Help a noobie understand critical hits

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

The interesting thing is how people here say "the other game" like saying "he who must not be named" or "you know who" like it's voldemort or something.

I noticed people on the forum doing it back when I joined, and thought it was funny. I'll also sometimes abbreviate it to TOG. D&D is a behemoth in the hobby, so sometimes it's just fun to refer to it like some evil Dark Lord.

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

No, I don't need to give luck as a free advantage, as gm I can re roll any bad roll I want to.

Part of the benefit of Luck (from the standpoint of the table as a whole) is the fact it's limited use. When a PC suffers from an unlucky result, Luck bails them out... but then they cannot count on luck again for some time (an hour of playtime for Luck; you can either shorten the delay or allow more uses within an hour with further levels, I believe the default is the latter), and so need to approach things a bit differently while their Plot Armor is recharging (typically this means being more cautious, but some players may instead opt to go for broke to try to end the confrontation as quickly as possible before another unlucky result crops up). But with that said, if Luck doesn't get you what you want, you'll need a different approach. And, yes, your nerf guns are an option, we're largely just trying to make certain your players will be OK with such.

Originally Posted by Anthony

I think you mean "invitation to be disarmed". Unless it's a John Wick film, guns are for taking out extras.

No, I mean Instant Death Wands. When a protagonist shoots someone, the target typically dies. The exceptions are generally when the target is functionally bulletproof and when the protagonist does not, in fact, shoot their target (and the in-between Grazing Wound). Making firearms 1d pi or 2d(2) pi means that when the PC hits a foe, that foe is much less affected by the hit than the players will typically expect. Armed characters being disarmed for purposes of having a fistfight is a different situation (which isn't limited to firearms, there are plenty of fights in media where the unarmed character readily disarms the swordsman; heck, you'll have fights where both characters start out armed, one gets disarmed, then easily disarms the other... or even cases where an unarmed character disarms an armed one, gets a weapon of their own - possibly the one they just took from the formerly-armed character - and is promptly disarmed in turn). A cinematic option would be to give unarmed characters sizable bonuses to defenses against armed ones, disallow Deceptive Attack from armed characters against unarmed ones (maybe even require them to use Telegraphic Attack), and basically not allow characters with ranged weapons to use them beyond their foe's reach, or at least suffer sizable penalties to do so (basically a variant of Unarmed Etiquette).

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

That is highly unlikely. That being said, when I design superheroes I design them with Luck, HT 15+, hard to kill or unkillable.

One of the examples of the problem was a character taking a headshot from a 9mm pistol, which gives a very similar result (2d+2 pi vs Skull results in only 4 more HP of wounding than 2d(2) pi vs Skull). So if that's an indication that the wounding system is broken, the proposed fix leaves the wounding system still broken, because the same thing can still happen. Of course, a big part of that is that the Skull is an extremely-valuable target to hit (but also extremely hard to hit), and it seems one would expect a hit to the brain to have serious repercussions. Heck, even in games where melee does markedly more damage than most firearms, a headshot will almost invariably insta-kill the target (unless it's an anemic hit, which typically calls for a combination of a lower-damage weapon and long range). If Skull (and Vitals) hits give results you don't want... don't target the Skull (or Vitals).