Alternate Critical Table

[Gudiomen]

I'm wondering if anyone has any alternate critical hits tables they made. Particularly for melee combat.

My players often get annoyed when they roll "normal damage" in the table, and I have to remind them every time that they already got a stun and no defenses, so it's not a "lost" critical hit. However, criticals should be fun and as a GM I'm obliged to supply them with fun.

I'm weary of adopting anything that clearly has a different balance than the original table in Basic. Specially because I'll adopt the table for both players and NPC's, so "deadly" goes both ways.

I have a vague recolection of Kromm posting a table of his own making, but it might have been for something else. I'm unable to search for it effectively.

I'll probably make my own as the discussion evolves, or post one anyway if nobody has one. Cheers.

Edit: you're welcome to make one on the fly and post it, ideas are allways welcome.

[Brandy]

This thread has a couple of suggestive Krommposts and may be what you are recalling. Neither is a new table, but he does have a couple of recommendations for alternatives to the "Normal Damage Only" result that players are sometimes nonplussed by.

[Dantar]

I'll often modify the crit table on the fly for what's appropriate, and not let the PCs see what the roll was. A little fudge never hurt anyone... :)

[Gudiomen]

Originally Posted by Dantar

I'll often modify the crit table on the fly for what's appropriate, and not let the PCs see what the roll was. A little fudge never hurt anyone... :)

We have a very strict, no-fudge rule. I let the player roll their own criticals and I let them see what I roll when an NPC has gotten one. This gives them a greater sense of realization when they crit. and leaves them no room for complaint when their enemies deal triple damage or something similar. We feel that if you don't play by the rules, then you're cheating and your victory isn't as glorious if the GM helped you get there by being nice.

We don't allways play like this, but most of the time. I realize that many people don't do this, and fudge a lot... that's fine.

So you see my need for an actual table...

[Gudiomen]

Checked out the thread Bookman linked, and yes, that was the one I remembered (had it confused with Kromm's special crit table for that sword).

One of the ideas further down the thread is to allow a critical hit to hit something smaller or more vital than originally intended. For instance, one could "promote" a hit to the leg to a hit to the joints or veins.

That's a bit powerful though, I was thinking more "special effects" than hand-chopping, bone grinding power...

[StevenH]

I have a set of melee critical charts in excel format (and pdf). I haven't put it up on my website yet, but if someone wants the file just ask, and I can email the file to you. Here is a sample (basically unformatted; some people may recognize certain Rolemaster influences...):

Crushing, Head

3 Foe is instantly killed as head explodes in a shower of gore. All foes make reaction roll at +4. Friends seeing the blow get a +1 to next attack roll.
4 Blow to back of neck crushes backbone and severs spine. Foe dies if HT check is failed; success means total paralysis. 2X max damage.
5 Blow to foe's neck area shatters bone and severs an artery. Foe cannot breathe and is bleeding at 3 hits/min until dead. If he lives, he is paralyzed (HT-2 roll)*
6 Blow to side of head. 2X damage, a skull fracture, and he's out for 30-(HT/2) hours.
7 Blow to back of neck paralyzes foe from shoulders down. 2X damage; foe is quite stunned (make all HT rolls at -2).
8 Strike to forehead. You squash foe's eyes and destroy them. Foe is stunned for at least 15 turns. Max damage. That'll teach 'em!
9 Strike to ear. Foe is deafened for 2d days (HT roll)*. Ringing in ears makes all skills at -1 during this time.
10 Smack to the eye. Foe gets black eye & takes normal damage. Great shiner, though! Eye swells up for a day; treat as "one eye" disad.
11 Strike to the cheek causes huge ugly bruise; normal damage. Foe loses 1d teeth from that side and is stunned for at least 2 turns.
12 Uppercut to chin knocks opponent out for 3d turns and sends him back at least 3'. Foe also loses 1d-1 teeth. Quit showin' off!
13 Yelling "Gitsum! Gitsum!" you break foe's nose. Foe is knocked on his butt and is stunned for at least 4 turns.
14 Hit to top of head. Max damage and foe is stunned for at least 4 turns.
15 Blow to foe's forehead. He is knocked down and at -4 to all skills for a full day. 2X damage; stunned for at least 6 turns.
16 Blow to foe's neck area breaks backbone and destroys spine. 2X damage, foe is knocked down and internally bleeds at 2/min.
17 Crush foe's skull and you spray yourself with pulped tissue. Opponent dies immediately; you have a huge cleaning bill. Yucky mess, but fine work.
18 Blow to foe's jaw drive's bone through brain. Foe dies within seconds after impacting the ground 6' away.

Cutting, Torso

3 Incredibly strong horizontal strike cuts foe in twain. Blood and gore spray onto anyone within 5' of foe. Foes make reaction rolls at +5.
4 Slash to stomach ruptures spleen. 2X max damage. Foe takes 1d hits/hr until healed; physician-2 roll each day will reduce this to 1d hits/day).
5 Deep wound across midsection half disembowels foe. Foe makes Fright check (take 1d hits/hr until healed).
6 Blast to back breaks bone and knocks foe down. +4 hits. Foe stunned for 1d+3 turns. Cool shot, dude.
7 Slash foe in side. Major wound. +4 hits and foe bleeds at 3X rate.
8 Shoulder strike yields +1 damage and forces foe to make a Will roll to remain standing under the force of the blow. Foe is stunned for 1d-3 turns.
9 Strike to foe's hip; foe is knocked down and is stunned for 1d-4 turns. -2 to DX for 1d turns; move cut by 50%.
10 Slash in back yields 2X bleeding and +2 hits. Foe is stunned at least 1 turn.
11 Break foe's rib with a loud snap. 2X shock, +1 damage, foe at -1 DX for 3 turns.
12 Chest wound, which bleeds at 2x rate. Foe is stunned, +1 damage.
13 Hack to foe's lower back knocks foe out for 1 turn. Foe falls and drops whatever was held in his hands. +1 damage.
14 Slash foe in back. +2 damage. Foe is stunned for at least 1 turn. No active defense for 1 turn.
15 Cut under armpit knocks foe over and stuns foe for 1d-3 turns. +3 damage. No active defense for 2 turns.
16 Strike to foe's side yields a lot of blood and 1.5X damage. Foe is stunned for 1d turns and at -1 to DX for next 3 turns.
17 Diagonal slash down torso causes 2X damage and 2X bleeding. Foe is stunned for at least 1d turns. 1d+1 ribs cleaved. One arm's DX at -4 until healed.
18 2X damage, spinal cord severed (HT-4 per limb to avoid crippling; take 1d hits per day until healed). Graceful shot.

Impaling, Vitals
3 Shot through heart sends foe reeling 10' to a spot suitable for dying. Weapon is stuck in reeling foe.
4 Strike through foe's side destroys a variety of organs. Foe fights normally for a minute, then dies.
5 Major abdominal wound. Foe bleeds at +2 HT per min. and is stunned for 1d+2 turns. Foe is at -2 to skills.
6 Thrust to chest pierces a lung. Stunned 1d turns as foe coughs up blood. +3 hits, foe has 2x fatigue loss until healed.
7 Upward strike beneath ribcage penetrates a lung. 2x damage, 1d-2 turns of stun.
8 Blow hammers home, splitting armor. Armor in that location is at -1 DR. +1 damage. Foe is stunned 1 turn.
9 Shot to stomach causes nasty ulcer. +2 damage, and foe loses 1 HT per hour until healed.
10 Jab to sternum cuts cartilage. Foe is stunned 1 turn and off balance (-2 to all rolls).
11 Shot to lung stuns foe until he can make a HT-4 roll. Foe can't catch his breath.
12 Blow to back damages kidney. +2 damage, foe is stunned for 1d-1 turns.
13 Penetration to foe's side results in loss of kidney function. 1.5x damage, foe is stunned 1d-3 turns. **
14 Max damage as thrust slides into pancreas. Foe is stunned for 1d-2 turns, and loses 1d HT per day until healed.
15 Blow to chest slices into aorta. Foe bleeds at 1 HT per turn and will die unless treated quite soon. It will be a difficult job.
16 Slam into midsection hits intestine. Septic wound, 2x damage, and foe will die in 1d days if not treated. Very odorous.
17 Strike through foe's kidneys. Foe drops, and dies after a min. of intense agony. Sad.
18 Strike through both of foe's lungs. Foe drops and passes out, then dies in 1 minute. Add +2 to your next attack.

The charts account for Crushing, Cutting, and Impaling damage, cross referenced by locations: Head, Torso, Vitals, Arm/Hand, and Leg/Foot. Groin shots are treated as a subset of vitals, with the descriptions altered appropriately. Note that this chart is for 3e, so some damage types are not represented.

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by Bookman

This thread has a couple of suggestive Krommposts and may be what you are recalling.

Re-reading this thread took me to this post of Kromm's, and suddenly I'm intrigued by the idea he suggests there - creating an enhancement or something that lets you have your own specialized crit table. Can the forum hivemind put our brains to work on this?

Initial thoughts:

It's probably best to stick to the predefined zones, as so:

3 – 
4, 5 – 
6, 7 – 
8, 9 – 
10, 11 – 
12, 13 – 
14, 15 – 
16, 17 – 
18 –

Then, we can decide how much it costs to put a special effect in each zone.
Offhand, I'd say that each zone has a "natural value" of sorts - i.e., you can replace a crit effect in a given zone with another effect of similar value without extra cost. 3 and 18 seem equivalent to +200% enhancements. In the standard crit table, both triple damage. That's basically the same as tripling the dice of Innate Attack, which in turn is a +200% enhancement, since each level of Innate Attack costs the same.
The 4-5 and 16-17 zones feel like 100% enhancements. The standard crit table includes both doubling damage, and halving DR at this level. Admittedly, the armor divisor would normally be a +50% enhancement, but it ignores Hardening, which bumps up the cost, and the doubled damage is basically equivalent to +100%, for reasons similar to the example above.
The 6-7 and 14-15 zones feel like +75% enhancements. Doing maximum normal damage is similar to using Partial Dice to add +3 to an Innate Attack, but limiting it so that it always tops out at the maximum damage. I'd eyeball that as a -20% limitation, so applying that to a +90% enhancement changes it to +72%, which we can round to +75%.
The 8-9 and 12-13 bands could be +25%. I don't have many good arguments for this one, it just sort of feels right. :-)
And the 10-11 band would stay the "no result" area, +0%.

Offhand, I'd call having a crit table with effects that were different than the standard, but no more powerful, would be a +20% enhancement, for much the same logic as the Based on Different Ability Score enhancement - even if it's not intrinsically more powerful than the base table, the ability to customize your ability to better synergize with other advantages is still useful.

Now, adding more powerful special effects gets trickier. I think Resistable is a good place to start when pricing this. I think it's safe to assume that someone with a special crit table is going to try to maximize their chance of critting, and try to keep their effective skill at 16, getting a crit on a 6 or better. That's effectively equivalent to an average person failing a roll on a stat+4 roll. Looking at Resistable, we find that that's a -50% limitation. We'll simplify that to halving the value, so that we don't start running into the -80% cap on limitations too fast. That's for an effect that happens any time you get a crit. Effects that happen only on one of the crit table bands should obviously cost less than that. I don't know the probabilities of the various bands coming up offhand - can anyone help out with that? Once we know that, it would just be a matter of applying the relevant Accessibility values to the already-halved values.

So, as a test run, let's build Fordaetha the Ice Mage's special crit table with her Ice Dart power.
We'll make the 3 and 18 results be "Make a HT roll or be frozen into an icy statue". That's essentially the Heart Attack condition, from Affliction. That's normally 300%. However, Fordaetha's switching out the normal triple damage result, so 200% of that is free. The remaining 100% is divided in half for being a crit result. If it comes up on 3 and 18, it's happening about .9% of the time you roll a crit. Powers suggests that something that happens 1-6% of the time is worth -40%. So, the enhancement value for the freezing effect on a crit is 60% of 100%/2, for a final value of +30%.
For the 4-5 and 16-17 zones, we'll have it be "Target takes 1/10th of the attack's damage every turn for 20 turns, as the flesh freezes and breaks". That's basically Cyclic with two 10-second cycles, treating splitting the damage up over the whole cycle as a special effect. Since that's 100%, and that's the value for those bands, that's not an enhancement.
The 6-7 and 14-15 bands will be "Attack explodes into an icy fog that inflicts the same damage to everyone within 3 yards of the target". That's one and a half levels of Area Effect, basically, for 75%, so again it doesn't increase the price, since that's the right value for those bands.
The 8-9 and 12-13 bands will be "The attack scatters lethal shards of ice, dealing 2d of fragmentation damage centered on the target". That's a +30% enhancement. It's 5% over the value of the band, so that's a 2.5% enhancement.
Finally, we'll decide to make all Fordaetha's critical attacks add the Freezing Hazard enhancement. That's +20%, halved for only being on a critical.
So the final enhancement value of Fordaetha's special crit table is +20% (for being a different crit table) +30% (for the 3 and 18 "frozen statue" result) +2.5% (for the fragmentation result on 8-9 and 12-13 bands) +10% (for the general Freezing Hazard), for a final value of +62.5%.

What do people think?

[StevenH]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

Offhand, I'd call having a crit table with effects that were different than the standard, but no more powerful, would be a +20% enhancement, for much the same logic as the Based on Different Ability Score enhancement - even if it's not intrinsically more powerful than the base table, the ability to customize your ability to better synergize with other advantages is still useful.

Now, adding more powerful special effects gets trickier. I think Resistable is a good place to start when pricing this. I think it's safe to assume that someone with a special crit table is going to try to maximize their chance of critting, and try to keep their effective skill at 16, getting a crit on a 6 or better. That's effectively equivalent to an average person failing a roll on a stat+4 roll. Looking at Resistable, we find that that's a -50% limitation. We'll simplify that to halving the value, so that we don't start running into the -80% cap on limitations too fast. That's for an effect that happens any time you get a crit. Effects that happen only on one of the crit table bands should obviously cost less than that. I don't know the probabilities of the various bands coming up offhand - can anyone help out with that? Once we know that, it would just be a matter of applying the relevant Accessibility values to the already-halved values.


What do people think?

I think this is a very interesting idea. Very flexible, and satisfying for the player who is really thinking about their abilities/techniques. It has a lot of potential, and I look forward to seeing where this goes.

Using your methodology, is there anything stopping me from upping the power of the results from the middle of the bell curve? So instead of being "no result" (which always made me feel disappointed), could you bump it up to something equivalent to double damage? Or are you intrinsically limited by the die roll ranges you listed? I see a lot of potential for abuse where the player ups the power of the middle of the bell curve and ignores the edges in order to have a higher proportion of their criticals actually do major damage.

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by StevenH

Using your methodology, is there anything stopping me from upping the power of the results from the middle of the bell curve? So instead of being "no result" (which always made me feel disappointed), could you bump it up to something equivalent to double damage?

You can always put something more powerful than the default in one of the slots, it will just cost you extra as an enhancement. Double damage is effectively a +100% enhancement, so putting it in the 10-11 band, where the default value is 0%, would cost 100%, halved for only applying on a critical, and then further limited if the 10-11 results were the only one it came up on. I think that 10-11 comes up 3/8ths of the time on 3d6, so 37% of the time. I don't have my books to hand right now, but I think that's a -40% Accessibility limitation. So the final value of "double damage on 10-11" would be +30%. Add in the base +20% for having a variant crit table, and you're looking at a +50% enhancement total.

Originally Posted by StevenH

I see a lot of potential for abuse where the player ups the power of the middle of the bell curve and ignores the edges in order to have a higher proportion of their criticals actually do major damage.

That's limited, I tihnk, by the middle values having smaller values to swap things out for, and coming up more often, resulting in them being worth less as an Accessibility limitation.

[Lupo]

Originally Posted by Gudiomen

I'm wondering if anyone has any alternate critical hits tables they made. Particularly for melee combat.

A simple "fix" could be to change the 9,10,11 results ("normal damage").
The other critical results are quite nice, only 9-11 is somewhat boring, because players expect more.

So you could say that results 9-11 grant "increased damage, as per All-out Attack (Strong)". It's not a big bonus, but this way every result on the Crit table will be "special".

Or perhaps a slightly more powerful option, "roll damage three times, and choose the best result". Usually the "three rolls" mechanic somehow 'thrills' the PCs.

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

So the final enhancement value of Fordaetha's special crit table is +20% (for being a different crit table) +30% (for the 3 and 18 "frozen statue" result) +2.5% (for the fragmentation result on 8-9 and 12-13 bands) +10% (for the general Freezing Hazard), for a final value of +62.5%.

What do people think?

I didn't understand where is that +62,5% applied... what is the base value?
Moreover: enhancers to results 3 and 18 should be VERY cheap. It's very unlikely they come up. If you don't discount them significantly, PCs are MUCH more likely to enhance the 9-11 results. I'd argue that a +1 damage to results 9-11 is more useful than "instant death" on results 3 and 18.