How Do You Feel Rolling a Crit?: Sly Flourish
How Do You Feel Rolling a Crit?: Sly Flourish
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How Do You Feel Rolling a Crit?
When you roll a critical hit for a monster attacking a character, how do you feel about it? Does it feel awesome? Does it feel like justice? Do you feel guilty about the crit? Do you enjoy the suspense and heightened tension it brings? What about when players roll a critical hit on a monster? Does t
My current soft house rule which I haven't been able to put into effect yet is that monsters don't crit unless I state it's an exception.
Until the party is level 3, I'm probably never going to have a monster who can crit, as many monster could at least knock a pc from full to unconscious, if not dead at this level. After that, I'm going to basically make it a tag as and when it feels right for the monster. Bruisers like gnolls, and other narrative damage dealers like assassin's can crit, and any boss with narrative importance probably can, because it will make them feel scary.
If I were writing this RPG, I'd probably have monsters not be able to crit, but then have some monsters be able to, and even have an expanded crit range (with a small overalls damage reduction across the board), but as I'm not designing this game, I'm pretty happy keeping it casual and nebulous, as long as my players are.
Do your players know about this or do you keep it under your hat?
In the game that I'm currently running, I started making most of my rolls in the open, so the players can see the attack rolls as they happen. I have really liked the results. There is a lot more anticipation as they watch the rolls. We see crits at the same time and I don't feel bad about them, and neither do they. They also see the modifiers for the rolls, which I think adds an oh shit element to the combat. Most importantly though, and the reason I did this, is that they see the saving throws vs their spells. Now I don't feel bad about saving on a one target spell and they don't have any question about me fudging a roll or not. Overall I think it has been much better and I intend to continue.
In my regular game, we rotate DMs and outside of that,, we often play other systems so I haven't put this into practice yet because I haven't had the chance to.
But I plan to tell my players, I generally roll about ½ in the open and ½ behind the screen, practically arbitrarily based on how I feel. Beyond that, I also on rare occasion fudge in the players favour, only really on saving throws against a player's cool new option or the contested grapple that preludes a cool tactic, and I feel this rule favours rolling in the open.
Also when it's an enemy that can crit, I intend to tell my players before combat, but they'll forgive me if I forget.