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Going Critical
22 Plays23 days ago
In this episode, Mark and Ben talk about the highs and lows of critical results. Whether it's a natural 20, an exploding damage die, or an incredible result on an old school crit chart, these extraordinary results can create extraordinary moments at your table. Join us as we discuss various options for critical success, and some of the pitfalls to watch out for when your dice turn on the players as well.
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Transcript
Playful Puns and Comedy Styles
00:00:02
Speaker
pro um
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Speaker
ah
00:00:18
Speaker
Not a good time to lose one his head. Indeed. That's not the way to get a ahead in life. No.
00:00:28
Speaker
It's shame he wasn't more headstrong.
00:00:32
Speaker
You'll never be the head of a major corporation. Okay, that will do. Okay. Tune up. Level up your fun. Tune Your quest has now begun.
00:00:45
Speaker
Tune up. We'll show you how it's done.
00:01:03
Speaker
I promise you it was not coordinated, but I tell you, Mark, I've been watching Austin Powers this week and that movie feels like it's both dated and holds up well.
00:01:13
Speaker
God, it's great. Like, so funny. So funny. You know what? It's it's great. um I was watching something about him talking about Austin Powers and kind of the joke process in there.
00:01:27
Speaker
He likes to beat a joke till it's not funny anymore and then keep telling the joke until you start laughing again. Yeah. Like, like he's, you've killed it and then he somehow revives it and it just becomes funnier.
00:01:40
Speaker
Mike Myers is a special comedic talent. One of the things I noticed is that he would let a take go until it got a little uncomfortable. No, he's going sit there and you're going to watch it.
00:01:52
Speaker
So good stuff.
Introduction to Tabletop Gaming
00:01:54
Speaker
Welcome back to tabletop tune up this week. We are going to talk about going critical. Critical tables, critical cards, critical dice damage, all kinds of critical things can happen if there's a special success.
00:02:07
Speaker
My name is Ben Dyer. I'm here with my co-host, Mark Lehman, as always. Hello, hello. It's time talk about crits.
Critical Hits: Excitement and Unpredictability
00:02:16
Speaker
Mark, some people might wonder why it is that you would talk about this concept. When we think about the pros and cons here, like why wouldn't somebody want to crit? I mean, i I love the idea of when I roll a natural 20 or when I roll, ah you know, whatever the relevant dice mechanic is that all of a sudden now I am doing extra special. I'm doing a great job.
00:02:40
Speaker
Whatever it is, I've got my moment of glory. As a GM, you know it adds that kind of narrative flair to to action. Gets some good highs that you wouldn't normally get.
00:02:52
Speaker
so you get these emotional peaks. And if you use fumbles, cri fumles you get those valleys as well. Yeah, I think people that don't like critical tables, they tend to be people who also don't like it being done to them.
00:03:05
Speaker
it can be kind of demoralizing when you take crit. It certainly can. it's It can be humbling. But, you know, a lot of times on that on the con side for GMs, a crit can add a lot of chaos and something unpredictable to the table.
00:03:22
Speaker
And if you're, like, not good at managing that kind of chaos, maybe just taking crits out makes the game flow a little easier for you.
Implementing and Balancing Critical Hits
00:03:33
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of different ways people do crits. So um let's talk about some of those options, because if you're thinking to yourself, well, hey, I might need to make some adjustments or I'm not really sure how to manage that table chaos.
00:03:46
Speaker
The good news is if one version of criticals doesn't work for you, there might be others that do so. Let's actually kind of work our way down the list here. We've got some different ideas for how criticals show up. And this is drawn from all kinds of different games.
00:03:59
Speaker
And for my money, I think they're interchangeable, right? Like in D&D, a crit is normally extra damage, but you could change it for a different kind of mechanic if you wanted to. I can't think of something in the game that's probably more house ruled than crits.
00:04:13
Speaker
Oh, interesting. I mean, it seems like people have various ways they handle crits. Yeah, let's let's talk about some of those. One way that they do that, as we've just mentioned, is with extra damage.
00:04:24
Speaker
So let's say you roll whatever your top dice result would be to hit, ah then extra damage is a way to do that. You can roll ah more dice, you can do extra fixed static damage. There's lots of different options here,
00:04:40
Speaker
Like the classic, you know, five E D and D is that you double the dice that you roll. Now I even see house rules where people say we max the first dice just so you don't have that little bit of famine in that second dice.
00:04:55
Speaker
Right. Yeah. If you've if you've got a 1d6 damage strike and then you roll 2d6 and you roll two ones, it feels it feels like you have a kind of anticlimactic crit if you do damage that is lower than the top end of the unmodified range.
00:05:13
Speaker
So that's that's something I see quite often though, where they just max the first dice, just so you hit a baseline. So you don't get that exact kind of feeling that you just described. Another thing people do is they'll have critical tables or I've also seen critical
Strategic Depth with Meta Currency
00:05:27
Speaker
card decks. The idea is you've got a essentially kind of a randomized, but also escalating level of critical damage that somebody might take. So yeah kind of the classic example of this was in Rollmaster, but I've also seen this done in the FFG Star Wars where they do criticals there.
00:05:43
Speaker
And when you hit critically, you're gonna roll some dice. And then the higher the dice value is, the more critical that critical strike is. And it might be something like you knock somebody's head off or you break their knee or you do all kinds of, they had all kinds of, in Rollmaster, all kinds of like,
00:06:02
Speaker
strange anatomical effects. On the low side, it could be something like, you know, you knock the wind out of them. It's not like you did extra damage, but it does take them off their game for a minute and maybe they lose a couple extra, you know, stress or they lose a couple extra something that regenerates quickly.
00:06:18
Speaker
And I that's the point, a little bit of extra flavor to some of these these actions. Rollmaster had a really interesting mechanical thing that they did though too, right? Because normally they were a percentile based crit chart.
00:06:30
Speaker
yeah So you could go from like one to a hundred. And typically i think they were in bands of like maybe five points or something like that. But Mark, they had something extra that they did too. why don't you talk about what exploding dice did to that table?
00:06:43
Speaker
Rollmaster did have an upper echelon where if you rolled like in the ninety s the chart extended up to potentially much higher. I think it was like 200. If you rolled like a 96 or ah you know between 96 and 100 basically, so those yeah that last 5%, you'd roll the percentile dice again, and then that total would be your new crit number. And so you could get really high numbers, especially if you did it twice.
00:07:10
Speaker
Yeah, I've seen those used and it gets wild. we're Severing heads, yeah you know losing limbs. These are the crits that you would talk about for weeks with your friends.
00:07:23
Speaker
Now, exploding dice, they literally, like you could roll a and roll a six and roll another six and roll another six. It could happen and sometimes did. And when it did,
00:07:34
Speaker
Oh man, that was exciting. That was cool. well and And what's interesting about that case is it's not a case where you're doing critical damage as a result of the to hit roll like D&D does. You're doing critical damage because you happen to get a lucky damage roll.
00:07:47
Speaker
Yes. So then that became critical because you just happen to roll really well and keep rolling really well. Yeah. And yeah, that's another way to do it. Another way to do it is not related to damage at all.
00:07:59
Speaker
um It could be that a critical strike gives you or critical success of many kinds gives you some kind of a meta currency, right? In Savage Worlds, for example, they have bennies and other systems. They have they have little meta currencies that you can acquire and they give you the ability to do things.
00:08:15
Speaker
Sometimes that might be a reroll. Sometimes that might be a little dramatic edit to the scene, right? So gotcha that's an interesting thing to do because then you can start thinking outside the damage transaction back and forth and you can start thinking about ways that the whole game could change in some way.
00:08:32
Speaker
And it also gives you a little something, something for later in the game that you could use in some function to maybe enhance a scene. Maybe it's not even battle related. You know, you have a Benny that you could spend to make it successful, to you know, persuasion check of some sort. i don't know.
00:08:51
Speaker
That actually brings us to another topic, which is critical skill
Critical Successes in Skill Scenarios
00:08:54
Speaker
rolls. So we've been talking about critical success in terms of combat, like to hit rolls and damage and things like that. But talk for a minute about critical skill rolls.
00:09:03
Speaker
You know, if you're playing a fantasy game, how many games players have tried make or crafting some great item? And criticals is that window into that opportunity. You know, when you roll a crit, something special happens.
00:09:20
Speaker
just like in combat, but here we are applying it to non-combat scenario. And it can be quite exciting. You got yourself ah potentially a magic item if you're crafting du to build something, or maybe you're using it persuade somebody or use a skill perception.
00:09:39
Speaker
Maybe you spot something really minute, clue that nobody else would get. This is an opportunity for the GM to drop some bit of knowledge that maybe they've been hanging on that they really want to reveal to some players.
00:09:55
Speaker
critical skill roles give you a chance to have great moments that are outside of combat. A lot of people will play these games and the biggest kind of activity that you think about the most when you're thinking about a D&D game or frankly lots of other games is what's going to happen when it comes to fighting.
00:10:13
Speaker
But here's a mechanical way that you can Frankly, spread that emphasis around. You can help people get more interested in other parts of the game besides the hack and slash parts. So critical skill rolls are great.
00:10:25
Speaker
We had a game just, what, about a month ago or or so where players were doing some crafting. they had a little downtime in each. I think we had about four players all looking to do some crafting.
00:10:37
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And three of the four players rolled criticals. Boy, I tell you what, as GM, I was excited. But I was very flat footed and had to come up with some fun stuff on the spot.
00:10:50
Speaker
And that is, for me, that is a lot of fun. So it's funny that we were just talking about it. It happened just recently. Let's think about the other end of the spectrum now,
Debating Critical Failures
00:10:59
Speaker
too. um What about critical failures, Mark? Do you like critical failures in your games? People rolling ones or the lowest possible results and having penalties of various kinds for that?
00:11:09
Speaker
Not particularly. ah Critical failure is always a failure, first of all. um If you're a one on a D20, that's not good. And usually that's enough.
00:11:21
Speaker
But I do like to narrate it as is horrible as it could be. But I don't really usually apply terms of negative. and There could be situations where I might, but just in general, I don't like to penalize people when they're missed.
00:11:37
Speaker
But we do like to make make a little fun out of it. So it might be that you don't necessarily want to do a lot mechanically or at least nothing like a mirror image of the critical success tables and things like that. Right. I've played in games with that. Don't get me wrong, Ben. I've i've yeah played in games.
00:11:53
Speaker
We had critical fumble tables and they were real fun and we all enjoyed it. And I would a hundred percent do it again. ah just don't think my players have the appetite for such a thing.
00:12:05
Speaker
Okay. So this goes back to them. What is your players into? Okay. Exactly. And I have yet to see players with the appetite for critical fumbles at all. I will say it is a very old school sensibility. It's the kind of thing that you tend to see in earlier editions of games. Rollmaster, as we've said, had its own fumble tables that could frankly kill you if you rolled low enough. Remember we talked about exploding dice. You could actually explode downward.
00:12:32
Speaker
If you fumbled and then like fumbled again, you know, you just like trip and break your neck and that was it for your game. We we had, I do remember playing role master one of our old friends back in college, we were, we spent, I mean, role master took a while to make characters and he comes running out the gate after a whole day of making a character critically fumbles with a morning star so badly that he brained himself and his character was done.
00:13:04
Speaker
oh no. It was his first swing out the gate. And if we all just like started laughing. We're like, Oh man. But I mean, we're laughing now, but ah poor Rob.
00:13:16
Speaker
oh Well, wherever you are, Rob, we hope you're, we hope you've had many successes since then. But I think that's a good point, right? In one sense, you know, the tone that you're setting with a critical fumble is that, hey, maybe these guys aren't exactly heroes. You know, there's a lot of moments when even a heroic character might miss or something might happen. But like, generally speaking, they shouldn't trip over their own shoes.
00:13:41
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, if you think about it realistically, you know, if Steph Curry was like, he's not rolling crit fumbles ever. You know what I mean? Yeah. like Let's hope not. Yeah. or we're talking about We're talking about heroes here in the game.
00:13:54
Speaker
ah one in 20 chance to roll a horrible crit fumble seems really high. Yeah. So, okay, look, we're talking about things we want to be
Genre Compatibility of Critical Hits
00:14:02
Speaker
careful of. What are some other things that we need to be thoughtful about?
00:14:06
Speaker
Let's talk about some player expectations and little genre expectations because criticals might not fit into all genres games, right? If you're trying to run a really grounded game, I expect that criticals that sort of vastly expand on the result that you might get from a normal hit is probably not going to go go with the genre well.
00:14:25
Speaker
You come across as little cartoonish if you're trying to play something grounded and gritty. Player expectations also matter too. You know, I mean, players will often want a very predictable kind of game.
00:14:37
Speaker
You know, it depends on the players you're with. I've i've played with some people that were very kind of technical and tactical and really dramatic critical results would have been really tough for them because it would have meant that there was a lot of the game that you couldn't get your arms around.
00:14:52
Speaker
And a big part of that too is that crits are a two-way street. Criticals are something monsters can do. And a lot of players... have a harder time kind of taking crits than giving them. And so maybe that even if they do like being able to give the crits, they really don't like taking them. And so for that reason, you might just not do it in the first place.
00:15:12
Speaker
But Mark, would you ever have a game where only players could do crits and monsters could not? No. Why would I do that? That's ridiculous. Let's make a game that's no fun for the GM.
00:15:24
Speaker
I see. No, I would not do that. ah I would say, no, I'm not running that game. I will say, though, like you said, the GM, his monsters get to roll crits. And... um I've seen games where my dice were hot.
00:15:36
Speaker
I've wiped out groups with it. Not necessarily just crits, but just in general. When your dice are hot, they're hot. So it's um it can be demoralizing for some players sometimes when they're taking it on the chin.
00:15:49
Speaker
Sometimes the dice speak and we've talked about this in a past episode recently, like when they when the dice say die. So I think one of the things to do is to be careful about what crits can do in your game.
00:16:02
Speaker
And you might need to house rule some things to soften the edges of some of these things or, you know, if they're not consequential enough to make players wary about them or be thoughtful, then maybe you want to amp them up in some ways.
00:16:13
Speaker
Or frankly, you might even want to just change the effects. One of the things ah remember we did with the old Role Master game was we noticed that there were a lot of those criticals that would stun a character for multiple rounds. Yeah. Yeah.
00:16:27
Speaker
Not fun. Yeah. It just takes people out of the game. Yeah. And as a, as a GM, it doesn't take you out of the game because you got other monsters you can kind of, you know, use. So you're never like, don't have anything to do, but when you're a player and you're waiting four or five turns for other people, and now you got to wait a whole nother round.
00:16:45
Speaker
I mean, you just got reversed. you know You know what I mean? Like you're not, you're not playing that round and it's not fun. And that means players might disengage, you know? Yeah, I was going to say, if each round is like 15 minutes even, then being out for four rounds means you just missed an hour of gameplay out of what might be, i don't know, four-hour, five-hour session at best.
00:17:04
Speaker
Brutal. Better believe that person's phone's coming out and they're you know side texting or playing a game or doing something because that's boredom right there. And relatedly then, recovering from criticals is something that matters too.
00:17:19
Speaker
One of the things i always thought was hilarious about the old Role Master tables was that they would say like, oh yeah, you've slashed through this person's tendons or that person's lungs have exploded or they'd have some like complex anatomical thing and you're like,
00:17:31
Speaker
How in the world do you heal that? And the role master thing would say, like, they had all these really complex lists for what kind of healing you could do, right? They had spells for healing nerve damage or for healing, you know, cartilage or whatever, you know? And I was just like, wow. So one of the things I think we always wanted to be smart about was like, don't introduce criticals that you don't have the healing mechanics in the game to resolve.
00:17:55
Speaker
You can regrow your limbs, but you can never regrow that self-esteem that you lost. No, no, no. So think about how you want to help people recover when they've taken those criticals. Is that something that's going to happen in the course of the combat because yeah they make a saving throw? Is it going to be something that happens later because they've taken a long-term injury? That's going to have a lot to do with how gritty this game is, how heroic your characters feel, and so forth. So think about that kind of stuff when you're putting this together.
00:18:23
Speaker
If you're bringing something in from another game, you really got to think about how... those roles might not match up very well. So give it a lot of thought before you just say, oh, I love this crit system from this game. I'm going to bring it in.
00:18:39
Speaker
Well, they may not be applicable. so just think about it. Yeah. Dear listener, if you're kind of getting the vibe that we brought Role Master into our D&D games at some point, we did.
00:18:51
Speaker
And it was great, but oh my gosh, did we have to do some work to make that an actual workable solution for us? I want to talk about one other, like last little bit.
00:19:03
Speaker
This is the Jeff thing. Jeff always states why he doesn't like crits is because, or crit charts is because the GM rolls more crits than the players.
Frequency of GM vs. Player Crits
00:19:17
Speaker
Okay. I don't believe that to be true necessarily. I would say potentially if you if you're fighting against armies and armies of of things.
00:19:30
Speaker
But I would also argue if you're fighting against armies and armies of things, those numbers are a lot more terrifying with a threat of crits out there. And that in itself is, to me, adds a little flavor to it otherwise, you know, encounter that you you would think might be one-sided.
00:19:53
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. So um maybe an example here would kind of illustrate. So let's imagine that we've got a party of four characters and let's imagine that they're going to come against 10 goblins, let's say, right? So the idea is that in any given round, you might think that the GM is going to be able to roll 10 hits and the players are going to be able to roll four.
00:20:11
Speaker
Jeff's thought here is that if the GM is rolling 10 and the players are rolling four, then the odds of the GM is going to roll a critical are much higher over time. Is that the gist of it? That's the gist of it. And he's not wrong. Okay. Okay.
00:20:23
Speaker
My argument would be if you were in the real world, you're going to go take on 10 people, you know, and you're just the four of you or whatever you are. You might have to think about some tactics.
00:20:35
Speaker
Okay. So that thing that Jeff points out as a flaw, you're actually saying that's a that's a feature, not a bug. That's exactly right. It's a future, not a bug. So that's where the whole like, you know,
00:20:50
Speaker
how how many 12-year-olds can you fight, Ben?
00:20:55
Speaker
Yeah, a lot, I would think. I don't know. 15. I don't know. If there's crits, they could get a lucky hit in, Ben. yeah Every one of those kids. Okay. Let me just put it this way, though. it's It's very much the same problem with like with the zombie movies.
00:21:09
Speaker
Right. Zombie movies, the threat is not, oh, there's there's four zombies. Well, that's not a problem. It's 10 zombies. It's now 20. Oh, my gosh.
00:21:20
Speaker
There's now 50 zombies coming at us. That's the problem. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Well, so, ah Jeff, if you're out there listening... Mark just played the Uno reverse card. I think he's calling it your bug a feature. So let's move on.
00:21:36
Speaker
ah There's one last thing that's kind of fun about crits. And ah this is something that's player driven, Mark.
Narrating Critical Hits
00:21:42
Speaker
How do you want to do this? Oh, yeah. yeah I love player narration.
00:21:48
Speaker
It's so fun. I mean, i like to narrate as a GM, but there's some players who just love to narrate the crits and you got to give them that opportunity. So that's a good chance for like some storytelling too.
00:22:01
Speaker
Giving your players a chance to do a little bit of storytelling is something that helps them feel like they own the game and it keeps them really engaged. Yeah.
00:22:14
Speaker
Hey, Ben, i got I got one for you here. All right. This one is... man I feel this one too. I got to be honest with you. I think we talked about this one before. Yeah. My my players... sort The person writes, my players attack villains on sight.
00:22:32
Speaker
What are some clever ways I can have some parlay between heroes and villains? Not to be too cheeky, but you could always have a dark room to attack on site. um I'm only slightly kidding there though, right? Like there's lots of ways you can create communication without proximity.
00:22:48
Speaker
And so when we were talking about villains, you remember we talked about insulating your villains. I think that was your term. And I i like that idea. We could put the villain in a situation where the players can't attack that person without basically turning everybody against them at a high society dinner, let's say, where nobody knows that guy's the villain except for the players.
00:23:08
Speaker
If they decide to attack then, then they're probably going to get in real trouble with the mayor or the whoever, right? Yeah, exactly. um You could have ah walls between them in some capacity, maybe a locked door and they're speaking through portoclus or something of that nature.
00:23:29
Speaker
Just give them a little time to parlay while they're trying to pick that lock. One of the things that movies do a lot, and it's really good, we saw this in Skyfall with the villain played by ah Javier Bardem.
00:23:41
Speaker
We saw this in Silence of the Lambs with Anthony Hopkins. Put the villain in a plastic box, in a cage, and in some kind of confinement that the players don't think they need to kill the villain because he's already you know been confined. He's already dealt with in some sense, but they need to go talk to him to get information.
00:24:01
Speaker
And then they realize the villain's got all kinds of things going on outside the bounds of his cage, or he's got all kinds of knowledge that they need to find a way to get. And no amount of pressure will extract that.
00:24:13
Speaker
Bruce Willis had some good parlaying on the walkie-talkie with his nemesis in Die Hard. With Hans Gruber. Yeah. I mean, they were going back and forth there. Die Hard's a good example. Yeah. And so you can have these things. You just got to kind of think outside the box a little bit.
00:24:28
Speaker
um I think one of the ones we were kind of joking about is you could have these guys meet up in a confession booth. What a great place. Maybe that the sanctity of the church might prevent them from falling into you know the fact that maybe there's other people there at the church might prevent them from out and out fighting right there.
00:24:51
Speaker
Yeah, I think it depends on the characters and the players in the game too. I think if you've got a paladin in that church, I think you're okay. But I think most rogues are going to start trying to stab their way through the confessional at that point. Yeah.
00:25:02
Speaker
of Of course, that may be also a classic for like ah character like Daredevil, where religious themes are kind of apparent in that not realm. And relatedly, that's a nice point. Daredevil is an individual character. So one thing you could do is you could have...
00:25:19
Speaker
characters be met by a villain when they're isolated or by themselves. And if they're thinking, well, gosh, if I had my party with me, I could do some things. But by myself, with this overpowered big bad guy, I don't know if I want to start a fight.
00:25:33
Speaker
Or maybe he catches them in a moment where they're their hit points are low, they're weakened, and they can't start a fight because they will lose. you know give your Give your villain the little upper hand there. you know This is his chance to strike up that conversation while they're gasping for air. So folks, I think that hopefully that gives you a little bit of insight.
00:25:55
Speaker
I think it helps me think about it at least.
Listener Engagement: Questions on GMing
00:25:57
Speaker
Definitely. And if you want to get more insight into your interesting open questions about anything to do with the GM and craft, whether it's world building or table management or anything else, email us at tabletoptuneup at gmail.com.
00:26:13
Speaker
And we will take up that question the next time we see you. Until then, keep those dice rolling.
00:27:10
Speaker
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Speaker
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