Flails and Criticals

[Torivor]

I'm looking at playing a Flail and Shield melee character who will make extensive use of trips and disarm combat maneuvers.

For a medium character, a light flail has a d8 damage die and a x2 critical multiplier on a natural 20 only. A heavy flail (two hands) has a d10 damage die and lands a critical threat on either a 19 or a 20. But a small Heavy Flail would be identical in stats to a light flail, except it would have a larger critical threat range.

Other similarly scaling weapons do not experience this change in critical threat range, such as bows, (longbow to short bow) and swords (long sword to short sword).

Is there a reason the light flail experiences this decrease in critical threat range or is there errata on this somewhere?

[Chess Pwn]

there are no scaling weapons. There are just weapons that maybe happen to share a name or something.

[Claxon]

Yeah, there is no "scale" to weapons.

These weapons stats have probably been what they are since D&D 3.0 (unless its weapons that didn't exist then).

So...don't overthink it. It is what it is.

[CBDunkerson]

Also note that you take a -2 penalty to hit when using a weapon intended for creatures one size category larger/smaller than you.

[Nefreet]

I was going to point that out, too.

So in essence you're increasing your Crit range by taking a penalty on attacks.

[BadBird]

Conceptually, I would guess that a heavy bashing weapon is seen as much more likely to smash someone's head real good. But who knows?

The feat Unhindering Shield (not PFS legal) would let you wield a buckler with a heavy flail in two hands for far more crunchy goodness.

Two levels of Titan Mauler Barbarian lets you one-hand a heavy flail at -2, and you get Rage.