5e House Rule for Crits - Full damage plus dice

Hi all, Starting up a 5e campaign, and as part of my house rules would like to implement an enhanced critical hit rule.  So, for example, barbarian with +4 STR bonus and a maul (2d6) gets a critical.  In RAW, he would roll the damage dice twice. So, the damage would be (first 2d6) + (second 2d6) + (str bonus). This would give a range of 8-28 damage. I want the rule to be that the first damage dice are always maximum. So, in the example above, the damage range would be 18-28.  While the maximum damage remains the same, the minimum is substantially higher, and I like this because it makes critical hits deadlier. Nothing worse than getting a critical hit and then rolling a bunch of 1s! So, I know that a LOT of people use this rule, but I'm trying to figure out if there is a way to implement this in my game universally. That is, for both NPCs/monsters and player characters. Any ideas? I found this article from over a year ago, but it wasn't exactly conclusive. It seems like I could do this on a per-attack basis by putting the max value in in the Crit field of the attack, but that would require quite a bit of diligence in tweaking every attack for every character and NPC. Thanks!

So, calling Oosh , I guess, if he's still around. :) I came across this and was wondering if it would meet my needs? I'm a pro member, so can utilize APIs, although I'm not very technical. I've added APIs from the standard list before, but never anything else.

In the attacks themselves there is a damage field and a crit damage field. You can just add flat numbers in the crit damage field, and voila.

Neo said: In the attacks themselves there is a damage field and a crit damage field. You can just add flat numbers in the crit damage field, and voila. Thanks for that. Unfortunately, that would require me to modify the crit damage field for every attack for every player character, and I don't believe that this would solve the problem for NPCs/monsters.  So, if possible, I'm trying to find an automated solution. Thanks for your idea though! It's definitely an option.

No worries, I personally don't use API. Good luck tho! ;oP

Steven B. said: So, calling Oosh , I guess, if he's still around. :) I came across this and was wondering if it would meet my needs? I'm a pro member, so can utilize APIs, although I'm not very technical. I've added APIs from the standard list before, but never anything else. Mostly not-around at the moment as there's a bit too much Life going on in my life, but still with a quarter of an ear to the ground. That script is pretty old, I'm frightened to even open it - I can't imagine the code is pretty. As far as I know it worked when I wrote it, but changes to the 5e sheet in the last 2 years could have broken it. Good grief, almost 2 years? Anyway, you should be able to check if the script still works by using it on a selected NPC, something like: !critbot --apply --sel --attacks And then check the attacks. Let me know if it does or doesn't work at all - from memory all the significant changes are done in new attributes, which are then called from the NPC attack's description field. If it doesn't work I can probably find time to rewrite it, it looks a lot more complicated than it actually is, apparently I coded that with my face?

Yeah, unfortunately no dice. At least, I created a new script, copied the code in, and started my name. Put in a critbot command. Nothing. No indication the script is even running successfully. :( Nothing in the sandbox window indicating it had launched successfully   I could be doing something wrong though. I’ve literally never tried to use an API that I didn’t just pick from the mods drop down.  Thank you though!

Hrmmm I just gave it a quick test and it seems to mostly work. But it did look like there was an issue with fresh installs - I just slapped a quick fix on it , feel free to check if it works any better. Then just check if at least the settings menu will open: !critbot --settings

Oosh said: Hrmmm I just gave it a quick test and it seems to mostly work. But it did look like there was an issue with fresh installs - I just slapped a quick fix on it , feel free to check if it works any better. Then just check if at least the settings menu will open: !critbot --settings Yep! That worked! I'm off to work but will play with it tonight! Thank you so much, this looks like it will be exactly what I need!

No worries - I haven't really played around with anything Character Sheet related since lazy loading came in - unsure if editing all the sheets at once will work or not, but it's worth a go. Let me know if there's any more issues. It's a horribly laid out script, but if there's any specific issues I should be able to fix them.

I tested it on a single goblin, and it seems to be working! Going to play a little bit further with a few more scenarios before expanding to include player characters... Thanks so much Oosh!

OK so one question: If I understand this correctly, !critbot is applying changes to sheets. So, if I apply the changes globally, like this: !critbot --apply --global --attacks Then it will apply to all existing NPC sheets. BUT, it would NOT cover any new NPCs I might subsequently create. So, I will need to remind myself that any time I add a new NPC, I will need to run critbot on that NPC .  Correct? Thanks again!

That's right - I don't think I ever got around to writing an observer. My group was playing a published module at the time, so I was probably more in the mindset of having all the monsters already in the journal. So yes - if you add a new sheet to the game, you would need to run critbot again. It's not overly difficult to add a way to automate that if you think it will be helpful. The script shouldn't ever try to add mods a second time though, so if you wanted to make sure you hadn't missed any, the --global flag should be ok to use without messing up the ones that have already been done. As an aside, in case it wasn't clear in the documentation (probably a bit generous calling it documentation, I know), almost all of the additions made by the script go in an attribute created on that row. This attribute is then called from the description field by appending a plain macro reference @{repeating_npcaction_rowID_critbotmods}. So essentially - if you can't see that appended to the description fields on the NPC, something has gone wrong. It also means you can manually remove the crit mods from the roll by simply deleting that text from the description field in that action. It also doesn't look like I ever added any kind of default "do everything" flag. So if you want every NPC attack to be using the custom crit rule, I think it's !critbot --apply --attacks --spells --global Edit - apparently I couldn't even manage to get the markdown right back when I wrote this. The readme on the repo is at least vaguely readable now...

Thanks a million Oosh. I'm just starting to get this game set up, haven't even had my session 0 yet, so I have plenty of time. So far I've tried it on a goblin and a player character, and in both cases it's working like a charm. I'm not really worried about an observer right now, so please don't spend any time on anything like that on my behalf!

Just to confirm for everyone who might come later - Oosh's script  perfectly solved the problem I mentioned in the OP. Thanks again!

Crikey, can't help good luck hey?