dramatic criticals rules thoughts?

[ember lance]

Decided to add some homebrew rules to add spice to critical die rules was looking for feedback if should Nerf some stuff etc?

Game i plan to use them is martial heavy as full casters don't exist.

[real prawn]

I'm all for buffing crits
In my game crits are buffed to instead of rolling an additional set of damage dice, it takes their maximum value. It's a decent buff to martials, especially Rogues, and makes poison slightly more valuable (and pretty good on enemy Assassins, lol)
But by God do not have penalties on nat 1s. Already failing what you wanted to do is bad enough, but if you introduce penalties then as martials level up they have a higher and higher chance of rolling a nat 1 in a session (by making more and more attacks), whereas casters benefit off of that rule, since they make others roll saves, so the enemies will get penalties on top of suffering the effects of the spell - and we all know about the martial-caster divide

[tall flicker]

I'd be in favor of buffing crits but these seem a bit... extreme? it also does favor martials bc a caster getting a second attack action is cool but they also cost spell slots (overall i think an extra attack action is too much anyhow, just look at how useful action surge is, there's a reason it's limited to once per short rest)

i think the easiest way to do it is just add two extra damage dies, or add your modifier twice

[ember lance]

Yee they were aimed to buff martials as the table I was running is martials heavy (artificer punches a lot).

Reason I punish nat 1 is a i can always bs my way of not punishing pc too much but b i myself am cursed so most of my minions and bbeg roll nat 1s 6-10 times per session.

Bbeg dropped his legendary sword and cape first session he was introduced and funny is funny

[tall flicker]

you also have to keep in mind, a lot of the times casters can't crit. a lot of spells are saves, which means no crit. if you want to buff casters it's much simpler to just let them find or buy magical items that help them, or even make custom ones for each character

[ember lance]

Ok my bad i meant to type martial not caster 😅

[ember lance]

Mb😅

[tall flicker]

ok lmao that's different. my question is, why are you looking to buff them? are they struggling in combat a lot? why buff crits specifically?

[ember lance]

Yee we had played a dmc nat 19 homebrew version earlier which had these style points which you gain by rolling crts.

Now in current campaign crts feels less exciting in comparison 😅

[tall flicker]

why not bring that back then?

imo, style points (not sure how they work) would theoretically be better anyhow, bc you can reward non-combat crits, which overall are usually a lot more underwhelming then critting with a melee attack

like critting for investigation, or even initiative, is pretty underwhelming

that's what i'd look to buff more than damage output

[ember lance]

It was a system which fits devil may cry or power rangers kind of combat/world not a one piece campaign 😅

We were already playing the one piece campaign but started dmc one in middle now normal crts feel underwhelming

[tall flicker]

i still think adding the modifier twice works best - bc that could be used for ability checks as well