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Old 02-05-2022, 07:07 AM   #1
Kesendeja
 
Join Date: Jul 2013
Default Please help price two Critical related advantages

I’d like some help pricing two advantages, mostly because I feel I may have undervalued them in my last campaign.

The first is, for lack of a better name, Improved Critical Result. It comes in two levels and each allows you to move your rolled result up or down by a +/- 1 on the chart. I had it priced at 10cp and 20cp respectively.

The second may already exist, but if so I can’t find it. Improved Critical Range gives a +1 to the critical of any one skill, to a maximum of 7. We treated it as a perk that had to be bought per skill.

Both were a direct result of players in my game. One was a player who was truly cursed by the spirits of the dice. In twenty-six, four hour sessions he rolled maybe 4 criticals in combat, and of those three were 9, 10, & 11 result level. He could critical on totally meaningless filler rolls easily though. The second was a player who rolled an exorbitant number of sevens, and almost never managed to critical on any roll.
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Old 02-05-2022, 07:58 AM   #2
Shuckster
 
Join Date: Nov 2014
Location: Near Chicago
Default Re: Please help price two Critical related advantages

Since higher skill levels improve your critical threshold with a skill of under 15 means 3 or 4 count as a critical success, while a skill of 16 means a roll of 3-5 counts and and at a skill of 16+ a roll of 3-6 counts as a critical success this advantage is kind of already, but if I just wanted more crits and didn't want to invest in higher skill levels you can sorta see how 20 points for say... twenty or thirty skills is always going to cost far less than upping that threashold individually. Also since a crit sucess in combat can't be defended against it would be quite game breaking to increase the crit threshold any higher than that 9.3% in any event.

Instead I'd use advantages like the higher levels of Luck to compensate for this and maybe modify it to specifically effect skill rolls since re-rolling or even just declaiming success a certain number of times is possible
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Old 02-05-2022, 08:01 AM   #3
Fred Brackin
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Default Re: Please help price two Critical related advantages

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kesendeja View Post
I’d like some help pricing two advantages, mostly because I feel I may have undervalued them in my last campaign.

The first is, for lack of a better name, Improved Critical Result. It comes in two levels and each allows you to move your rolled result up or down by a +/- 1 on the chart. I had it priced at 10cp and 20cp respectively.

The second may already exist, but if so I can’t find it. Improved Critical Range gives a +1 to the critical of any one skill, to a maximum of 7. We treated it as a perk that had to be bought per skill.
In my own experience rolling dice in Gurps the first is not really worth what 10 or 20 pts. It was indeed frustrating that so many rolled critical results were insignificant compared to the auto-hit and the damage it did but changing dice by 1 or 2 wouldn't actually do that much. 9-11 is literally nothing extra but 8 or 13 are not very useful to someone who's already doing a Major Wound and 12 (Drop held object) is probably not that important compared to having taken a Major Wound. Knockdown d Stunning already includes dropping whatever. Critical Hits and Major Wounds frequently win fights.

So i'd never spend my 20 pts on this. You can buy a lot of really good things with 20 pts.

The second one is drastically underpriced. Going back to critical hits winning fights this just makes those fight-winning hits come much sooner on average. I'd buy this automatically.

So for a start reverse your pricing scheme if you really want to keep these. 1pt to move the Critical Results, 20 pts to increase the odds of scoring a crit.
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Old 02-05-2022, 08:14 AM   #4
johndallman
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Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
Default Re: Please help price two Critical related advantages

I created an extended critical scheme for my Infinite Cabal campaign that seemed to work OK. I didn't actually tell the players about it, although I would have applied it if relevant - I don't think that ever happened.

It's entirely standard up to skill 16 giving you a critical on a 6 or less. You then need skill 27 to get a critical on a 7, skill 38 to get one on an 8 and 49 to get one on a 9, which really was the maximum. That costs 44 points per extra level of critical, although you do get all the other benefits of ridiculous skill levels.

One NPC who worked as a backroom researcher could get to Mathematics-27 on a good day with a following wind.

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Old 02-05-2022, 08:53 AM   #5
Kromm
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Default Re: Please help price two Critical related advantages

You might want to look at Every One's a Critical in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Denizens: Swashbucklers (p. 26). Its rationale is as important as its stats, so it may or may not work "as is" in all genres. Given its prerequisites, it's likely fine in a genre where people are routinely launching Deceptive Attacks that give -5, -10, or more to enemy defenses.

I consider the soft cap on the price of critical-hit enhancements to be 40 points. For that, you can be invisible and just stab defenseless people all the time. Anything less good, with less noncombat utility, should cost quite a bit less. I'd put the floor at 8-10 points.
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Old 02-05-2022, 09:21 AM   #6
malloyd
 
Join Date: Jun 2006
Default Re: Please help price two Critical related advantages

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kesendeja View Post
The first is, for lack of a better name, Improved Critical Result. It comes in two levels and each allows you to move your rolled result up or down by a +/- 1 on the chart. I had it priced at 10cp and 20cp respectively.
Since the only critical that even has a table is for weapon hits, you're mainly looking at this stuff for combat effects. That seems fair.

If you want a mechanical argument, critical hits don't come up all that often, so it probably doesn't trigger more often than Super Luck, which would let you pick any result on the table, only this one table is clearly more limited than aspected, there are 13 entries on the table, so on average 7 or 8 levels of move one line will let you pick from most or all of them, 100-20+%/7 or 8 is around 10.

Quote:
The second may already exist, but if so I can’t find it.
It doesn't, and messing with critical probabilities mostly doesn't have a really great track record among people who have done it - it tends to be either "useless" or "overpowered", with few people expressing an opinion it improved anything.

Still, for a combat skill, going from a 6 to a 7 is a critical hit amounts to a 7% extra chance you can ignore defenses. That's a fairly significant penetration modifier (compare a largish Area of Effect the target couldn't dive out of, with a Selective Effect only to him) but it only comes up 7% of the time. Applied linearly it to an Innate Attack, it's worth a bit less than 1 point per die of damage, so assuming you are applying it to a typical hand weapon skill that gets 2d or so, 1 or 2 points is probably fair enough. If you are applying it to Guns skill, maybe 5 points.

Incidentally, one rule that I've noticed a lot of people don't pick up on is that RAW getting a critical hit does not mean you get to roll on the Critical Hit Table. That comes up only if you roll a natural 3 or 4. Other critical hits, caused by higher skills, or modifiers take you into the critical range, just get the penetration benefit. In truth there's an argument to be made that the Critical Hit Table is superfluous, especially if you are using the rule on p.B326 where a 3 does maximum damage - that'll supercede a lot of the Critical Hit Table results for the 1 time in 4 it was a 3 that took you to the table.
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Old 02-05-2022, 09:46 AM   #7
malloyd
 
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Default Re: Please help price two Critical related advantages

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Originally Posted by Kromm View Post
I consider the soft cap on the price of critical-hit enhancements to be 40 points. For that, you can be invisible and just stab defenseless people all the time.
Or boost your weapon skill by 10 and always Deceptive Attack for -5 - which will knock even pretty god-like defense rolls down half the time, not to mention the benefits of any [other] uses of high skills.

Frankly I'd encourage a player who wanted to drop a lot of points into "better criticals" to buy up skill instead. You can see that doing something every fight. The reason a lot of people who have implemented slightly improved critical ranges complain it didn't matter is that, well, the 7% chance you rolled a 7 exactly isn't great odds. It's easy to go through several fights without having it turn up at all, which makes the points you paid for it to be something special look useless.
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Old 02-05-2022, 11:09 AM   #8
Kesendeja
 
Join Date: Jul 2013
Default Re: Please help price two Critical related advantages

Seems that my players routinely broke probability.

I didn't know that you only used the chart on a 3 or 4, I thought it was any critical.

I was also under the impression that the maximum critical rate was a 6. Could you explain how it works otherwise?
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Old 02-05-2022, 12:01 PM   #9
WingedKagouti
 
Join Date: Oct 2007
Default Re: Please help price two Critical related advantages

Quote:
Originally Posted by malloyd View Post
Incidentally, one rule that I've noticed a lot of people don't pick up on is that RAW getting a critical hit does not mean you get to roll on the Critical Hit Table. That comes up only if you roll a natural 3 or 4.
I am not sure what book you picked that up in, but
Quote:
Originally Posted by B347
A critical hit is a critical success scored on an attack. The GM does not determine the result. Instead, use the Critical Hit Table (p. 556).
That page (and the following) has no mention of not using the critical hit table if you roll a 5 (with skill 15+) or 6 (with skill 16+).
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Old 02-05-2022, 02:07 PM   #10
Kesendeja
 
Join Date: Jul 2013
Default Re: Please help price two Critical related advantages

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kromm View Post
You might want to look at Every One's a Critical in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Denizens: Swashbucklers (p. 26). Its rationale is as important as its stats, so it may or may not work "as is" in all genres. Given its prerequisites, it's likely fine in a genre where people are routinely launching Deceptive Attacks that give -5, -10, or more to enemy defenses.

I consider the soft cap on the price of critical-hit enhancements to be 40 points. For that, you can be invisible and just stab defenseless people all the time. Anything less good, with less noncombat utility, should cost quite a bit less. I'd put the floor at 8-10 points.
It's perfect, thank you.

I should clarify one thing about Improved Crilical Result. Each level shifts the number rolled by one. So if you had one level of it and rolled a 14, you could take the result of a 13, 14 or 15.
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