Critical hit dice options?

[Milke]

Trenloe. When crits are rolled, it doubles the number of dice. Since, according to RAW, crits are simply double damage (plus any deadly or fatal dice), is there an option (or could one be added) to switch to one or the other? I prefer just doubling the damage. But it'd be nice to have the option to choose.

[Trenloe]

It is also RAW to roll all the dice. In the "Doubling and Halving Damage" section on page 451 of the Core Rules this is also included:

The GM might allow you to roll the dice twice and double the modifiers, bonuses, and penalties instead of doubling the entire result, but this usually works best for single-target attacks or spells at low levels when you have a small number of damage dice to roll.

The wording of this "when you have a small number of dice" suggests that the idea of rolling the base dice and doubling is a design decision to try to speed up the game. As seen in the quote above, it's also within the rules to roll all of the dice. As Fantasy Grounds does the rolling and totaling all for you, it doesn't slow the game down like it would in a face-to-face game.

This has been raised, and discussed, a few times before. I'd like to offer an option for both approaches in the ruleset. The issue is that the way FG rolls dice (it has an asynchronous handler) with a lot of code before and after the dice roll. From the outside, it would appear that it would be simple to allow an option to roll and double - the issue comes in with where effects can add damage dice, particularly targeted effects, and having that encoded into the whole damage process. I've looked into it a few times, thinking "it really can't be that complex", but it is and so it requires a re-work of the damage system to allow the option - which I'm a bit averse to doing right now as it would require a lot of coding and testing to do. I'm doing some work with new effects for damage dice with Release 19 which move the adding/removing of damage dice to earlier in the design process, so that may allow me to do something around this - but no promises!

[Milke]

Definitely wasn't a criticism. Just was wondering =)
Knowing zero about the coding side myself, it sounded like something that would be easy. It's not enough of a big deal probably to spend lots of time on it.

[MaxAstro]

I would like to note that the current approach does cause a slight inconsistency that can be confusing to new users sometimes (my players have been tripped up by it a time or two): Crits caused by a critically succeeded attack roll double the number of dice. However, crits caused by a critically failed saving throw seem to roll the standard number of dice and then double the damage.

This can make it look like a crit wasn't applied correctly, if players are used to seeing the extra dice for a crit. Would be nice to have consistent behavior either way (personally I'm in the "extra dice" camp because it looks visually satisfying!).

[Trenloe]

A Basic Saving Throw is different to a critical hit from a weapon. There's no concept of "critical hit" damage (for example, a gelatinous cube's immunity to critical hits wouldn't apply to a basic save), there's no fatal or deadly dice to be added/changed. It's a single damage roll which can then be doubled or halved depending on the result of the saving throw - sometimes with multiple targets getting different final damage.

[Milke]

Yea. I think the deadly and fatal is what makes it more difficult programming-wise (as a guess, anyway). If I could program, I'd have my OWN VTT!!! But, I can't. So I need you smart people. =p