DwD Studios
critical hit/failure
Wed, 07/15/2015 - 1:40pm | 
Wishing
After spending a lot of time thinking about how to best use critical success and failures in attacks, trying out most of the variants on this site, this is the home made answer I've cooked up for my group, which has been picked up by them.
Since I like letting the players have a say in the narrative, critical failures are decided by the person left of you (GM not included). This has kept things very interesting :o)
As for critical success from a player on an enemy, the usual typical choices are X2 dmg, ignore DR or drop him prone and dazed 1 turn. Anything else a player finds could be cool, they are welcome to suggest.
My problem has mostly been when enemies score a critical hit on the players. It can get brutal very quickly. So I came up with this alternative. While still violent, it rarely kills a player outright, and lets them keep a souvenir from the encounter.
When you are hit by a critical success, you fall Prone, and become Wounded/. Each time you are Wounded/, choose one of the following conditions as semi-permanent effect.
Dazed (may be taken multiple times, stacks)
Slowed (usually simulates a leg wound) may be taken twice, become Immobilized.
Stunned (usually simulates a head wound)
Weakened (usually blood loss)
Fatigued (usually blood loss)
These conditions are permanents until you receive proper medical care. For each day of medical care, you may remove one of the conditions affecting you. If you have received more than 3 of these wounds, intensive care is required.
I even made some cards I printed for the players to keep record of their wounds. See attachment.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| WoundedCards.pdf | 129.13 KB |
| 
Tags: 
Wishing, this is great! Kudos with the Wound Cards, and I love the idea about the player to the left deciding the failure. That'll definitely keep everyone paying attention.
This will definitely find a home in my campaign.
That's great! I especially like the idea of someone to your left being able to narrate the crit failure, very cool!
For critical successes by enemies, I have a "condition deck" (I think we have one in the downloads section of this site, and have them available for sale on RPGNow). I randomly draw one and throw it at the player. Same thing I do when they critically fail. But I may try your solution, it looks fun!
I know they're part of the PDF bundle. Now I know exactly what to do with them. :)
Very interesting. I'd like to observe this in practice.
So far we've used it in two covert ops games and one barebones game, and it's been really nice. Players love it, and often choose options that fit their view of the combat instead of the least problematic solution.
Failure-wise I've had silencers explode cartoon style, people shooting themselves in the foot while trying to fix a jammed gun (two critical failures in a row), and some more typical stuff like weapons being dropped or characters slipping etc.
My players are very narrative in nature, so they tend to pick the wounds that fit their idea of the scene, which means I've had characters with blood loss and head wounds instead of minor wounds on more than one occasion.
I'm glad to see others might enjoy them! :o)