Poll of the Day > Why do i have to roll a 20 AGAIN to confirm a critical?

(+) Yeah! (+)

If I roll an attack roll and get a 20 , why do I need to re roll a 20 a second time to confirm? The DM/GM can plainly see the dice roll. Its extremely difficult to roll a 20 the FIRST time! And I have a history of getting bad dice rolls.
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Doesn't that mean all 20s would also be crits by default?

Signed,
Someone who has never played D&D before
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Because it's 3.5!
It already has a badtime with rules.

Also, even if you fail to confirm the crit, it's still a regular hit.

Never seen that rule before. Most GMs I played w/ considered a 20 an instant crit. The variation being that a 20 is an auto hit (threatening a crit), and you roll again to hit the target number, not necessarily to roll a 20 again to confirm a crit.

Play original world of darkness. Why roll one die when you can roll all the dice.
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RFC22 posted...

If I roll an attack roll and get a 20 , why do I need to re roll a 20 a second time to confirm? The DM/GM can plainly see the dice roll. Its extremely difficult to roll a 20 the FIRST time! And I have a history of getting bad dice rolls.

What system/edition are you playing? I've never seen one where you need to roll two 20's to crit? D&D 3.5 required a second roll to confirm the crit, but the second roll just needed to be high enough to hit the target.

Muffinz0rz posted...

Doesn't that mean all 20s would also be crits by default?

Signed,
Someone who has never played D&D before

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I'm playing Pathfinder Society/League.
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RFC22 posted...

Muffinz0rz posted...

Doesn't that mean all 20s would also be crits by default?

Signed,
Someone who has never played D&D before

To attack an enemy/target, a person has to roll a 20 sided dice. combatants has a amor stat. If your Dice roll exceeds that, the attack hits. Then you roll an attack dice. Which means you roll any from a 4 sider dice to an 8 sider dice depending on the weapons you are equipped with. A critical gives you double damage off the attack dice rool.

To start combat:
1. Roll a 20 sider dice.
2. roll attack dice.

If the dice roll from the 20 sider dice is a 20, you get a critical chance. Then you roll to confirm the critical.

Oh shit, you gotta, gotta get that terminology right.
The first d20 roll is to attack, the second dice roll is for damage.

RFC22 posted...

If I roll an attack roll and get a 20 , why do I need to re roll a 20 a second time to confirm? The DM/GM can plainly see the dice roll. Its extremely difficult to roll a 20 the FIRST time! And I have a history of getting bad dice rolls.
I'm playing Pathfinder Society/League.

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RFC22 posted...

Muffinz0rz posted...

Doesn't that mean all 20s would also be crits by default?

Signed,
Someone who has never played D&D before

To attack an enemy/target, a person has to roll a 20 sided dice. combatants has a amor stat. If your Dice roll exceeds that, the attack hits. Then you roll an attack dice. Which means you roll any from a 4 sider dice to an 8 sider dice depending on the weapons you are equipped with. A critical gives you double damage off the attack dice rool.

To start combat:
1. Roll a 20 sider dice.
2. roll attack dice.

If the dice roll from the 20 sider dice is a 20, you get a critical chance. Then you roll to confirm the critical.

So, rolling 20 twice in a row - meaning you only have a 1/400 chance to get a crit?
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shadowsword87 posted...

RFC22 posted...

Muffinz0rz posted...

Doesn't that mean all 20s would also be crits by default?

Signed,
Someone who has never played D&D before

To attack an enemy/target, a person has to roll a 20 sided dice, which is the attack roll. Combatants has a amor stat. If your Dice roll exceeds that, the attack hits. Then you roll damage dice. Which means you roll any dice from a 4 sider dice to an 8 sider dice depending on the weapons you are equipped with. A critical gives you double damage off the attack dice roll.

To start combat:
1. Roll a 20 sider dice/attack dice.
2. roll damage dice.

If the dice roll from the 20 sider dice is a 20, you get a critical chance. Then you roll to confirm the critical.

Oh shit, you gotta, gotta get that terminology right.
The first d20 roll is to attack, the second dice roll is for damage.

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Muffinz0rz posted...

So, rolling 20 twice in a row - meaning you only have a 1/400 chance to get a crit?

Nonono, the second roll gets your regular modifiers to beat their AC.
Meaning that you roll 1d20+7 (or whatever), vs their AC of 16 (or whatever).

Meaning you can still confirm the crit if you roll a 15, which turns into a 22 which beats their AC, so you confirm the crit and you roll crit damage.

Muffinz0rz posted...

Doesn't that mean all 20s would also be crits by default?

Signed,
Someone who has never played D&D before

To attack an enemy/target, a person has to roll a 20 sided dice, which is the attack roll. Combatants has a amor stat. If your Dice roll exceeds that, the attack hits. Then you roll damage dice. Which means you roll any dice from a 4 sider dice to an 8 sider dice depending on the weapons you are equipped with. A critical gives you double damage off the attack dice roll.

To start combat:
1. Roll a 20 sider dice/attack dice.
2. roll damage dice.

If the dice roll from the 20 sider dice is a 20, you get a critical chance. Then you roll to confirm the critical.
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shadowsword87 posted...

Muffinz0rz posted...

So, rolling 20 twice in a row - meaning you only have a 1/400 chance to get a crit?

Nonono, the second roll gets your regular modifiers to beat their AC.
Meaning that you roll 1d20+7 (or whatever), vs their AC of 16 (or whatever).

Meaning you can still confirm the crit if you roll a 15, which turns into a 22 which beats their AC, so you confirm the crit and you roll crit damage.

So i have to beat the their class again to gain the critical damage? So the critical damage is to see if my attack critical injured them?
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RFC22 posted...

So i have to beat the their class again to gain the critical damage? So the critical damage is to see if my attack critical injured them?

Correct.

Me trying to figure all this out:


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PFS rules shouldn't be different from normal PF as far as crit confirms go. As suggessted by others after the first D20 roll to hit enters your critical threat range, the second D20 roll is simply used to determine if the strike does critical damage. Unless the AC of what you were fighting was so high that you couldn't hit it without a 20, it sounds like your DM was a little confused himself, which is surprising for PFS.
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123pizza2 posted...

PFS rules shouldn't be different from normal PF as far as crit confirms go. As suggessted by others after the first D20 roll to hit enters your critical threat range, the second D20 roll is simply used to determine if the strike does critical damage. Unless the AC of what you were fighting was so high that you couldn't hit it without a 20, it sounds like your DM was a little confused himself, which is surprising for PFS.

I have a feeling it went like this:
Player: "I rolled a crit!"
GM: "Now roll to confirm the crit"
Player: *rolls a not-20*
Player: "Dammit, I didn't crit"

Muffinz0rz posted...

Me trying to figure all this out:

Oh honey, this is the simple stuff.

So in DnD, you have a whole bunch of different dice, all with different amount of sides on them, you have anywhere from 4 sided to 6 to 8 to 10 to 12 to 20 and weird dice between them.
How DnD uses these is you roll one of those dice, and add (or subtract) numbers from them to beat some floating number determined from various things.

The way people write about it when talking about it though is XdY+Z. Where X is the amount of dice rolled, Y is die itself, and Z is the added (or subtracted) number.
So 1d20+5 means you roll one twenty sided die, and add five to that number.
2d6+3 is rolling two six sided dice, and adding three.

Once again, there are more complicated versions of rolling dice that other games use.

The attack roll is using the d20, and you roll against someone's AC (meaning Armor Class). The idea is that the DnD character is sitting there attacking a whole bunch during the turn, and you have a chance for one of those attacks to actually do damage to the person and not bounce off their armor or shield.

AC is determined from a whole bunch of stuff and I'm not going into right now though, mostly because this is more of an abstract thing.

So to attack someone, you roll 1d20+stuff, against their AC. The "stuff" in question is called Attack Bonus, because the bonus number is being added to your attack
.
For example, to beat a 15 AC with an attack bonus of +7, you would need to roll an 8 or higher, because 8+7=15 (I think ties go to the attacker in PF, I can honestly never remember). But that also means if you roll a 10, you would have a 17 to hit (10+7), which beats their 15 AC (17>15).
20's always at least hit, and 1's always miss on attack rolls.

Then if you hit, you roll damage. Damage is determined from some dice plus stuff, the amount and specific dice is determined from the weapon itself, and the stuff is from the character sheet.
So it can be 2d6+3, or 1d8+4, or 1d4-1 there's a whole bunch of different damage dice for anything you would want.

Now it's the question of rolling a critical (i.e. a "natural" 20). So the first attack roll goes, and then you roll a 20. You then have to make another attack roll to "confirm" the crit, if you beat their AC, you get some sort of bonus to damage (normally a x2 modifier).
Some weapons have an increased critical range, meaning you can roll a 19 and activate the critical hit, and get a x3 modifier for damage. These builds are weird and I honestly haven't seen them that much.

shadowsword87 posted...

123pizza2 posted...

PFS rules shouldn't be different from normal PF as far as crit confirms go. As suggessted by others after the first D20 roll to hit enters your critical threat range, the second D20 roll is simply used to determine if the strike does critical damage. Unless the AC of what you were fighting was so high that you couldn't hit it without a 20, it sounds like your DM was a little confused himself, which is surprising for PFS.

I have a feeling it went like this:
Player: "I rolled a crit!"
GM: "Now roll to confirm the crit"
Player: *rolls a not-20*
Player: "Dammit, I didn't crit"

It's what it sounds like
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helly posted...

shadowsword87 posted...

123pizza2 posted...

PFS rules shouldn't be different from normal PF as far as crit confirms go. As suggessted by others after the first D20 roll to hit enters your critical threat range, the second D20 roll is simply used to determine if the strike does critical damage. Unless the AC of what you were fighting was so high that you couldn't hit it without a 20, it sounds like your DM was a little confused himself, which is surprising for PFS.

I have a feeling it went like this:
Player: "I rolled a crit!"
GM: "Now roll to confirm the crit"
Player: *rolls a not-20*
Player: "Dammit, I didn't crit"

It's what it sounds like

I actually don't remember the exact roll, but I was exactly wanting to say this. But it might have been a low roll. Most of my rolls are extremely low or just high enough to beat an Armor Class. Anyone who has a Path Finder Society shirt gets a re-roll. And sometimes the other players let me use a re roll and I sometimes roll lower than my first roll!
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RFC22 posted...

helly posted...

shadowsword87 posted...

123pizza2 posted...

PFS rules shouldn't be different from normal PF as far as crit confirms go. As suggessted by others after the first D20 roll to hit enters your critical threat range, the second D20 roll is simply used to determine if the strike does critical damage. Unless the AC of what you were fighting was so high that you couldn't hit it without a 20, it sounds like your DM was a little confused himself, which is surprising for PFS.

I have a feeling it went like this:
Player: "I rolled a crit!"
GM: "Now roll to confirm the crit"
Player: *rolls a not-20*
Player: "Dammit, I didn't crit"

It's what it sounds like

I actually don't remember the exact roll, but I was exactly wanting to say this. But it might have been a low roll. Most of my rolls are extremely low or just high enough to beat an Armor Class. Anyone who has a Path Finder Society shirt gets a re-roll. And sometimes the other players let me use a re roll and I sometimes roll lower than my first roll!

Are you playing sanctioned? That's no fun. I mean you can't even drink.
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this is what you get for playing d&d
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TES_Nut posted...

Play original world of darkness. Why roll one die when you can roll all the dice.

It also applies in Legend of the Five Rings and 7th Sea (where the 10 is said to "explode").


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

TES_Nut posted...

Play original world of darkness. Why roll one die when you can roll all the dice.

It also applies in Legend of the Five Rings and 7th Sea (where the 10 is said to "explode").

nWoD also works with this.

That's why percentile is the best! You don't need a whole bunch of silly dice, just roll percentile and move on! It's wonderful.

I think it was 3.5 that used that rule and it was pretty dumb vs high AC characters since you are almost immune to crit hits all together.

AC was still....unlocked....meaning unlike in 5th edition, you could get some pretty insanely high ACs, and to hit was based on a d20 (still is in 5e, but AC is far more regulated).

This means you could get a character up to say a 30 AC, which means even someone with a +12 to hit, would only hit with an 18 or higher. So even if they rolled a 20, they would then need to roll an 18 or higher to actually crit you, which rarely ever happend (making you almost immune to crit hits right there).

My current DM loves crit hits and fails and won't allow feats that avoid crit fails (we have not yet had to use/determine what he will do with halfling luck, which normally lets you reroll a 1).

Basically though 20's mean someone amazingly good happened, and 1's mean something amazingly bad happened. There is no, did you actually do crit damage on your 20....you did, or had a crit success in something you attempted etc.

Halflings ability to re-roll 1's is pretty freaking huge if you think about it, especially if you have a very high chance to hit already (or save). Take dex checks for instance...especially with a class that gets evasion.

Any character can get a high dex save, and many can get evasion in a variety of ways, but....if they roll a 1, no matter how high their save is, they will fail. Still a high save character may only fail on a 4 or lower for instance.

In such a case, being a halfling, means that 25% of the time you would have actually failed (and critically failed), you actually roll again and almost certainly succeed. If your save is high enough to only fail on a 1.....you would literally be unable to fail (and in many cases you'll have advantage on dex checks, which even if you did fail on a 4 or lower, you would need to roll a 2,3 or 4 twice, to fail lol.

Halfling luck may be the most powerful racial ability by far to be honest.
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The benefit of a natural 20 is automatically hitting, no matter the AC of the target. It can also lead to a critical hit, but you have to confirm it (hit their AC again, doesn't have to be another 20).

This is a GOOD thing. It makes critical hits less common (note with some weapons and feats you can easily get the critical hit range down to a 15-20 on a d20, not every attack only threatens a crit on a 20), and less randomness is better for players. Because criticals are very devastating (some are even 3x or 4x as powerful as a normal hit), and just by sheer probability, player characters are going to be crit. A lot.
Non-player character enemies "exist" for one combat. Player Characters are there for EVERY combat. Countless attacks will be made against them, you really don't want a significantly high chance that any given one can kill them by sheer dumb luck.

When we played rolling a double 20 would just be an instant kill
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In the starwars campaign we were playing the DM wanted us to confirm crits acter like 4 months of playing and it was the worst thing ever at first. It's not so bad though.
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Final Fantasy2389 posted...

In the starwars campaign we were playing the DM wanted us to confirm crits acter like 4 months of playing and it was the worst thing ever at first. It's not so bad though.

What game were you playing?
There's a whole bucket of different versions.

streamofthesky posted...

Non-player character enemies "exist" for one combat. Player Characters are there for EVERY combat. Countless attacks will be made against them, you really don't want a significantly high chance that any given one can kill them by sheer dumb luck.

Good point. One of the seasoned players said "It's best to avoid combat". Most of the sessions involve story telling, solving puzzles, looking for clues/exploring. We get in 2 -3 fights on average for 4 hr every session. You don't want your character build you spent hours working on to die during one fight.

Or you would get this scenario:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWxLanshXw4
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shadowsword87 posted...

Final Fantasy2389 posted...

In the starwars campaign we were playing the DM wanted us to confirm crits acter like 4 months of playing and it was the worst thing ever at first. It's not so bad though.

What game were you playing?
There's a whole bucket of different versions.

Not sure of the ruleset, it played a lot like Pathfinder but starwars. It was also a made up campaign using the Old Republic timeline. Like 15 years after KotoR II.

The DM said at the time he didn't really get confirming crits but finally looked it up and made us start using it once he got it.
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Is this gonna turn into another tabletop topic? Because I'd be down for that.
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Final Fantasy2389 posted...

Not sure of the ruleset, it played a lot like Pathfinder but starwars. It was also a made up campaign using the Old Republic timeline. Like 15 years after KotoR II.
The DM said at the time he didn't really get confirming crits but finally looked it up and made us start using it once he got it.

Ah, sounds like the d20 Starwars game that came out during the d20 glut era.

Not 20, you just need to beat their AC, as others have already said.

It's like that, because you can get some weapons to threaten a critical hit on a 15, which means you would have a 30% chance to crit every time you roll an attack, and with some characters, you can roll an attack up to 8 or even more times a round.

A natural 20 automatically hits, even if with the 20 and your hit modifiers wouldn't hit their AC. It will also always threaten a critical hit.

A lot of weapons also have a crit range, this will be 15-20, meaning you threaten crit on a 15 above if you beat their armour class. (It does not mean an automatic hit if you roll a 15 on one of these weapons and your modifiers do not allow the roll to hit their AC, which a lot of people don't seem to understand.) 17-20 means you threaten a crit on a 17 or above, and so on with 18-20 and 19-20.

If you threaten a critical hit, then you roll an attack roll again with the same modifiers as you rolled the original attack. If that roll hits their AC, then you get a critical hit. (Even if you roll a 2, but your +10 to hit brings your roll up to a 12 against their 12 AC. But a 1 can never confirm a crit as a 1 is always a failure.)

Since you're playing Pathfinder, you should also know that a natural 20 is only ever an automatic success on an attack roll, a saving throw, or a Constitution check to stabilize. Likewise, a natural 1 is only ever an automatic failure on an attack roll, or a saving through, but not a Constitution check to stabilize.


Anyways, if you roll consistently roll low that often, I would really recommend checking to see if your dice are weighted poorly, or even just buying new ones. Google or search Youtube for the dice in salt water trick to figure out how to check your dice. It's really not that uncommon for them to be weighted poorly, especially if they are opaque. Sometimes it's positive, sometimes it's negative.
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Crits are bad for players, and anything that mitigates them is A-OK in my book.
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Mario_VS_DK posted...

Anyways, if you roll consistently roll low that often, I would really recommend checking to see if your dice are weighted poorly, or even just buying new ones. Google or search Youtube for the dice in salt water trick to figure out how to check your dice.

Bruh, come on, it's a game, do you really need to optimize your dice that much?

shadowsword87 posted...

Mario_VS_DK posted...

Anyways, if you roll consistently roll low that often, I would really recommend checking to see if your dice are weighted poorly, or even just buying new ones. Google or search Youtube for the dice in salt water trick to figure out how to check your dice.

Bruh, come on, it's a game, do you really need to optimize your dice that much?

No, if someone managed to get some loaded dice, I'd probably tell them to stop using it. Just get some properly weighted ones that don't favor any particular sides.
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shadowsword87 posted...

That's why percentile is the best! You don't need a whole bunch of silly dice, just roll percentile and move on! It's wonderful.

A lot of it depends on how you want odds calculated and how you want to set difficulty for specific actions.

That being said, I'll never argue against any percentile system, if only because it's basically what I started with. Albeit not a entirely "pure" percentile system:

http://www.classicmarvelforever.com/cms/assets/files/other_stuff/updated_universal_table.jpg


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