Crits!

Inside of us all there is a monster. Its little monster brain doesn't function quite properly. This monster loves games of chance. When you lose, it doesn't care, it can shrug off losses like they are nothing. When you win, the monster goes crazy, releasing dopamine all out of proportion to the scale of what is happening, making you feel wonderful about a ten dollar scratch ticket that you just spent 30 dollars to get. This monster is your brain. In the hunter gatherer days we had to get very good at accepting high risk high reward activities. Without agriculture the world was a giant slot machine spitting out animals, veggies, and berries. So our brains have become masters at forgetting our failures and rewarding those random successes.

Our games have their own random berries and mammoth herds, we call them crits. Designers have been using crits in games for a long time. Even a very old game like backgammon uses them, whenever your dice match you get twice the movement. Any bonus for a rare outcome counts as a crit for us. The most common one we see is getting a high die roll, but I would even count catching one of your out cards in Texas hold em, or getting pocket aces. Even Magic the gathering and Hearthstone have that lovely feeling when you pull the perfect card off the top of your deck. The most beloved house rule of monopoly, putting money on free parking adds crits to the game. As you can see lots of games have crits, but they are most famous in rpgs.

If we dissect the crit a little bit there are two main mechanical factors, the rate at which crits occur, and the effect that the crit has. I would add as a secondary concern the ease of execution on the crit. Another consideration is the number of rolls that you see in a typical session, in a game where you only roll a few times a night you can afford to have a higher crit rate than in a game where you roll 400 times a night. The rarity of the crit is what makes it so tasty and exciting.

The non mechanical aspects of the crit can't be ignored though. Some players are rewarded by seeing big numbers come up on the dice, other players want to hear the gory descriptions their attack. The crit adds to the natural flow of the story, they provide highs and lows to what otherwise could be just rote execution of a map combat or skill checks. When a crit is rolled it is an opening for the players and the GM to remember that they are telling a story and take a moment to bring the descriptive elements back into the game. The guy who always plays the hyper competent, super awesome, Tom Clancy Mary Sue character is annoying, but we all want to be awesome. The crit is the games way of giving us permission to indulge, to do something ridiculous with no shame.

The crit that everyone is familiar with is the dungeons and dragons old standby, the Natural 20. Rolling a 20 on a twenty sided die generally means an automatic hit, and double damage to boot. The Nat 20 is maybe the perfect crit, or at least the standard to judge the other by. With a 5% chance of happening you can expect to see a few of them on any given night of gaming. The double damage aspect is good, but not amazing. You don't need to roll nat 20's to win a fight but it helps thing along. The crit is a perfect bonus that lets you hit that unhittable enemy, pick the unpickable lock, but the game would function perfectly well without it. It happens in an intimidate and recognizable way, when that 20 pops up on the top of the die you know that something great happened.

As a side note, the crit is what makes the advantage system in 5^th ed feel so good. Advantage works out to about a +5 bonus, but if you roll two dice instead of one you get the double fun of crit hunting. So much more exciting than a +5.

The D&D crit has everything going for it, a perfect rate of occurrence, simple to resolve, no game breaking effects. It fits the game perfectly. Let's look at a game that takes all of those aspects and takes them to the other extreme, Rolemaster. The Rolemaster crit is a completely different beast. Rather than crtting fairly infrequently, a crit occurs on many of attacks that hit. Resolving the crit is complicated requiring chart look up. Rather than having a minor effect RM crits run a range of effects from nothing to killing a foe in one shot. Indeed while the goal of a D&D combat is to grind a foe's hit points to zero, in RM your goal is land a crit and kill them or degrade them so much they fall into a death spiral of penalties.

It isn't exactly fair to describe the RM wound resolution as a crit in same way a D&D crit is. Rolemaster has an involved wound system because that is one of the things they decided to model. They just happened to call it a critical hit roll. The design of RM is that they want lots of fun random rolls with potentially devastating effects. So they built a system where most hits give you a pull on the wound chart slot machine. The real crit roll is that wound roll. That's the one where a 0 does nothing and 100 instakills your enemy and a 66 makes them wet their pants for some reason. RM loves this crazy high variance and embraces it wholeheartedly.

Neither way is right, both systems are well tailored to the kind of game that they want to be. A whole range of options in between exist. There are a bunch of things that make a game a good or bad fit for a player, determining what level of randomness you enjoy is certainly one of them. Let's all give crits some love.