Critical Confirmation

[Firehand]

I ask this with just a raw dice roll, no bonuses or anything.

So, if I have a Crit range of 18-20 and the AC of the target is
a 19 and I roll a Natural 18 and then confirm with another natural 18 is this a critical hit?

[Pizza Lord]

No. The attack and confirmation still have to be a successful hit against the target's AC (natural 20's are considered an automatic hits, so those will apply even if a creatures AC was 50 or more).

[AwesomenessDog]

No, or at least not necessarily. First you have to check if you attack roll actually hit your target. The enemy's AC may be 19, but your natural 18 has (hopefully) bonuses that would raise it to the enemy's 19 AC or better. In such a case, not only do you hit, but also because your threat range is 18-20, the natural roll (not total roll) of an 18 can qualify for a critical hit. But say you didn't have any bonuses to hit at all, so your total roll was still an 18, even though that could be a critical threat, you don't threaten a critical because it wouldn't hit in the first place.

Now, assuming you have hit and threatened a critical, you roll your attack again to see if it hits normally. You don't need to check for an additional critical threat on the natural die roll because you have already threatened, you just need to hit to confirm and get the critical damage. Now, if your natural 18 hit to get the threat in the first place, 99% of the time the enemy's AC won't change on the confirm meaning another natural 18 should confirm, but as above if you didn't hit in the first place, then you don't even get to roll to confirm.

[Firehand]

I gotcha.

I think it would make better sense to just make the
Crit range 18-20 the same as a natural 20.
" Oh you rolled a 18, that's the same as a natural 20,
roll confirmation." Because, really why wouldn't it.

I understand what you guys are saying, and thank you.

But having to have your natural 18 and 19 actually have to hit
the target to make it a critical seems like your not really getting a crit, range of 18-20 with out the circumstance of hitting the AC.

Just like keen. This ability doubles the threat range of a weapon. So if the only threat range is a natural 20 you would think the natural 20 is now a natural 19 and a natural 20.

[Pizza Lord]

Firehand wrote:

I think it would make better sense to just make the

Crit range 18-20 the same as a natural 20.
" Oh you rolled a 18, that's the same as a natural 20,
roll confirmation." Because, really why wouldn't it.

If you want to house rule that in your game go ahead. This is the Rules forum. You asked us how it works.

I don't recommend it. Disregarding bonus, as you've done in your examples, that would make high threat weapons unbalanced. Now an 18-20 with a rapier, scimitar, or falchion is an auto-hit. That's invalidates all armor class entirely. Even with a 20 doing that, that's only 5% of the time, you've upped it to 15% of the time. In the case of a natural 20, if an attacker needs that to hit an opponent, then normally they'd need two natural 20s in a row to crit (otherwise it's still a hit).

Now you've not only tripled auto-hits for some weapons (or at least doubled them for most swords), you've doubled or tripled auto-crit confirmations, and you've done nothing to help high-crit weapons to keep them balanced or in parity. Then, adding in keen or Improved Critical to the mix, and you've not only increased crit range (which is what those do) you've increased auto-hit and auto-crit range. It would just be unbalanced, and would virtually negate the purpose of having a high armor class other than anything other than on an attack below a natural 15.

In most cases (meaning where bonuses apply), if you roll an 18 to hit, you probably hit unless you have pitiful bonuses and you're fighting something with incredible AC or are out of your league already.

Even if you still want to do it, you'd have to do it for NPCs to remain impartial and fair (you don't have to be). You think your players who focused on high-Dex or mage armor and shield to help their squishy guys survive attacks will thank you for invalidating their builds and making their ACs worthless (and making them take double damage or more from auto-crits against their already low hit point characters to boot) just so the maybe one or two PCs in the party that use high-threat weapons can benefit from your new rule?

[Firehand]

Wow lol, thanks.

No matter how you slice it though, you're going to get the same outcome more or less. Just prolonging it with a chance of not getting a critical. And as far as squishy goes, they're doomed regardless usually when crits are concerned.

Thanks for breaking it down, and most importantly; thanks for clarifying this is the rules question forum, I would have been mad at my self if I posted this elsewhere.

[Derklord]

Firehand wrote:

I think it would make better sense to just make the

Crit range 18-20 the same as a natural 20.
" Oh you rolled a 18, that's the same as a natural 20,
roll confirmation." Because, really why wouldn't it.

Because high crit range weapons are already better in practise than high crit damage weapon even at same theoretical average, so you're making the game balance worse for no benefit.

A critical hit is about the double (or higher) damage. A natural 20 is about the guaranteed success.

[AwesomenessDog]

I'm not sure if you're not understanding the RAW or just wanting a (as others have said) very bad change to the RAW for your table.

The rule that a nat 20 is an auto-success for attacks rolls, Saves, etc. is separate from the rule that a 20 is a crit threat for weapons that don't have a wider threaten range. If it were possible that you could get a 20 and miss, and thus your 20+bonuses didn't hit the target's AC, you wouldn't get a crit threat because you didn't hit in the first place.

Same applies if you are getting a 19 all the way down to 15 on an improved critical weapon that then threatens all the way down to 15 (14 if you have a level 20 inspired blade swashbucklers).

Perhaps you are coming from a DND 5e, where the bonuses to hit at level 20 are barely even consistently above +10, so getting the natural 18 in that game would almost always be a hit anyway. That isn't the case in this game. You will have a +10 bonus at the latest by level 6 if you are a martial character. At level 20, you could have in excess of +50 (+20 BAB, +7 bane weapon, +4 bardic performance, +12 stat, +6 weapon training, +2 greater weapon focus for a total +51 with a simple fighter). This is by design, and that design is meant to make it virtually impossible for characters even 3-5 levels apart from one another to never have a chance of the lower level character beating the higher character.

The power scaling is intentionally wide, but making it so any level 1 Commoner peasant can pick up a keen rapier, and have 6 times the chance that a fighter 10 could of hitting a fighter 20, is a massive wrench in the design of the game. Never mind how much it would actively discourage players from building tanky characters, when anyone with a slightly curved sword has a minimum 15% chance to hit them.

[Taja the Barbarian]

Firehand wrote:

I gotcha.

I think it would make better sense to just make the
Crit range 18-20 the same as a natural 20.
" Oh you rolled a 18, that's the same as a natural 20,
roll confirmation." Because, really why wouldn't it.

I understand what you guys are saying, and thank you.

But having to have your natural 18 and 19 actually have to hit
the target to make it a critical seems like your not really getting a crit, range of 18-20 with out the circumstance of hitting the AC.

Just like keen. This ability doubles the threat range of a weapon. So if the only threat range is a natural 20 you would think the natural 20 is now a natural 19 and a natural 20.

Just to put this into context, it is fairly easy to get really big threat ranges on certain weapons with the Keen Weapon Enchant - or - the Improved Critical* feat, either of which will give a traditional Falchion/Scimitar/Rapier a 15-20/x2 critical range (this is basically 'standard' for characters who use these weapons).

So, if you house rule that any 'threat' roll is an automatic hit, these weapons will have a 30% auto-hit rate, which makes them really dangerous with iterative attacks and/or attack roll penalties (like a Falchion + Power Attack combo).

[Belafon]

So, when you really dig down into the game design this is actually two rules rolled into one that's tripping you up.

First: Crit range. Every weapon has a crit range. For many weapons the crit range is only "20." Others are 19-20 or 18-20. Now set that aside for the moment.

Second: For most types of rolls, including attack rolls, Natural 20s always succeed and Natural 1s always fail.

Put those two rules together and now you see why a Natural 20 always threatens a crit. (Because a 20 always succeeds and every weapon has a crit range that includes "20.") However a Natural 19 doesn't always automatically succeed, so even if the weapon's crit range includes "19" a 19 might not hit.

[Pizza Lord]

Taja the Barbarian wrote:

So, if you house rule that any 'threat' roll is an automatic hit, these weapons will have a 30% auto-hit rate, which makes them really dangerous with iterative attacks and/or attack roll penalties (like a Falchion + Power Attack combo).

Another good reason. I hadn't even considered Power Attacks, Iterative Attacks, Two-weapon combat penalties (make sure your off-hand weapon is the high-threat one at the least if you don't have two).

There'd be little reason not to just go Power Attacking, Combat Expertise for maximum damage and bonus AC (well, unless your opponent has a rapier, falchion, or scimitar too, then your AC is worthless 15% of the time). And hell, use larger, oversized weapons for extra damage, since 30% of the time that penalty won't matter and the extra damage will.

[AwesomenessDog]

Pizza Lord wrote:

Taja the Barbarian wrote:

So, if you house rule that any 'threat' roll is an automatic hit, these weapons will have a 30% auto-hit rate, which makes them really dangerous with iterative attacks and/or attack roll penalties (like a Falchion + Power Attack combo).

Another good reason. I hadn't even considered Power Attacks, Iterative Attacks, Two-weapon combat penalties (make sure your off-hand weapon is the high-threat one at the least if you don't have two).

There'd be little reason not to just go Power Attacking, Combat Expertise for maximum damage and bonus AC (well, unless your opponent has a rapier, falchion, or scimitar too, then your AC is worthless 15% of the time). And hell, use larger, oversized weapons for extra damage, since 30% of the time that penalty won't matter and the extra damage will.

Two-Weapon Fighting, Strength Wizard builds are finally viable.[/s]