If you’ve listened to a few episodes of the podcast, you’ve no doubt heard us talk about the critical miss rule that wiped out half a party. That was based on a whole critical hit system that wasn’t actually a terrible idea, but it got out of hand.
To follow up on this week’s episode about Rolling the Dice, here’s how the old Penndel Critical Hit System worked, where it eventually went wrong, and how I think you could still save it (for any D&D edition, really) by making some tweaks.
Old-School Killers
This critical hit table comes from DM Tony’s old group, who welcomed me as a new player a few years later. So, this goes WAAAAY back to our high school days.
They were playing “AD&D 1.5 Edition,” which meant it was a hybrid of 1E and 2E rules, but the crit system can really fit into any D&D edition or similar system – if you share its core conceit: Anything can die from any hit at any time.
Anything can die from any hit at any time.
A lot of the players were in some martial arts training, and some were a little older and had spent time in the military. So, in general, their feeling was that combat should be deadlier than the books made it out to be. In real combat, any hit with a weapon can potentially be a killing blow, so any RPG combat system should allow for the possibility of instant-death due to a very skillful or lucky hit.
At heart, I don’t think that’s a bad policy, as long as everyone is on board with it. And the way the system worked made instant death very, very rare anyway (I never actually saw one).
Big Crits, Big Hits!
What I’m calling the Penndel Critical Hit System (because we used it in Penndel Pennsylvania, which is just outside Philadelphia) worked like this: If you roll a critical hit, you then rolled a D4. On a 1-3, it just does double damage, including bonuses – you roll the base damage dice, add your bonuses and double it.
So, if you critted with a 2-handed sword on a large creature (2E, baby! large-size damage), the roll would be (3d6+12,)x2. With an average roll of 11, that’s 46 damage.
That’s already a BIG HIT! Even in those days.
But if you roll a 4 on the D4, then you go onto the expanded critical hit chart: Roll a D100
- 1-49: Still x2 damage
- 50-74: x3 damage
- 75-89: x4 damage
- 90-99: x5 damage
- 100: Instant Death
One thing that jumps out is this chart offers the CHANCE to increase damage more than the reality of it. Only about 1 in 8 crits wind up doing more than double damage. There’s also some disagreement about whether bonuses were doubled (but in the game I played, they definitely were). I never personally saw an instant death rolled.
Of course, what’s good for the players is good for the NPCs, so we took some massive crits back, too.
Missing the Point
To be honest, the critical hit chart worked OK. You decimated the BBEG in a few turns every now and then, or you occasionally had players get taken from like 15 hp to -100 in one shot, but everyone was pretty much OK with that. The rule reflected the values of the table.
The problem was, we mirrored the table for critical misses. Meaning, if you rolled a 1, then you had to roll a d4. And if you rolled a 1 on that, then … you critical hit a random ally.
Let me be clear: You did not make an attack roll on a random ally, you straight-up critical hit them. The hit went directly onto the expanded critical D100 chart.
And we rolled the target randomly. If the Wizard was standing in the backline and their number came up, the sword slipped out of the barbarian’s hand and went flying back to impale that frail caster, no attack roll or save.
Now, part of the problem with that is wizards and other backliners are often optimized for AC rather than HP. And this critical miss system totally ignored AC! It didn’t matter if you were hidden with a -10 AC (that’s like a 20 AC in 5E), that sword went right down your throat like you’d been hit by a natural 20! No saves, no dodges, just a crit to the face from one of your fellow PCs.
What’s a dead character between friends, right?
For lower-level thieves, wizards, bards and some clerics, that was usually instant death.
The Math of Critical Misses
The whole thing became even more problematic in a 2E system where your average PC started off with about 10 HP, but optimized martial classes were getting 2 or 3 attacks a round at 1st level. Combat also tended to run quick, so you’d make like 6 rounds of attacks. and move on to get another 4 or 5 fights in.
That’s about 15 rolls per melee character per combat, more for a longer battle, and each roll has a 1-in-20 chance of being a 1. That means each martial character is probably going to roll at least one 1 critical miss per combat, with a 1-in-4 chance of that miss critically hitting a comrade for at least double damage.
If you have 4 martial characters in your party, there’s a good chance one of your PCs gets hit by another PC in any combat encounter. If you run 6 combats a session, there’s a good chance one of those misses kills a squishy PC each session.
Tony ran one game with a hyper-optimized elven archer out of the 2E Elven handbook. This guy got 4 attacks per round at low levels with massive archer damage bonuses. His critical misses alone gunned down half the party before 3rd level!
Dexterity-based characters became nigh unplayable because you needed to put those points into constitution. No matter what you were playing or how hard it was to hit, you had to be able to withstand at least one of the archers SCUD missile arrows!
As DM Tony lamented: “Critical misses killed more of my players than all of my monsters combined.”
Can We Save It?
If you’re inclined to homebrew a more deadly critical hit and critical miss system, honestly, this isn’t a bad way to do it.
On the critical hit side, players get to make some exciting rolls and there’s the CHANCE they’ll do crazy damage, but it’s not too likely. It also really raises the tension when a BBEG rolls its own 20.
The critical miss system needs to be toned WAY down. We’ve talked at length about why critical misses are a problem for the DM. (“It’s hard enough not killing you idiots by accident, the last thing I need is you killing each other!”) But we had players who really wanted that extra risk, and there is some truth to the idea that swinging weapons around each other wildly should be dangerous.
It certainly adds a downside to multiple attacks!
The simple change I’d make is to have a critical miss followed by a 1 on the D4 lead to an attack roll against a random ally rather than immediately going to a crit. At that point, the attack should be treated as normal: If it misses, it misses. If it hits, it hits. If it crits, THEN, and only then, is it doing jacked-up critical damage.
The Homebrewer’s Lesson
Math is hard. (And we Wise DMs are very bad at it!) Sometimes a mechanic that looks properly balanced on paper doesn’t work out that way in practice simply because we can’t properly visualize how the odds and frequencies will play out.
A critical hit table that seemed to dole out totally reasonable critical hits turned into a PC meat grinder when we used it as a critical miss mechanic. The DMs ran the numbers and swore a critical hit on a comrade should be rare. But once you totaled up the sheer number of attacks being rolled, that rare scenario was happening every session.
On the other hand, it did make for some great stories and fun. (Having said that, it was definitely the kind of fun that got old fast, and I would not want to do it again.)
Don’t be afraid to mix things up with your own homebrew tables like this, just be aware that the math might need more adjustment than you think, and be ready to adjust when the homebrew doesn’t play out like you planned at the table.