Houserule Idea - always resist with critical success instead of Rule of 16

[the_matrix_walker]

Originally Posted by Yako

I have been actively GMing GURPS for a while and I have to say, I often find my players struggling with the Rule of 16.
And since I myself have a bit of mixed feelings on it, I have been thinking of how to maybe deal with it in a better way.

I understand that the intend of the rule is to not make Malediction type abilities, including spells waltz over people, however, what I find it really does is this: The rule of 16 makes Will / Health 16 a hard set value which, baring afflictions which are both malediction AND give a penalty to the resistance roll (I haven't seen any of those yet), gives you a better than 50% chance (since ties are in your favour) to resist any attack of this type flung at you.
I don't really like this hard set border.
With an average Joe opponent, Rule of sixteen means that if his opponent rolls a ten, he resists at 4 or lower, a critical success, so to say.
Given how rare crits are, this seems like a fair "doesn't always work" for average cases.
On the other hand however, the higher the opponents Wil or Health, the harder the rule hits you, making it quit akin to a wild swing to "maledict" anyone with 16 or higher Will / Health.
Is that really a good solution?

My idea would be to shake up this dynamic in the following way:
A critical success (including easier crits for highly skilled characters) always means you resist it.
First, what this does is even give a chance of success to really low Will / Health characters, after all 3 and 4 always are crits.
Secondly, In the average case, it protects Will / Health 10 characters as well as the rule of 16.
Thirdly, it does give some degree of insurmountable protection to the high Will / Health characters, after all, they can at best have around a 10% chance to crit.

For me, it quite resolves anything I dislike about the current situation, however, I would like to get some opinions on how far you think this might unbalance a game.
After all, a +10 reliable Malediction 3 allows you 90%+ odds to afflict anyone in your line of sight who doesn't have an immensly high resisting attribute.
On the other hand, you can have the same with the cosmic modifier in tow that lets you ignore the rule of 16 (and give you absolute odds) in the current rules, so, it seems to be a case of what modifiers to allow anyway.

SO, anyway, what are your views?

I would assume any critical success on a resistance roll is already a success, so I'm not sure what your change is, other than just throwing out the rule of 16 (which I don't recommend).

You also mention a +10 reliable Affliction, but Affliction is a Ranged Attack (even with Malediction) So unless you have a house-rule for this, you can't put Reliable on an Affliction anyway. Doing this might be contributing to your frustration!