)
The thing had something like 4 pages of critical hit results for each and every damage type. Piercing weapons, thunder keyword powers, fire, cold, the list was pretty exhaustive. Â And it failed to scale in a lot of places where a ‘less major’ result would insure death while a later one wouldn’t. Stunning someone for 5 rounds is worse than IMO than a escalating -1 penalty to hit that then recovers after a certain point.
Anyway, if you really really like critical hits to matter more than just max damage then someone’s gone to a LOT of trouble to give you a ton of options. I’m trying to recall the commercial system that had similar critical hit charts but I”m drawing a blank right now but it was very old school, back in the 80′s is when I played.
But can you imagine for every 20 rolled (or a 19-20 for things with improved critical ranges?) digging through 50 pages of charts to find out what it did? Then trying to keep track of the results, because most of the results were pretty varied. (-2 for 6 rounds but only to rolls that involve the lower body when the moon is in the house of jupiter and the sun is over your left shoulder).
Okay I kid, a little, but seriously if you like lots of charts and more (semi) realistic consequences from rolling a 20 then this book is for you. Everything you could possibly hope to find is in this exhaustive set of charts. Otherwise it’s good for the occasional chuckle as you glance through the many pages see just what happens when someone takes 250 points of damage from one blow from a necrotic blast.
So final word: For those who’d enjoy it, it’s worthwhile, for the rest which is I’m betting most, it’s not.
February 8th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
The commercial system you’re thinking of was probably Rolemaster, which was crazy with tables for catastrophic damage- my second guess would be the Morrow Project, which if I recall correctly had tables to track the path of a bullet through your body. Ahhh, good times…