and for a fumble it meant you roll to see how much damage you do to yourself). Not very imaginative, but it got the job done. Well, this deck added a new dimension to the whole RPG experience for me and my players. Rather than simply double damage, now when a player or NPC rolls a Mr. Natural, the deck comes out and it becomes a fun event to see what will be drawn.

What Paizo has done is broken down each card into four differnt types of damage - Bludgeoning, Piercing, Slashing or Magic, based on what the character used to attack with. The one card I drew just now, interestingly enough, had Double damage for each type of damage but had additional effects such as Knockback, bleed, etc. The magic effect caused normal damage to the target but everyone adjecent to the target got hurt too. Anyway, pretty good stuff and everyone looks forward to drawing from the critical deck (and the fumble deck, especially when I as the CK roll a fumble for an NPC!).

As a C&C Player not all the stuff is applicable - Fortitude Saves, Conditions, etc. But those or easy to convert on the fly and haven't had any issues with theme in my games.

Anyway, well worth it for adding something bit different to your games.