I've been thinking about this one lately due to a house rule on the Glass Cannon Podcast. In GCP games, a natural 20 on an attack still gets "exploding damage dice" if it fail to confirm. That means a rogue who fails to confirm can still reroll all the 6s on their sneak attack and add the bonus damage. This helps to mitigate the feels-bad moment that accompanies a failed crit.
What's the community's thought on this sort of thing? Does it throw off game balance too badly? And are there other options for taking the sting out of unconfirmed critical hits?
I generally think its up to the players to worry about their own mechanics. There exists ways in the game to take care of the issue. Namely: Critical Focus. Or a variety of other feats or traits that give a bonus to attack when confirming a critical hit.
I'm not going to hold their hand the whole time. I'll point them in the right direction, but they have to invest in the abilities. I'm not bending the rules for them like that.
One thing I do is on a natural 20 but you don’t confirm a critical I have you do max potential damage with that attack (because a confirmation can do a ton of it or worse, I use critical cards vs. multiplication modifiers)
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I generally think its up to the players to worry about their own mechanics. There exists ways in the game to take care of the issue. Namely: Critical Focus. Or a variety of other feats or traits that give a bonus to attack when confirming a critical hit.
^---- this. If you're crit reliant, then get crit-confirming feats, traits, FCB's, w/e.
Also, I house rule that nat 20's auto-confirm. Frankly, I think it's dumb that they don't, and its disheartening to players when you don't confirm on a nat 20. Rolling a 20 should be a huge "YES!!" moment for the party and a feeling of grandeur and heroism for the person who rolled it.
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I generally think its up to the players to worry about their own mechanics. There exists ways in the game to take care of the issue. Namely: Critical Focus. Or a variety of other feats or traits that give a bonus to attack when confirming a critical hit.^---- this. If you're crit reliant, then get crit-confirming feats, traits, FCB's, w/e.
Also, I house rule that nat 20's auto-confirm. Frankly, I think it's dumb that they don't, and its disheartening to players when you don't confirm on a nat 20. Rolling a 20 should be a huge "YES!!" moment for the party and a feeling of grandeur and heroism for the person who rolled it.
The traditional issue with this is as ACs increase and higher rolls are needed to hit, you're 'percentage of hits that crit' goes up until you reach the point where every hit is a crit because you need a natural 20 to hit at all.
The confirmation roll basically ensures that:
- If you are highly likely to hit, you are highly likely (but not guaranteed) to confirm your crit.
- If you need to get lucky to hit in the first place, you'll need to get extremely lucky to crit.
PF2e did away with the confirmation roll, but they also made all weapons x2 on a crit and everything has a lot more HP, so this doesn't threaten to quickly delete characters with a single roll like your PF1e crits should...
The traditional issue with this is as ACs increase and higher rolls are needed to hit, you're 'percentage of hits that crit' goes up until you reach the point where every hit is a crit because you need a natural 20 to hit at all.
The confirmation roll basically ensures that:
- If you are highly likely to hit, you are highly likely (but not guaranteed) to confirm your crit.
- If you need to get lucky to hit in the first place, you'll need to get extremely lucky to crit.
PF2e did away with the confirmation roll, but they also made all weapons x2 on a crit and everything has a lot more HP, so this doesn't threaten to quickly delete characters with a single roll like your PF1e crits should...
Yeah the way the maths work for confirming crits is that the chance for any hit to be a crit shouldn't change at all for higher AC characters.
Example, Lets say we have a character with a 15-20 crit range :
If you need a 15+ to hit then 100% of your hits will be critical threats. Of those hits 30% of them will be confirmed crits. 100% × 30% = 30%.
If you need a 9+ to hit then 50% of your hits will be critical threats. Of those 50%, 60% of them will be confirmed crits. 50% × 60% = 30%.
If you need a 3+ to hit then 33.3% of your hits will be critical threats. Of those 33.3%, 90% of them will be confirmed crits. 33.3% × 90% = 30%.
So a character with a 15-20 crit-range should find that 30% of their hits are confirmed crits, no matter the enemy's AC.
There are of course common exceptions to this.
For example if the above character needs a 16+ to hit then 100% their hits will be critical threats, but only 25% will confirm.
Another common exception is the Critical Focus feat, which will increase the chance of confirming crits. This changes the percentage of confirmed-crits in a less consistent manner, and will generally be more useful to those who have a harder time hitting. Using Critical Focus with the above examples: If you hit on a 15+ you'll have a 50% crit-rate, on a 9+ you'll have a 40% crit-rate, and on a 3+ you'll have a 31.6% crit-rate. And the same character needing a 16+ to hit will still have a 45% crit-rate .
So giving auto-confirms to Nat-20's will disproportionately advantage people with lower to-hit rolls. This isn't necessarily a problem as it will likely even the playing field somewhat, but it's important to know how your rule will affect the game.
Also, if you are that person with a low to-hit but good damage on a crit then get yourself a wand of BLESS WEAPON.
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So giving auto-confirms to Nat-20's (or similar house-rules) will disproportionately advantage people with lower to-hit rolls. This isn't necessarily a problem as it will likely even the playing field somewhat, but it's important to know how your rule will affect the game.
This house rule also disproportionately boosts the 20/x3 weapons more than the 19-20/x2 weapon since you'll need to confirm the 19 roll to get the additional damage.
Assuming this is not a PC's only rule, I'm having a hard time believing it hasn't deleted low-level PCs on a single good roll, bringing the excitement of the natural 20 to a sudden end...
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So giving auto-confirms to Nat-20's (or similar house-rules) will disproportionately advantage people with lower to-hit rolls. This isn't necessarily a problem as it will likely even the playing field somewhat, but it's important to know how your rule will affect the game.This house rule also disproportionately boosts the 20/x3 weapons more than the 19-20/x2 weapon since you'll need to confirm the 19 roll to get the additional damage.
Assuming this is not a PC's only rule, I'm having a hard time believing it hasn't deleted low-level PCs on a single good roll, bringing the excitement of the natural 20 to a sudden end...
True, and regardless of the crit-range or crit-multiplier, auto-confirming crits of any kind will make the combat more deadly. The more deadly it is, the less predictable it is. The less predictable it is, the higher the chance that the weaker side will win.
The PCs are almost universally the stronger side in any combat , so any auto-confirm will invariably favour the NPCs over the PCs .
Again, it depends what you want out of your game.
You may want to encourage axes for your Viking campaign, so giving auto-confirms on a crit will help them look better than a scimitar.
Or you may want a more deadly game where the PCs have to decide whether to fight or flee when a single lucky roll could be the end of one of them.
And as the OP said, you may just want to keep the excitement of a natural-20.
All these are fine as long as you understand what the changes will do to your game, both when the PCs get lucky, and when their enemies do.
MrCharisma is spot on that this is going to hurt the players more than their opponents. For the most part the opponents the players face are designed to be defeated. This means the players will face a vast number of opponents over the course of the game, whereas most opponents will face the players once or twice. You may have reoccurring opponents, but that is actually fairly rare. This means that every player will have more rolls against them then any single opponent. Anything that increases the chance of an attack being more effective has a disproportionate effect on the players.
Automatically confirming critical hits is going to mean the players are going to be hit with a lot more of them. If an opponent needs a natural 20 to hit that gives them a 1 in 400 chances of getting a critical hit against the player. This means that the high level character facing hordes of low level threats is going to be a lot tougher. For the most part the players usually also have a decent chance to hit. This means they are already getting a decent number of critical hits. Automatically confirming critical hits is probably not going to increase this number significantly. If a player hits on anything but a 1 this only increases the chance to critical by 5%.
The other thing to consider is that often players are already dealing a significant amount of damage to their opponents. This often means that a lot of the damage is actually wasted. If your opponent only has 20 HP and your attack can already do that amount doing, 60 points of damage is not really that much more effective. On the other hand a lot of opponents are not doing that much damage so multiplying that does make a difference. When the Orc Barbarian is doing 1d12+7 damage a critical hit increases the damage from 13.5 to 40.5.
You asked if this would throw of the balance too much. Do you consider the players taking 10-20 times the number of critical hits to be too much? Do you want the horde of low level threats to go from being a minor annoyance to a significant obstacle? Do you want to make it easier for your party to be defeated? If you answered no to all these then it is too much. If you answered yes to them it would not throw off the balance more than you want.
The traditional issue with this is as ACs increase and higher rolls are needed to hit, you're 'percentage of hits that crit' goes up until you reach the point where every hit is a crit because you need a natural 20 to hit at all.Also, I house rule that nat 20's auto-confirm. Frankly, I think it's dumb that they don't, and its disheartening to players when you don't confirm on a nat 20. Rolling a 20 should be a huge "YES!!" moment for the party and a feeling of grandeur and heroism for the person who rolled it.
Our solution to this is that Nat 20's will auto crit, unless the only way to hit was a 20, then you need to confirm to crit. (20's always hit)