Make crit fails on strikes matter

[Pirate Rob]

Alright, so we've got this neat 4 levels of success system, but then for one of the most basic actions "Strike" we ignore one of the levels.

Of course the easy thought would be to penalize characters who crit fail, make them drop their weapon or something equally problematic.

D&D 3.0 had that paradigm and I for one was glad to see it go in D&D3.5 as it was unfairly punitive to those that made attacks, especially with weapons.

So instead of making crit fails worse, we need to make misses better to help differentiate them from critical misses.

Stealing Learning from 13th age gives us level to damage on a miss (but not on a crit fail). It keeps fights against high AC creatures from dragging on too long and becomming a slog of misses, it also helps makes even desperate 3rd strikes contribute. This might require adding level to damage on hits as well to avoid corner cases when a miss would be better.

This can of course be combined with other critical changes (such as maximizing crits instead of doubling)

Leaving attacks to be:
S: Hit, CS: Critical Hit, F: Glancing Blow, CF: Miss

[bro1017]

I think they've outright stated they tried making glancing blows a thing (ex you deal your Strength modifier in damage without rolling damage dice), but people kept forgetting to deal damage on a failure. I honestly think part of it is that most DMs say something along the lines of "you miss" or "that doesn't hit", which causes players to effectively hear "no contact".

In any case, while I think it would be interesting to add normal failure damage on a Strike, I don't think it's all that needed.

[Vic Ferrari]

Pirate Rob wrote:

This can of course be combined with other critical changes (such as maximizing crits instead of doubling)

I am not really a fan of DoaM, but maximising damage is the best critical hit rule (ala 4th Ed), so far, to me. In 3rd and 5th Ed, critical hits can spike too much damage, or roll less than normal (anticlimactic).

[John Mechalas]

The problems with critical failures on a strike action are:

1. they happen too often in the d20 system
2. more importantly, an attack roll is not a skill check at how to swing a sword without dropping it

Generally speaking, someone who is trained at combat isn't going to drop their weapon by accident just because the enemy's AC is high. And putting a penalty on such a thing has too high of a potential for slapstick comedy.

[MajesticWaffle]

I recall the developers talking about monsters that have reactions for when critical fails happen. I haven't looked at the Bestiary enough to verify it though.

Also, some Fighter feats have the Press key term that lists a Failure conditional that doesn't go off if the roll to attack is a critical failure.