Critical on a 4?

[GodlessRose]

Just a curiosity question: why is a four always a critical success, regardless of how low the effective skill is? It's asymmetrical with the rule for critical failure.

[ArchonShiva]

I'm almost certain that 4 isn't a critical success if it's a failure (i.e. effective skill 3). At any rate, make 4 a critical success only on skill 5+ and you've got symmetry with no significant game effect.

[Anaraxes]

The symmetrical rule would call for 4 not to be a crit when your effective skill was 5 or less. It wouldn't come up a lot. Much lower than that, and you're not allowed to roll at all. On the other end of the scale, skill above 15 is not uncommon, and the crit range reduction allows the extremely skilled characters to actually be seen as better than those with lower skill on the same task.

Getting lucky and succeeding is appropriately heroic for most genres. Getting unlucky and seeming to be randomly and disastrously incompetent in your areas of purported expertise is not.

[robkelk]

Originally Posted by GodlessRose

Just a curiosity question: why is a four always a critical success, regardless of how low the effective skill is? It's asymmetrical with the rule for critical failure.

Perhaps succeeding with low skill is more fun than failing with high skill is.

[GodlessRose]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

The symmetrical rule would call for 4 not to be a crit when your effective skill was 5 or less. It wouldn't come up a lot. Much lower than that, and you're not allowed to roll at all.

Yeah, I thought it might have been left out simply because it wouldn't come up enough to be worth mentioning. (Defense rolls can be attempted with an effective skill below 3, though.) But then I started wondering if handling crits symmetrically would cause problems somewhere. Again, I'm just curious.

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Getting lucky and succeeding is appropriately heroic for most genres. Getting unlucky and seeming to be randomly and disastrously incompetent in your areas of purported expertise is not.

True, but if it were handled symmetrically we would only be looking at about a 1.4% drop in the odds of a critical success when it came up, and we wouldn't have the odd situations where you can't succeed without critically succeeding.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by GodlessRose

I started wondering if handling crits symmetrically would cause problems somewhere.

I don't think anything will break, no. And it's easy enough to make the rule symmetrical.

Though I expect most players, when faced with enough modifiers to turn their skill into an effective 4 or 5, will find another approach to solving their problem. It's not like the extra 1.4 points will make them decide to chance the roll, or losing those make them decide it's not worth it.

[thulben]

Originally Posted by GodlessRose

True, but if it were handled symmetrically we would only be looking at about a 1.4% drop in the odds of a critical success when it came up, and we wouldn't have the odd situations where you can't succeed without critically succeeding.

Sometimes that's exactly what you want. Just think of the story the player will tell: "remember that one time when there was no way I could do that thing and then *bam!* I rolled a crit success!" If you're not actively aiming for memorable moments like those, you're just not living (tongue removed from cheek).

[GodlessRose]

Originally Posted by thulben

Sometimes that's exactly what you want. Just think of the story the player will tell: "remember that one time when there was no way I could do that thing and then *bam!* I rolled a crit success!"

Makes sense. Maybe that was part of the thought process behind the rule. A symmetrical handling of critical successes with low skill would rarely matter, it would add a little more text to the Basic Set, and it might be less fun in the rare cases where it did matter.