- When you miss with an attack, you still do damage: roll its damage expression.
- When you hit with an attack, you do its full damage expression, no need to roll damage.
- When you crit an unbloodied enemy, do your attack’s full damage expression. If this does not bloody him, bloody him now.
- When you crit a bloodied enemy, do your attack’s full damage expression. If this does not take the enemy to 0 hp or below, immediately take him to 0 hp.
D&D combats (not just 4e) are possibly infinitely long. Say we have a PC fighter and a goblin. They both have, say, a 50% chance to hit. Every round, it’s possible that both miss. The sun could burn out before that goblin buys it.
In practice, it means that combats take longer than they should because, on likely a third of turns, nothing happens. Whiff. If you spent any time selecting powers, that time was wasted. That’s what these rules address. (And, if you want to be more severe, have crits mean insta-zero-hp period, skipping the bloodied step. Whether you apply this to the PCs or not depends on the aesthetic you’re wanting to evoke.)
And we should understand, in fiction, these changes don’t mean that the fighter cuts the goblin’s head off every time he hits. Hit points are abstract. One “attack” takes six seconds. Losing hp doesn’t even represent taking a hit. (I’d even have an informal understanding where “bloodied” means bloodied—for the first time. Before then, everybody’s dodging, blocking, getting flesh wounds and bruises. Then someone gets bloodied, and things get real.) It represents being pressured and wearied always and only sometimes suffering actual violence.
Revised: hp loss represents assault (usually with a deadly & magic weapon) and only sometimes battery.
All that to say: here, I think this will produce more engaging play.
|