Critical Hits and Critical Failure...

[.Leif.]

To most foes Critial hits should be fatal.

Like when my archer aims for the enemy mage's yarbles.

[Agelastos]

The Critical Failure rate of firearms should be pretty high, IMO. After all, match- and wheellock guns were prone to jam, break or backfire.

I would love it if a musket could blow up in your face causing massive damage. Firearms could be the weapon equivalent of Wild Magic from Throne of Bhaal.

[HansKrSG]

Having interresting stuff happen when you roll a critical whatever, sounds like a good idea. I agree.

[maggotheart]

I said this in the other thread: critical hits and misses diminish the importance of the players tactics and skill and increases the reliance on simple luck and I think that's a bad thing.

 

Ever played Arcanum where every time you swing your weapon there is a chance of damaging your armour, dropping your weapon, falling over, scarring yourself for permanent attribute loss, etc? How about all of those things happening at once? How about having that happen right after you've spent 10 minutes fighting your way through a mob and getting wiped out because of it? Another one was Fallout, though it tended to happen much less often (a good thing), but if I'm in a battle and my gun jams, I'm usually dead and have to reload. That's only amusing the first couple of times it happens. It's really annoying after a while and encourages reloading, regardless of how interesting it may seem on paper. I don't want to have to reload constantly because of an overly luck based combat system.

 

Realism shouldn't matter in this regard. In BG1, your weapon could break at any moment, just like in real life. However, that mechanic was (imo) extremely annoying and they removed it for BG2.

 

Critical hits should do more damage, and critical misses should just miss.

[Frenetic Pony]

Don't like either, don't think they add anything really substantial whatsoever to gameplay sice you have no direct control over them, nor does manipulating their stats via levelling/gear seem interesting.

 

But others like them, and it's not like I'm really bothered by them.

[AGX-17]

I don't mind a critical failure so long as my weapon doesn't explode (i've never liked the idea of having to carry surplus/duplicate weapons around for when the one you're currently equipped with breaks,) or end up in the hands of the enemy.

Edited November 18, 2012 by AGX-17

[Diagoras]

The Critical Failure rate of firearms should be pretty high, IMO. After all, match- and wheellock guns were prone to jam, break or backfire.

I would love it if a musket could blow up in your face causing massive damage.

 

Problem is, if weapons have high chances of critical failures and do it often, it's hard to make them fun to use. Though I could see taking a note from reality helping here - critical chance escalating the longer you go without cleaning the barrel, and depending on the charge used.

[Pipyui]

Cursed weapons of great power, but with high chances of critical failure would be neat.

[rjshae]

Generating a complicated system for an unlikely outcome doesn't make for efficient resource usage (i.e. development costs). It would be better to use a wounds system as in Drakensang or DA2. But I can live with just applying extra damage, or better yet just using a normal distribution for all damage determination.

[mokona]

the party will receive, in general, many more critical hits than they'll dish out - and if they have massive, and long reaching, in-game penalities, you're only truly hampering the players or robbing them of an interesting encounter because they got incredibly lucky (although a solid normal crit can do the same in some cases).

I have a simple solution. NPCs never deal critical hits. Only the PC or his companions can deal critical hits. Each character has a character-specific critical hit effect.