Crits on skill checks ruin the game because nothing becomes impossible, which ruins the story. You shouldn’t e.g. be able to jump infinitely high by rolling Athletics until a 20 comes out, assuming you want your world to, you know, have prisons in it.
Critical successes and failures can easily exist while still having the impossible be impossible, that’s the DMs job
Player rolls 20 on an intimidation check despite their roleplay being more awkward than intimidating? Critical success, because it’s funny and entertaining usually to do so and it’s theoretically possible anyway.
Player rolls 20 on a strength check to lift a giant iron gate? You did a really good job of trying, but no, you’re not strong enough to lift something 100x your size and weight
Nat 20 on trying to convince the king to give you his throne? He’s amused and either hires you as a jester, or let’s you have a literal replica of his chair.
I see Nat 20’s on skillchecks as “something good happens, but if it’s impossible then the good thing might not be what you expected”
one time the dungeon master planned a big dungeon crawl and put a wall with a tiny hole to look through in it so we can see the boss before fighting it
one guy wanted to roll for breaking the wall with his sword. got a nat 20. we fought the boss early haha
Not at all. A crit is never doing the impossible, it’s doing the best possible. A crit at first level isn’t going to one shot an elder dragon, but you’ll hit it and do some damage.
A crit trying to lift the castle’s giant, wrought iron portcullis isn’t going to lift it, but it just might help you realize one of the bars isn’t as firmly connected as it ought to be…
Does a crit on an attack automatically kill the attacked thing? Of course not, that would be absurd. Depending on the rules you’re using it either does max damage, or bonus damage. It also often is a successful hit even if the attacker would not successfully hit. It is the best outcome the attacker could hope to accomplish.
A crit success at a skill check is no different. You can not expect to convince the Dwarven kingdom that you, a human, are the long lost prince with a deception check any more than you can expect a first level rogue to sneak attack any noticable damage onto the Tarrasque. But you can score a hit, or convince them you believe you are the long lost prince and that maybe they need to find out why.
It sounds like what you think a crit anything is is pretty dumb. Success doesn’t begin and end at accomplishing the entirety of your goal with a thing. If it did we’re still going to have to make every combat crit a kill shot.
Flavor the failure to a success then: in an impossible feat of strength, you managed to lift the iron gate high enough for a small creature to crawl through.
Then, depending on how important this situation is for progressing the narrative (whether you as the DM want them to get through or not), you have options to build on their success. Do they have a small creature in their party? Will they be willing to split the party? Do they have the strength to continue holding it up or is there a risk someone would be crushed crawling under? Or maybe their crit success was enough to move it but not enough to hold it at all for a chance for any one to get through.
Semantics I guess. I see your point and don’t see a problem with a DM running things that way, but I don’t think there’s a problem with letting the players enjoy the idea of a critical success on their roll while keeping things functionally the same so as not to break the game.
In other words of what others have already said, a crit skill check isn’t making the impossible possible, it’s the best possible outcome you could hope for. Just like how a crit on a thing you can’t hit is the best you could hope for. You don’t instantly kill it, you just get a very good shot in.
You don’t convince the guard to let you go free, but maybe you manage to get him to believe you’re inept enough that he can go to the other room and have a nap.
I really like Pathfinder 2e’s graduated success model, where how much you beat the DC by matters. A crit bumps you up a success bracket, so if you roll a 20 on a DC 100 check, you still fail but it’s not an abject flop. It could be a success at great cost, or a failure without as great a penalty, and the move tells you which.
There are many.
Counterspell is way more interesting, for the reasons listed above and more.
The levels of success thing means if you crit, you can counter spells up to three levels higher than the spell slot you spent to cast counterspell.
Plus, it’s mechanically different based on which class you learned it under, and then you can customize the heck out of it with feats. The one that interested me the most out of the latter was one that lets you spend thematically opposing spells that you’ve prepared instead of one that’s identical to the spell you’re countering, like a water spell to counter a fire spell (comes down to GM’s decision to prevent game slowdown due to bickering).
I think a great analogy is Puss in Boots vs the giant of Del mar.
There’s no way a cat with a tiny needle for a sword would one-hit an 8 storey tall giant. But that Spanish splinter scene was a perfect example of a critical on a massively oversized creature.
While I agree that rules should be used more as guidelines, the last campaign I was in allowed crits on skill checks, and it my my lock (built partially around filling a “face” role, as everyone else min-maxed for combat) and I felt absolutely useless.
Our negative modifier int and cha barbarian player had a lot of lucky rolls, and thus was better than a cha based character with proficiencies in all the speaking skills…
I often felt left out of all aspects of the game really. Lock spell slots are limited, but is made up for by the short rests… If your party ever takes them. Bah.
That sounds like a few problems and there should at least be a discussion with the group about expectations before future campaigns.
But the inverse of a skill based build getting a lot of lucky combat rolls and outdoing the combat character is possible in the book. A good DM can and should mitigate skill crits but is kinda stuck on combat ones.
Not my first campaign, I started in 2E with my mom as the DM lol.
It was everyone else’s first time, including the DM.
Our first session zero had characters created and we were going to run the mines of phandelver. Except the entire party was evil aligned, and thought that meant they should just go straight murderhobo on anything that breathed, and ganged up on my gnome illusionist and murdered him. House rule, no evil aligned characters. Re rolled to lock with being a face in mind, based on the party composition - I decided to handle whatever hole popped up in the party, and just roll with it. I’m the type of player who has half a dozen character sheets generated just because they like character building, and being table top as opposed to a video game, backstories were relevant to the overall plot (in theory)
But whatever, had some fun, enjoyed the experience overall. Glad to see people interested in the game.
Just… the the player of the Barbarian had his own negative INT modifier to work with, if you catch my drift. No one else needed consistent help with the simple math involved of low level combat (and we got wasted the whole time, he didn’t drink for religious reasons) and no one else consistently made stupid decisions that were also completely out of character after like the second session. Yeah, there can be a bit of a learning curve, especially separating character from player, but it got pretty decent and OOC chatter had a gesture associated to it, so people would pop in and out of character and make meta commentary OOC to good comedic effect, enhancing the overall experience even though a poor decision was made, it was in character - at a certain point someone made the gesture and just said “I’m so sorry,” long story short a diplomatic situation that was being handled peacefully was interrupted by a consistently tardy wizard who was well educated, but lacking in wordly experience, and raised on tales of romanticized monster slaying and a very black and white view of morality threw everyone’s favorite problem sovler - fireball. We all cracked up as soon as he said sorry out loud. Poor tactical decision, completely in character, well accepted.
I’d do it again, just might not invite the barbarian and another person (attendance issues).
Sorry if it came off like I thought it was your first time. We all screw up sometimes, like I did with that comment lol
I’ve been playing since 2e as well. I took it that the rest of the table had different ideas and goals than you did. That’s almost never fun as I’m sure you know.
There’s no crits on skill checks in the book. Play how you want
Ok? The DC can be 15 in both scenarios.
Crits on skill checks ruin the game because nothing becomes impossible, which ruins the story. You shouldn’t e.g. be able to jump infinitely high by rolling Athletics until a 20 comes out, assuming you want your world to, you know, have prisons in it.
Critical successes and failures can easily exist while still having the impossible be impossible, that’s the DMs job
Player rolls 20 on an intimidation check despite their roleplay being more awkward than intimidating? Critical success, because it’s funny and entertaining usually to do so and it’s theoretically possible anyway.
Player rolls 20 on a strength check to lift a giant iron gate? You did a really good job of trying, but no, you’re not strong enough to lift something 100x your size and weight
Nat 20 on trying to convince the king to give you his throne? He’s amused and either hires you as a jester, or let’s you have a literal replica of his chair.
I see Nat 20’s on skillchecks as “something good happens, but if it’s impossible then the good thing might not be what you expected”
one time the dungeon master planned a big dungeon crawl and put a wall with a tiny hole to look through in it so we can see the boss before fighting it
one guy wanted to roll for breaking the wall with his sword. got a nat 20. we fought the boss early haha
You’d be a much more fun DM than the guy you’re responding to hahaha
Thats literally not a critical success though. Your example of doing critical successes right is not having critical successes
Not at all. A crit is never doing the impossible, it’s doing the best possible. A crit at first level isn’t going to one shot an elder dragon, but you’ll hit it and do some damage.
A crit trying to lift the castle’s giant, wrought iron portcullis isn’t going to lift it, but it just might help you realize one of the bars isn’t as firmly connected as it ought to be…
A critical success trying to lift the portcullis lifts the portcullis. If it doesn’t, you arent playing with critical successes.
Which is good, because they are dumb
But saying crit successes are fine because they can still fail, with other results? That’s not a crit success.
Does a crit on an attack automatically kill the attacked thing? Of course not, that would be absurd. Depending on the rules you’re using it either does max damage, or bonus damage. It also often is a successful hit even if the attacker would not successfully hit. It is the best outcome the attacker could hope to accomplish.
A crit success at a skill check is no different. You can not expect to convince the Dwarven kingdom that you, a human, are the long lost prince with a deception check any more than you can expect a first level rogue to sneak attack any noticable damage onto the Tarrasque. But you can score a hit, or convince them you believe you are the long lost prince and that maybe they need to find out why.
It sounds like what you think a crit anything is is pretty dumb. Success doesn’t begin and end at accomplishing the entirety of your goal with a thing. If it did we’re still going to have to make every combat crit a kill shot.
Flavor the failure to a success then: in an impossible feat of strength, you managed to lift the iron gate high enough for a small creature to crawl through.
Then, depending on how important this situation is for progressing the narrative (whether you as the DM want them to get through or not), you have options to build on their success. Do they have a small creature in their party? Will they be willing to split the party? Do they have the strength to continue holding it up or is there a risk someone would be crushed crawling under? Or maybe their crit success was enough to move it but not enough to hold it at all for a chance for any one to get through.
Thats not a critical success. You are describing a normal DM response to a high roll.
If its a crit success, they succeed in their attempted goal
Semantics I guess. I see your point and don’t see a problem with a DM running things that way, but I don’t think there’s a problem with letting the players enjoy the idea of a critical success on their roll while keeping things functionally the same so as not to break the game.
In other words of what others have already said, a crit skill check isn’t making the impossible possible, it’s the best possible outcome you could hope for. Just like how a crit on a thing you can’t hit is the best you could hope for. You don’t instantly kill it, you just get a very good shot in.
You don’t convince the guard to let you go free, but maybe you manage to get him to believe you’re inept enough that he can go to the other room and have a nap.
I really like Pathfinder 2e’s graduated success model, where how much you beat the DC by matters. A crit bumps you up a success bracket, so if you roll a 20 on a DC 100 check, you still fail but it’s not an abject flop. It could be a success at great cost, or a failure without as great a penalty, and the move tells you which.
Well that sounds like a great reason to look at Pathfinder 2e
There are many.
Counterspell is way more interesting, for the reasons listed above and more.
The levels of success thing means if you crit, you can counter spells up to three levels higher than the spell slot you spent to cast counterspell.
Plus, it’s mechanically different based on which class you learned it under, and then you can customize the heck out of it with feats. The one that interested me the most out of the latter was one that lets you spend thematically opposing spells that you’ve prepared instead of one that’s identical to the spell you’re countering, like a water spell to counter a fire spell (comes down to GM’s decision to prevent game slowdown due to bickering).
I think a great analogy is Puss in Boots vs the giant of Del mar.
There’s no way a cat with a tiny needle for a sword would one-hit an 8 storey tall giant. But that Spanish splinter scene was a perfect example of a critical on a massively oversized creature.
That’s not how crit skill checks work, so no wonder you don’t like your version of them, your version does suck.
It’s role play, not roll play. Don’t be a metagaming ass and just have fun
While I agree that rules should be used more as guidelines, the last campaign I was in allowed crits on skill checks, and it my my lock (built partially around filling a “face” role, as everyone else min-maxed for combat) and I felt absolutely useless.
Our negative modifier int and cha barbarian player had a lot of lucky rolls, and thus was better than a cha based character with proficiencies in all the speaking skills…
I often felt left out of all aspects of the game really. Lock spell slots are limited, but is made up for by the short rests… If your party ever takes them. Bah.
That sounds like a few problems and there should at least be a discussion with the group about expectations before future campaigns.
But the inverse of a skill based build getting a lot of lucky combat rolls and outdoing the combat character is possible in the book. A good DM can and should mitigate skill crits but is kinda stuck on combat ones.
Regardless, I’m sorry you had a crap time.
Not my first campaign, I started in 2E with my mom as the DM lol.
It was everyone else’s first time, including the DM.
Our first session zero had characters created and we were going to run the mines of phandelver. Except the entire party was evil aligned, and thought that meant they should just go straight murderhobo on anything that breathed, and ganged up on my gnome illusionist and murdered him. House rule, no evil aligned characters. Re rolled to lock with being a face in mind, based on the party composition - I decided to handle whatever hole popped up in the party, and just roll with it. I’m the type of player who has half a dozen character sheets generated just because they like character building, and being table top as opposed to a video game, backstories were relevant to the overall plot (in theory)
But whatever, had some fun, enjoyed the experience overall. Glad to see people interested in the game.
Just… the the player of the Barbarian had his own negative INT modifier to work with, if you catch my drift. No one else needed consistent help with the simple math involved of low level combat (and we got wasted the whole time, he didn’t drink for religious reasons) and no one else consistently made stupid decisions that were also completely out of character after like the second session. Yeah, there can be a bit of a learning curve, especially separating character from player, but it got pretty decent and OOC chatter had a gesture associated to it, so people would pop in and out of character and make meta commentary OOC to good comedic effect, enhancing the overall experience even though a poor decision was made, it was in character - at a certain point someone made the gesture and just said “I’m so sorry,” long story short a diplomatic situation that was being handled peacefully was interrupted by a consistently tardy wizard who was well educated, but lacking in wordly experience, and raised on tales of romanticized monster slaying and a very black and white view of morality threw everyone’s favorite problem sovler - fireball. We all cracked up as soon as he said sorry out loud. Poor tactical decision, completely in character, well accepted.
I’d do it again, just might not invite the barbarian and another person (attendance issues).
Sorry if it came off like I thought it was your first time. We all screw up sometimes, like I did with that comment lol
I’ve been playing since 2e as well. I took it that the rest of the table had different ideas and goals than you did. That’s almost never fun as I’m sure you know.
I’m glad there were some good times