this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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Critical success and failures are by the book.
They are an optional rule in the Dungeon Master Guide on page 242.
They are as optional as Multiclassing and Feats.
Arguably MORE optional as this rule does not appear in the PHB, but fair enough. To me, using crits on ability checks messes with game balance too much and challenges verisimilitude. But, to each their own.
Well, the rule as stated there is a recommendation to possibly change "exceptional rolls" to have different effects. It talks about rolling a 1 and 20, but I'd say DMs should probably just use the Pathfinder option of getting 10 points higher or lower than the DC. It just makes so much more sense, although the advantage/disadvantage system doesn't really work for this as well as the Pathfinder system, which actually adds to your roll.
At the end of the day, everything in the book is a guide. You should throw parts away that don't work and add things that do. Regardless though, the rules of Pathfinder 2E need a lot less modification to work as you'd expect.
I don’t play PF2E, but I checked out the crit rules a couple of months ago and rolling a nat 1 or 20 was still accounted for. From memory, doing that or succeeding / failing by 10+ brought you down or up a degree of success, and those degrees were:
So if the DC was 25, you rolled a nat 20, and your result was a 16-24, you would succeed. If your result had been a 25 or higher, you’d have critically succeeded.
If the DC was 10 and you rolled a nat 1, you didn’t necessarily critically fail. If your result was a 20 or higher, you’d still succeed (since you were over by 10); on a 10-19, you’d fail; and on a 9 or lower you’d critically fail.
If you rolled a nat 2-19, though, the impact of the over by 10 / under by 10 would be more noticeable. Vs a DC 15, you would crit fail if your result was 5 or lower and crit succeed if your result was 25 or higher.
Like I said, I haven’t played with the PF2E system, but my impression is that it would be a big improvement over 5e’s current system without suffering the same issues that most homebrew crit systems run into. It makes critical successes and failures more believable. It encourages DMs to prepare outcomes for the higher degrees of success / failure due to them having a higher chance of occurring. It makes it less likely for crit failures to happen to highly skilled characters.
And, as a fringe benefit, it also means that you can have almost impossible DCs that are possible only for the most skilled, and even then, only when they’re lucky (like a DC of 40 in a game where the highest bonus you can reasonably get is +11-+19, such that only a nat 20 by someone with such a bonus can succeed).