It’s been announced that in Fourth Edition there will no longer be any rolls necessary to confirm criticals. This reduces the number of rolls in the game (I think a good thing) and increases player enjoyment (also a good thing!). However, this got me thinking about the math behind 3.5E criticals.
I’m sure everyone at one point or another has thought of the situation of a heavily armored fighter against an mob of low level foes. The fighter’s AC is such that the foers can only hit him on a very high roll, possibly a 20. This leads to the interesting question: “Because he can only be hit on critical threats, does this mean a larger portion of successful hits against him are crits?” Is the fighter invincible except when he gets crit? It seems like a strange situation.
Being a graduate student with some free time, I decided to quickly do the math. I considered all To Hit values necessary to hit the defender from 1 to 20, and a critical is threatened on a 20. (I’m looking at the percentage of hits that are criticals, not total number of critcals here.)
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As we can see, the proportion of hits which are criticals are exactly the same if a critical is threatened only on a 20. A fighter suffers 5% critical hits from all opponents, invariant with attack bonus.
However, this changes in Fourth Edition. The proportion of hits which are criticals increases until all hits against a highly armored defender are criticals.
I don’t think this is a terrible thing, but it is an interesting consequence of the new system.
February 13, 2008 at 5:29 pm
That’s actually exactly why in my 2e games, I added in the concept of critical hit confirmation as a house rule from 3e. (The concept of critical hit confirmation was added in 3e, if you’re not familiar with older editions; this is a throwback to the way critical hits used to work.) It just seems ridiculous to me from the perspective of verisimilitude that someone that’s so well armored that they can only be hit on a 20 would get hit in a weak spot every single time they’re successfully hit, or similarly, someone that’s not good enough to hit their target without a 20 would still be good enough to hit a weak point every time they manage to hit.
This is the first piece of crunch in 4e that I’m definitively not a fan off, but it’s easy enough to change anyway; if I do move to 4e myself, I’ll probably house rule confirmation back in here too.
February 13, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Haha, wow. Guess those WordPress errors weren’t actually errors after all. Er, sorry about that.
February 13, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Cleaned it up for you. Thanks for the comments, I played 2E for about 5 years.
Have you seen the other portion of 4E crits, where damage is no longer doubled (or tripled etc), but simply maximized?
May 8, 2008 at 10:07 am
Non-confirmed criticals defeat the point of a crit IMO – it is essentially random, and thus crits/hits shouldn’t vary with attacks/hits. But on the other hand, maximised is probably softer, unless you’re rubbish in combat so take a damage penalty.