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My rule for massive damage is 50 hp or half your HP, whichever is higher. So you're not worrying about that until far later in the game.

My homebrew rule for combat. Rolling a 1 to hit doesn't make you fumble. It just allows the one you were swinging at a an opportunity to try and disarm you with a bonus. This keeps you from dropping your weapon 5% of the time, which is something an actually trained person would never do.

To me, the brutal crit one avoids getting a crit and rolling two hp damage. I have crit so many times and rolled less than half normal damage, and it makes feel like you were robbed of that crit. If you are using these rules, make sure you adjust your bbeg appropriately.

I ALSO hate the tomato explanation!!! So glad someone else does!! It's so annoying because people just love to act liek intelligence is just "knowing facts" and that wisdom is streetsmarts and applying the facts. No!!! Intelligence IS ALSO ABOUT APPLYING THE FUCKING FACTS!! Because knowing how to apply them, IS ITSELF A FACT ANYWAY!! Gods.

omg i'm a new player and thank you so much for explaining what wisdom is in a way i understand (well the book explained it, but i didn't know that was in a book so thank you)

Wisdom is knowing this video is technically correct. Intellect is knowing the saying is better.

However If we didn't use the tomato explanation, we wouldn't get this video. Maybe the real treasure was the unhinged arguments we had along the way.

5:00 I was running Madhouse of Tasha's Kiss for my friends the other day and there is an encounter in there where you fight this creature that turns into copies of the party and you fight them one by one. Well, the sorcerer rolled really well on initiative and used hold person on him and then the party proceeded to wail on him over and over until he depletes all copies. I was glad the party succeeded so well but I was sad that they missed out on a neat fight

I feel schizophrenic

Wisdom is not putting yourself in a position where you could be attack by a tomato

Good and fair point. Counter point: the reason most of these monsters have such huge stat blocks or endless abilities, which you even claim yourself to tweak, it’s because the game is in the players advantage. Average group there’s 4 to 6 other players and there’s one DM. The whole point of legendary actions is to give the boss fighting chance due to action and spellcasting economy. The game is designed to be unbalanced on purpose. By the time party or adventures meet those type of creatures. They have a huge arsenal tools already. And that’s not including the dungeon master giving out items or quest items. A experienced player can punk out most monster encounters. FFs fog cloud can cripple a beholder. Oh no an ogre! Spam ray of frost and kite his ass. The monster did 30 damage! But the cleric healed him for 2hp and he back in the fight. If the party has two spellcaster, and you have one, you will always lose the spellcasting fight. The dungeon Master is a player as well and should be treated as one. My final statement: is you must be aware how strong abilities are and conditions are. For a new dungeon Master, not realizing the strength of paralyzation could be very detrimental. For both the players and the Dm. Honestly, as long as you’re asking yourself, what do I want out of this combat counter? Theme, tone, atmosphere and tension should be the driving force of what abilities you put on your monsters and how they behave. I’m picking up from you is marvel, superhero action. Where are the players are everything and that’s cool. You speak very well on this style of DMIng.

I’ve once benefited from the “more dice more problems” point regarding Perkins crits and yeah, from firsthand experience the snowball potential is insane. At the time this happened I was an 8th level scourge aasimar Profane Soul blood hunter. The DM had given me a unique +2 greatsword that also dealt an additional 2d6 necrotic damage (meaning it dealt 4d6+STR+2 in total). Now, Profane Soul is basically just a 1/3 warlock, meaning I get Hex. Combine that with things like Crimson Rite, Curse of the Marked, and Radiant Consumption, and I was able to casually deal a lot of damage over the span of two turns. One time during this window, I was lucky enough to land a critical hit on a large boss that had-according to the DM-around 430 HP. With that crit, I was able to do over a fifth of its HP (86 damage) in four different damage types, and send it careening into its second phase in the middle of the second round. The final calc came out to 7d6+59.

Bro became the Green Goblin by the end there.

The moment people told me "if the palyers can, the npcs can too" i just ask them how many death saves they have rolled for npc's and they say npcs dont have death...oooohhh 😂😅

I use it as a good starting point for new players because it is already a huge info dump when starting, I do agree that it is not a good long term description but it gives a starting point.

if you want a short, quippy, and slightly less wrong explanation, here's one: strength: How hard you hit, how much you lift. Constitution: How hard you can get hit. Dexterity: everything else physical. Int: book smarts Wis: Street smarts Cha: emotional intelligence/ force of personality.

for the record, i think the expanded version came from a tumblr discussion, and if you know the tumblr humour of "everyone is desperately trying to be the dumbest person in the room", that should clarify why the explanations are a bit nonsense

Late to the party at this video and coming more from a 3.5/pf1e perspective, but I agree with the first two wholeheartedly. The last one I cater to the specific situation if it fits. Player takes risks to attack the BBEG of a section and gets a crit, I let them describe it and then chose a small bonus for the player or penalty for the BBEG. So like a crit with a giant hammer deforms armor, giving them an AC penalty, or they are "in the moment" and get a bonus to the next attack or two. Player makes a big deal about being confident they can cross a log safely and fails with a nat 1, they make a reasonable DC fort save or are sickened until the end of their next turn as they hit their stomach, or another sensitive location, while falling down.

I use existing mechanics so that the players feel like a part of the world.

i have a homebrew rule that says that if an enemy is A) Male, B) Wearing medium or lighter armor, and C) Not raging, you can target their balls with a bludgeoning attack to knock them prone (CON save)

Critical failures don't exist in D&D. They never have. They have always been homebrew, since 1e and BECMI stuff, and they have never made the game better. Don't use them. Never use them.

On Massive Damage, when our rogue took more than half his hit points in damage - at level 14, to be clear - our DM off-handedly mentioned the rule as a joke and said we weren't playing with it, but then after a few words exchanged between our DM and the rogue, the player actually wanted something debilitating to happen to her character, thinking it would be cool. The rogue lost one of his arms. It was an incredibly cool character moment that we carried for the rest of the campaign (until level 20!) but the key point of it was that both DM and player were cool with it happening.

Jason Schwartzman

2:13 as a new DM, I did have the issue of balancing encounters, buuut I still like the rule, and I gave the players the option to use it or not.

When it came to crits with my first (and really ONLY DM, since I've only played 2-3 serious games with that one person.) we just rolled to hit, and if it was a crit, rolled for damage and then doubled that damage straight up. Meaning that even if you crit it was still possible to only end up dealing 2 damage, but at that point if the roll on a crit was low, the DM would add in some extra flair like "Even though the attack was tame, you struck a vital weak point in the enemy's armor, causing them to stagger. The enemy now has -3 on their next dexterity check for the next 2 turns."

I have some experience with a couple of these rules in some way. For the brutal crits, when I played pathfinder, the usual pathfinder GM we had liked to *multiply* the damage rolls for any crit that was dealt in the encounter. One of the other PCs died, and my sorcerer picked up his battle axe and charged the person responsible for his death, despite being non-proficient. She promptly missed the attack and was hit with a crit on the next turn by the guy she whiffed, and was dealt more than twice her total HP in damage killing her instantly. Massive damage is a rule that dates all the way back to d20modern back in 2002, which was a trashfire of a system because it just lazily ported all the 3.5 mechanics to a modern system. There the massive damage threshold was based on simply your constitution score, so a character with 10 con taking 10 or more damage needs to roll a DC 15 fort save or instantly begin dying by dropping to -1 HP. It exists because by necessity, DnD is a system focused around people sponging lots of damage; and d20 modern gave all the guns 2dx damage. So 9mm pistols did 2d6, a lot of assault rifles did 2d8, bigger guns did 2d10 and so on; but people still had HP numbering in the hundreds at higher levels. So massive damage was a bandaid solution to make guns "feel like guns" even at high levels. The 5e version is honestly probably worse, because the threshold is so low at low levels, but enormously high at high levels. Meaning it only serves to TPK low level groups. And ultimately, I just agree with your points on crit tables. I don't think DnD has much place for something like a crit table, because it's already balanced around criticals having completely different effects. So the table just adds more to a critical on top of what you normally get and with a 5% chance of it happening every roll (minimum, more with things like advantage or boosted crit ranges) they're just not rare enough. If you want to play something with crits that powerful, something that uses 3d6 instead of a d20 is a much better choice. My personal opinion on rules like these are people wanting to play more gritty games with DnD, when honestly DnD isn't well designed for that. DnD does DnD best, which has always been at least somewhat heroic game with lots of magic and delving into dungeons to fight dragons mano e mano. There's lots of other great system that fit the "lethal and gritty" niche pretty well, like World of Darkness, Riddle of Steel and it's successors or if you really can't find anything that fits your setting, GURPS.

Oh, this was really interesting. I'd love to see more deep dives like this.

Our brutal critical only apply to the base weapon or spell dmg. So in a sneak attack example only the rapier is auto maxed so 8+ a rolled d8 + 4d6 rolled. So all the extra dice added from smite or hex etc are still rolled.

I would say I generally fit into the category of a GM who likes really crunchy, very gritty simulationist combat games. I don't play DnD, and generally the players and monsters have the same sets of actions available to them. But I do make a point in my games to give players other mechanical advantages a lot of the time. Sometimes I deny basic features to enemies, so they're less skilled and have less HP, other times I do go full "Only the players can do it" and give them goofy stuff like unique buffs related to bonds they've formed with NPCs. I think even in a super hardcore combat game, making the players feel unique and giving them the opportunity to flex their decisions and builds is extremely important.

Yeah that's a petty rant alright

What kind of watch do you have? I have a really similar looking one, and I'm wondering if it's the same thing

I would say that what you said here holds true for 5e dnd, but not necessarily other systems. As an example, I recently ran an encounter where the entire party had a save vs paralysis. Only a few passed. This being b/x based, the turns were quick, and no one was out long. Those who passed were franticly trying to unparalize the others, while the cleric held back the opponents. Smelling salts, slapping, and shotgunning energizing pipesmoke got more members into the fray. Granted, part of that working is because b/x is intended for solutions that aren't from class mechanics. There are advantages to systems where PCs and NPCs are built similarly. It lets players figure out what to expect from an enemy based on it's context clues and the abilities they know. An example is when our party kept track of the spell slots of an enemy wizard to assess how his resources were dwindling and how many more times he could cast shield. In my old school games, I've adopted the inverse of that phrase. I tell them "If my villains can do it to you, you can do it to them. Be mean. Be cruel. Smoke them out. Hire mercenaries to follow you in. Send the hounds after those who flee. My monsters won't fight fair, so you don't have to."

The only group it helps to have subclasses start at level 3 are new players and it only aids slightly by delaying one or two abilities from being learnt until later. The roleplay heavy story tellers lose out on having classes like the Cleric, Paladin, Warlock, Sorcerer, and Druid make proper sense narratively as these classes should already be a subclass when they become a class. The Min Maxers lose out on being able to easily dip 1 level for some specialty bonuses like Life cleric 1 level for Heavy armor and Healing buffs And it is meaningless since the benefit new players get is that instead of learning their first level stuff and their subclass they now learn their first level stuff AND A NEW FIRST LEVEL ABILITY TO REPLACE HAVING A SUBCLASS. For warlocks they actually have MORE to learn after the change than they did Before the change

Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Intelligence is knowing not to put a tomato in a fruit salad. Intelligence is having the business skills necessary to sell a tomato-based fruit salad. Intelligence is being able to crush, dodge, or eat tomatoes no matter how rotten, because you know how to crush, dodge, and eat things. If you get sick from eating a rotten tomato, that doesn’t mean you didn’t eat it.

I fully agree on the massive damage portion. I've used it in a brutal survival campaign. But it was 1/4 of their health and it only limited them to either an action or bonus if they fail the con save. At 1/2 + fail same as before and go prone. after that it's punishment enough

I agree completely... though for different reasons.. I guess... for me the mentioned issues are resolved as follows: 1) critical damage... does not happen when you roll high on your attack roll but - guess what - your damage roll... that is the whole point of the seperated rolls.. roll if you hit... roll how good you hit... so you roll maximum damage? Great... that is amazing... a critical.. you roll minimum? Damn... that is a glancing blow.. 3) attack roll of 20/1 must sure mean something.. yeah.. 20 always hit/succeeds. 1 always misses/fails... oh and no... do not always allow a roll... if you think there is not at least a 5% chance to have it succeed I do not ask for a roll.. and players can roll their dice all day long.. it only matters if I as the DM ask for a roll 2) massive damage... I agree that this is inconsistent with level.. as it seems to be born in a level range where players seem to lose fear of normal dangers due to an ever increasing hit point pool... therefore I recycled the old "they shall splinter" rule of shields and helmets... To recap.. shields can be sacrificed to either half, negate or lower the damage of an attack to 1 (depending on the variant of the splinter rule used)... helmets are sacrificed to keep a character alive an going with 1 hp/save a character from death a 0 hp... depending on the variant of the rule used (this stems from a version of D&D where losing all you hit points ment death and not another game of death check dice rolls... So, massive damage allows the character to half the damage/reduce it to minimum damage in exchange for a complication like... disadvantage on skill checks... damage rolls... saving throws.. advantage of attacks on their attacks.. or damage rolls... for as long as the character is notbfully healed... that way massivev damage triggers an option to introduce problems instead of the damage not on top of it... and it us the player's decision

Massive damage is one i enjoyed in the campaign i played, added such an extra "oh fuck" when getting hit by something big

Just saw this in my recommended. If someone is that deadset on a game where permanent injuries are accounted for on crits... Cyberpunk. I will take any opportunity to shill it.

Personally I look at the "tomato analogy" more as a bit of humor than actually explaining the ability scores. I do use it occasionally, but definitely add caveats to each of the six statements. And, based on my experiences with D&D, I can confirm that this analogy started before 4e was a thing. I remember first hearing it around the time of the D&D 3 to 3.5 transition. With that said though, the analogy could be older than that (AD&D 2nd, maybe?).

For massive damage our table instead uses the rule of. If you take massive damage you instead have a chance to be knocked unconscious. It’s a dc 10 con save so it’s not that hard but still a possibility. For grit tables my uncle actually used a 2.0 grit table which actually worked pretty well considering how rare some of the effects were. Though I do like you argument of how 20’s and 1’s are already good enough

As a dm I normally say "if you can do it so can they" in regards to variant rules or homebrew type situations. If we are using flanking so are the enemies be prepared. if you got a gun, you might run into other gunslingers. Make sure you prep for that, being the case.

You didn't die on the hill. You rolled of it.

I've never heard of that crit rule but i have explored simple crits where you just double the damage literally.

My crits are just roll the regular dice for damage and then only the weapon damage gets doubled. So like any smite, sneak, poison, etc hits as normal but the longsword gets doubled. It's a balanced way to increase damage without 1 shoting a combat encounter.

Good news man youtube recommended me this vid via notif and I doubt im the only one

crits are a thing for a reason. *should be brutal*. tpk's from regular enemies sucks, but it's part of the game. and people hating the random aspect....like mate. you're playing a dice game. it's random. deal.

It is indeed the world's pettiest rant

i use brutal crits in stars without number, the com,bat is already deadly but tbh in terms of damage everyone is kinda doing the same damage because it is all weapons damage, brutal crits work alot better i find in this environment because when they are fighting the rare enemy that is VERY hard to bring down (for instance a suit mech reduces incoming damage from small arms fire by 12 and has an AC of 18 while only having HP 15) those crits need to actually feel like crits, especially when it is gonna reduce that damage already. in terms of regular combat you dont really notice much of a difference because most gangers or soldiers or whoever you are fighting usually die in about 1-2 hits already just because base health for most humans sits below max damage for most basic weapons.

I only use crunchy crit on weapon attacks. Spells, sneak attack, and smite crit the same way

That last one was a crit lmao