Don’t people “confirm” criticals any more? The way we did it way back when, was a natural 20 meant you rolled a second time. If that second roll was successful, then the success was a critical success. Similarly, a natural 1 meant you rolled a second time. If that second roll failed, then the failure was a critical failure.
We also had “double-crits” when the confirmation roll was a natural 20 or 1. A 20->20 roll was extra-extra good. A 1->1 roll was extra-extra bad. We sometimes did weird* results where a 20->1 meant you were successful, but something annoying happened. And 1->20 meant you failed, but something beneficial happened as well.
In potential circumstances of friendly fire, we’d have the critically failing player make regular to-hit rolls against each friendly character in the line of fire until there was a hit. If those were all misses then the errant attack would do something else nasty.
*Weird in the original sense of the Fates screwing around with you.
I’ve never seen it done that way. Which may not mean much since I (a) played with totally different people than you and (b) was more likely to be running a game than playing it for most of my RPG career, until recently.
The Sharpshooter feat includes a bullet point that your ranged attacks ignore half and three-quarters cover.
More generally, “critical misses”, while they can be fun for some groups, have a perverse impact. The more skilled you are in combat, the more attacks you get, thus the more often you will score a critical miss. So a high level fighter with the Archery fighting style and a magical bow and a maxed-out Dex and maxed-out proficiency bonus and Bracers of Archery is more dangerous to his companions than a 1st level wizard firing a bow he isn’t even proficient with, because the fighter gets three attacks per round (at least) and the wizard only gets one.
Confirming criticals was a thing in 3rd edition, but not in 5th (I don’t know in 4th). In 2nd, crits weren’t even an official rule, at least in the PHB (I think they might have been added later): There was a rule that a 20 always hit and a 1 always missed, regardless of THAC0 or AC, but nothing special happened in those cases, and even the always-hit, always-miss rule was listed as optional.
I was in some 2nd edition groups that had the houserule that a natural 20 entitled you to an extra attack, which works out about the same as “confirm the crit to do double damage”, but since that was all pure houserules, other groups did it differently.
In 3rd Edition, weapons had a critical “range”. It could be 20, a particularly nasty weapon could be 17-20. Any natural die roll in that range was a “crit threat” and you’d have to make a second roll. A successful hit of any kind on the second roll was a confirmed critical strike.
If I remember correctly, there were also feats that could increase the critical threat range on a weapon.
Yup–and there was goofy cheese around getting keen scimitars and the improved critical chains, where nearly half your attacks were crits that did insane damage.
The blade-wielding warlock sounds like fun–hope it works out!
There was even a goofy cheese build that, first of all, made you threaten a crit 40% of the time, and second, gave you two extra attacks every time you threatened a crit. Which, combined, meant that you were making, on average, an infinite number of attacks per round.
It’s funny. There’s a part of me that enjoys coming up with these crazy cheese tricks and which appreciates the tricks others come up with, and then there’s a part of me that enjoys actually playing D&D, and there’s almost no overlap between those two parts.
Our house rules on critical failures impact you, not your party. And most often involve you shooting yourself in the foot for 2d6 or missing your next turn because you need to go get your weapon when you flung it 30 feet after loosing your grip. It still has the funny and team building, but lacks the risk.
I was playing a Paladin in our last D&D campaign. If you want a fighter class that can take and deal damage, its darn nice - and level eight (IIRC) is the point at which they go from “why is the cleric doing more damage than I am” to “and I’ll add a d8, and another d8…and then I’ll hit again”
We have a critical failure rule that ties to inspiration.
If you roll a critical fail and narrate a particularly awesome outcome, you get inspiration. Or another player at the table can do it for you and they can get inspiration. It turns it from DM-alloted punishment into an opportunity.
The DM can award a point of Inspiration to a player for especially creative acts such as good out-of-the-box ideas, role-playing a crucial moment, etc. That player can then use it or grant it to another player in a time of need. Using your Inspiration allows you to make one attack/save/ability roll with Advantage (roll two dice, pick the better result). Pretty sure you have to use it that gaming session or lose it; no stocking up on Inspiration points.
It’s just a way for the DM to encourage good play without granting material treasure or experience points for it.
That is a nice idea. It awards creativity and role playing - rather than just rolling dice to hit and do damage. And it also creates a trigger to do so - reminding a group that is in the “roll dice and hit” mindset that once in a while they should engage in storytelling.
I had picked up Devil’s Sight, which allows normal vision in magical and non-magical darkness. I plan on using the Darkness spell on an amulet, and being a roving patch of night.
I had never actually played an evil character before, so this’ll be interesting.
The problem with Darkness is that it also blinds any PCs who happen to be standing next to you. Using it effectively requires some careful maneuvering.
I used to play D&D with a group of friends at my junior high. We poured hundreds of hours into developing our characters over many months to fairly high levels. Then one day a relatively new guy to the group offered to DM a dungeon for me and three other friends. Turns out it was a killer dungeon filled with monsters way beyond our level and all of us lost ALL of our characters. There was no one left behind to raise dead, resurrect, or even wish.
Rather than starting over from scratch, we just collectively decided that we’d played enough D&D.
I’d just ignore the events of that evening and find a new DM for the characters. If a DM wants to do a meat-grinder death trap dungeon (and they can be fun), make new appropriately leveled characters for the occasion so everyone can laugh at your misfortune rather than see a beloved character get shredded for DM lols.
That might not dawn on you at age 12 though. “No, says here in the book that you’re DEAD!”
Years (decades) later I ran into one of the guys in that gaming group. Almost the first words out of his mouth was “Hey, remember that one killer dungeon soandso subjected us to? I wonder why we didn’t just decide to disregard that adventure and continue to play without that kid?”