Figuring Critical Hit Damage with Penalties

[Matt2VK]

Has this been clarified yet -
Playtest rulebook page 308 for figuring out Critical damage.
Add double any circumstance and conditional bonuses and penalties to damage.

So if I rolled a critical hit with a melee weapon but have a penalty to my strength I have to double that penalty?

That is wrong on so many ways and might actually have me ending up doing less damage on a crit then if I did a normal attack.

[DerNils]

The relevant line for your example is this:

"Add double your ability modifier to damage, if one applies" And I am afraid that right now, that means yes, if you have -1 ability modifier, this will be multiplied to -2. But speaking of pure math, the chances of dealing less damage with a multiplied die and penalty than with your original die and penalty are minimal. And it can happen with a Bonus as well, even though it's less relevant.

But let's take the worst case, a D4 dagger. Your original damage is between 0 and 3. On a crit, you are between 0 and 6. Not great, but come one, you are a strength 8 guy with a shank. What did you expect?

[Fuzzy-Wuzzy]

Strength penalties to damage got multiplied on a crit in PF1 too; I don't recall ever hearing of it being a problem.

[Matt2VK]

Used the -1 penalty as a example. Might have been better using a -2 or even a -3 penalty.

Plenty of ways to stack on those penalties. From starting with a low strength, failing a spell/poison/disease save, to getting hit by some ability damaging attack.

While it didn't come up in PF1, it came up more often then I liked when as a GM. You'd be running tiny creatures dealing 1d4-2 damage and critting. In that situation, it's almost a guarantee you'd end up dealing less damage on a crit.

[FowlJ]

Matt2VK wrote:

In that situation, it's almost a guarantee you'd end up dealing less damage on a crit.

It is not - for 1d4-2, you have a 25% to deal 2 damage (the maximum that you can deal), and for 2d4-4 you have a 37.5% chance to deal at least 2 damage. (See here.) If your penalties are even higher than that, relative to your die size, it does become true that you are dealing very slightly less damage on average when you crit (but still with higher maximum damage than you would otherwise have), but at that point we're talking about someone so really, truly awful at attacking that they are probably better off doing something else one way or another. It really isn't going to be something that happens often enough to be a concern (even if you have a flaw in Strength, and have two different -1 penalties, you're still only dealing worse damage if you're using a 1d4 damage weapon and would never be dealing more than 1 damage on a regular hit to start with - a more impressive weapon (much less a magical one that adds entire extra damage dice) makes this basically impossible.)

[Reverse]

It's a pretty corner case. You need somebody who is good at hitting enough to crit consistently (presumably with Finesse, using their Dex instead of their crippled Str), but has a horrible penalty to damage (so horrible they can barely deal any damage), but still chooses to attack anyway...

In that setup, I think a GM-call of "You may choose not to crit if you would rather not" would solve the problem.