5e Can I use a variant rule for Critical Hit damage?

Hi Y'all, new to DMing, and still figuring out how to use Roll20 from this side. Is there a way to change the critical hit damage so that instead of rolling twice it's max damage on the first roll and rolling the second as normal?

Not automatically. You would probably need to create custom macros for each attack. Keith says this and then Oosh will probably be along ten minutes later with an ingenious solution...

I've got nothing, sorry :( Unless you happen to be in a Pro game, I do have an API script that will apply custom crit rules to all the character sheets in the game. Without API I don't know of any shortcut... I think you need to modify every attack on every character sheet as Keith said.

I don't have a lot of experience with the 5e sheet, but won't it work if you just enter the max damage in the crit field? For example, if you have a weapon that does 1d8, just put 8 in the weapon's crit field. It's really the first die that is rolling, but the end result should be the same.

Oosh said: I've got nothing, sorry :( Unless you happen to be in a Pro game, I do have an API script that will apply custom crit rules to all the character sheets in the game. Without API I don't know of any shortcut... I think you need to modify every attack on every character sheet as Keith said. Wow! That was quick y'all, thanks! My friend who created the game before handing me the keys has a Pro account. I know nothing about CS, but he majored in it, so I'm sure if it's easy, the two of us can figure it out. What do we need to do?

As Rabulias said, if this custom rule is only for player characters, it's probably faster to just do it manually. Also, can you explain the crit rule you're using again? I'm unsure about this first roll / second roll thing... it doesn't sound like something the API script will help with, it's for bulk changing NPC sheets to support a custom crit rule. But if bulk processing of NPC sheets is what you want to do, the script will do the job. It'll do PC sheets too if you want, but they're pretty easy to handle since they actually have editable crit fields.

I'd like to do it for all rolls, PCs and NPCs, if possible. Say for instance, a fighter with an Oathbow crit. Rather than rolling 2d8 and 6d6 to determine the damage, the damage would be Dex + Proficiency + 1d8+8 + 3d6+18

Okay... so it sounds that's the max damage crit rule. So with the oathbow example: Damage 1 (base): 1d8 + DEX + PROF Damage 2 (sworn enemy): 3d6 Crit 1 (standard rule): 1d8 Crit 2 (standard rule): 3d6 And you want it modified to: Damage 1 (base): 1d8 + DEX + PROF Damage 2 (sworn enemy): 3d6 Crit 1 (modified rule): 1*8     Crit 2 (modified rule): 3*6 And by the same rule, a greatsword would go: Damage 1 (base): 2d6 + STR + PROF Crit 1 (standard rule): 2d6 modified to: Damage 1 (base): 2d6 + STR + PROF Crit 1 (modified rule): 2*6 If that's correct, this is the default modified rule my script uses, so should be pretty easy. It's still a work in progress, but it should be able to do this without breaking any furniture. All the changes it makes can be undone easily, anyway. You can grab it here from Github, and paste it in as a new script (post back if you need help with this bit). First thing is to make sure it's going to do what you want. The default settings should be fine. It won't process PC sheets for now, but we can leave that for later. Once the script is loaded, just check the console for its initialization log, make sure it's loaded the r205e sheet, and the 'default' or 'brutal' crit rule. Make a new page in your campaign, and drag a monster or two on to the canvas. Make sure their entries appear in the Journal properly and the tokens are linked, then run: !critbot --apply --page --attacks --critrange 2 You can add --spells as well if the NPC's you've added have any spells with attack rolls. This should apply the custom crit to any NPC sheet with a token on the canvas, and expand the crit range to 2 or more (just to make testing easier). Roll some attacks and see if the math is correct. Then make sure reverting changes works: !critbot --revert --page --attacks --critrange If it's all good, you should be able to go ahead and bulk change your NPC's with --global instead of --page. The readme on the Github is the only help at the moment, (there's a --help command in the script but it doesn't currently do anything). To process PC sheets you'll need to go to !critbot --settings and change the toggle - it currently only does one at a time. Let me know if you need any help! edit - the script doesn't currently react to anything except the command line. If you add character sheets to your game, or add attacks/spells to an existing sheet, the script won't know about it and you'll need to run it again. There's no harm in running it multiple times on the same sheets, although it will overwrite anything the script had added in previously