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Recently I decided to abandon the critical fumble chart from middle earth I've been using (inflicting) on my players, and I also decided to use paizo's fun critical hit deck. I find the card drawing mechanic fun, and the cards do present an interesting tactical situation to the party (although some crit hits seem to be overwhelming like the 2d4 int damage one if you're fighting animals).
Now the issue that was brought up was a player asked what the point of going into the critical tree is if the cards are used. Why pick up bleeding critical, or the like, if the deck is there and giving similar effects 'for free.' I didn't really see anything in the deck itself to explain interplay with on-crit feats. I admit I'm trying to figure out an answer to this and so..
Discussion time.
What do you lot think?
If you have the feat you can guarantee the effect that you want to happen. If you rely on the cards you might get something that is completely unhelpful. It would be annoying to invest in Blinding Critical and then randomly draw a card that made them blind anyway, but I doubt that would happen often enough to make the feat worthless.
Oh, and I would rule that the critical feats occur along w/ the effect on the card, if I used the cards. I don't use the cards myself, b/c I find them to be fairly unbalanced and in some cases ridiculous. It is good at adding some variety to game play though.
I Like them. and also started using them in place of my Happy Fun Crit chart (my term NOT theirs)
though our House rule on them is Monsters and NPC have to use them PC can choose to. effect stack with Crit feats and may negate the save or worsen it.
RPG Superstar Season 9 Top 16, RPG Superstar 2015 Top 32
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If you use the rule that you can choose to use either the feat or the card then the feats are still worth an investment, but still not nearly as much as they normally are without the cards.
Personally, I am going to use the cards every time and not bother with the feats with my critical hit master character. In this case the goal is to score as many critical hits as possible on an enemy through a high crit range and several extra attacks through the TWF chain. Most critical hit feats only work once per enemy (Bleeding critical stacks with itself though, so I may still pick that up,) and if you are able to score three or more crits on an enemy the feats are not as effective as drawing a card each time.
The feats are in addition to your normal crit damage. So they should also be in addition to any card effect.
Sure, this might not be as good, if the card duplicates your critical feat, but if you have multiple, you could choose a feat which the card does not have, and get both.
Example: Fighter has Staggering and Blinding critical. He rolls a crit with his longsword (x2 weapon) and draws one card. He sees the card for his slashing ability blinds the opponent. He chooses to use his staggering critical feat for this critical, and also gets to apply its effects.
Without the card, he would have gotten x2 damage instead of blind, and been able to choose whether to apply his blinding or his staggering crit feat. (Assuming he didn't have critical mastery to apply both).