I have never heard a Crit beeing explained as a charcter "putting max effort in". But yeah that's stupid. I've always heard it explained as a lucky strike that connects with a vital spot of the enemy. And that sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Yes ofcourse a fighter always aims for the killing blow, but in most cases the target dodges or just moves enough that you don't quite get the perfect blow. A crit is simply that perfect blow that hits the vital spot. Therefore I think it is a perfectly valid concept.
I think "putting max effort in" crit is when you hold button to charge attack and it does much more damage. So its kind of intended crits, not random based.
My logic on "putting in max effort" is basically that they had a read and pushed to the point of putting themselves at disadvantage either before or after the blow in hopes of finishing it in that one shot
The funniest critical i have ever seen in a table top roleplaying game: a enemy wizard stands on flying disc hovering over a lava pit. We are unable to hit him with close combat weapons and our supply arrows and throwing weapons had been spent fighting the wizards minions. One of my friends had enough of it all and picked up a rock from the cave floor and threw it at the wizard and scored a critical hit with the effect: normal damage, target stumbles back ten feet. The wizard fell off his disc into the lava pit and died horribly. The end.
Hahaha. I love things like that in RPGs. I once had a player run out of bolts for their crossbow and throw the thing at an enemy, scoring a critical hit and killing them. One of my favourite things in pen and paper games.
Playing a level 0 chatter in the prologue session of a campaign. I'm just a farm boy, trying to free the guards captured by the invading dark elves slavers and their orc mercs. I take an arrow from my quiver and cut the first guard loose. As he is a guard and I'm a farm boy, I give him the bow and arrows and I just keep the one arrow to cut the rest of the guards free. The orc captain is charging towards us. The freed guard shoots an arrow and misses and the orc swings it's scimitar so hard it cuts the guard's head clean from his neck. He is charging and will be on me next round, I don't have a weapon except the arrow to hand. I thrust it out, putting all my strength into a punch like attack to stick the arrow in the eye. Natural 20, critical hit, max damage plus strength modifier (I was a STRONG farm boy) meant I killed the orc by punching an arrow into its eye and brain. That character was the king of the clutch.
Before warching the video, id like to say i have always thought of critical hits as you succsefully hitting a gap in the armor, or hitting an opponent in a vital organ. Stuff like that.
kamatong yeah, i was just about to comment that. Most of the rpg's I've seen or even if I think about a critical hit in real world terms I imagine or have mostly experianced a normal/ish attack that does way more damage because the luck of hitting a vital organ or gap in Armour or weak spot. Not an action that required more force or a special move to be able to create the critical hit.
indeed and thinking in a realistic sense, one can increase their critical strike % by training so that their attacks are more precise, therefore hitting critical areas more often.
In DnD I've always thought of the attack roll as being the ability to pass through an opponent's defenses, and the damage roll is how large of a wound you inflict on them. Thus higher armor class, or using a shield etc reduce the opportunities to land a damaging strike, and require a higher roll. Sometimes the novice hits and the veteran misses,
I'd say that the random sort are an attempt to simulate circumstances in actual combat where a person is both presented with and notices a significant vulnerability in their opponent's defenses and manages to land the blow. Because games that use these mechanics aren't able to capture the intricacies of actual combat, it's sort of their way of adding in something to simulate that dynamic. In cases of games that allow you to increase the chance of critical hits, it's like they're increasing the character's ability to notice and capitalize on those vulnerabilities.
Exactly, thank you. Especially in games where you can't even aim where you attempt to strike, like the vast majority of RPG games, it's a damn good approximation to the character spotting and exploiting a weakness or mistake from the enemy.
RioluMan not to mention that they tend to penetrate a lot deeper than blades with a larger cross sections and thus has a greater probability to reach internal organs rather than just cutting flesh and fat.
FortyTwoBlades As a D&D DM, I make use of this same idea, and as a result, I actively describe critical hits, and give them added effects if enough land on the right weak spots. When I put together an encounter, in my notes I have all the critical points, and I do let players call their attacks (I aim for its head). If they roll a nat 20 the effectiveness of the critical depends on where they called, and, with bosses, if they've been struck there before with crits. The most recent boss encounter was a powerful winged swordsman, who used lightning fast attacks and dodges. However, after being crit by a lightning bolt in rapid succession (Witch Bolt), and the barbarian landing a nat 20 while aiming for his shoulder on his sword side, a term I like to use was put into place: "Reality Ensues." His arm came off.The dude was battered, then had a massive axe slip past his minimal armor, and cleave his limb clean off. A more well-armored opponent might get caught under the armpit, or through the eye slit of their helmet, etc, or in the case of spells, the metal armor might melt at a certain point, or act as a pressure cooker, or be welded by a bolt of lightning, or become brittle under extreme cold. A hammer blow could stave in a chest plate, or break off an armored scale of a dragon, or an axe could remove the dragon's tail after a few powerful blows. The beauty of tabletop is that the game is never more or less sensible than the DM.
I would imagine that once in a blue moon an attack might, for example, hit a major bloodvessel and do a lot more damage than that attack would normally do even mere centimeters to the left or right. One would think that could count as a "critical hit" or what not. An unexpectedly effective attack if you will.
King Harold took an arrow to the eye on a battlefield. That was a true critical 20 rolled by some lucky archer. (or perhaps it was a critical miss from a firendly archer... who knows)
I'm glad more companies are sponsoring videos. I'd rather hear about a game from the owner of the channel instead of some cheesy commercial that you can't skip.
in games i played critical hits were said to be either: 1) a strike that hits a vital spot of the opponent and thus does extra damage 2) a strike that hits in a weak spot of the armor thus ignoring armor worn by the opponent 3) an event of luck in which the enemy botches his parade and actually runs into the blade rather than parrying or dodging it all those sound reasonable to me
The best system I think is non lethal and lethal critical hits. so it multiples based on parts of the body that are armored, and not. For instance there was a hidden point based system in Dark age of Camelot. A lot of people wore helmets, and a lot didn't. If you were critically hit in the head without a helmet the damage would be lethal and you could die in one hit, if you wore a helmet it would be non lethal and calculate that damage against the armor until the armor failed it's duty.
In most games now crits just bypass all armor. This actually damaged armor to the point it broke then the attacks dealt more damage. It didn't negate a critical hit though, it just dealt with it differently, like if you put "Max effort" in hitting a piece of armor, still not going to do much to the wearer. but often demonstrated time and again if you keep striking a piece of armor it will fail. but nearly all the time a first strike on an unfamiliar armor will do no damage and no one is going to stand there and let you hit them in the head 20 times in a row.
I would imagine a critical hit being basically a perfect hit for the most part. You hit perfect edge alignment, maximum force, on the weakest part of the armor with zero deflection or interference from your opponent. That's how I describe it anyway. No extra flashy shit, the technique itself doesn't look any different, you just landed a perfect hit doing what you normally do. If you've ever sparred before, sometimes you land those really juicy ones that hurt even if you weren't even trying to hit hard. EDIT: Mostly for game balancing reasons, this has to do just double damage in most cases, because generally landing a "critical hit" in real life is going to instantly mortally wound that person if not outright kill them.
I love games where criticals can one hit kill you or cripple easily because they are way more than double damage like Fallout were a critical hit can severely cripple your character till you find some healing juice.
Brian Rodriguez Agreed, and in my personal table top rpg im making, its definitely a thing. Most people though don't like being one shot, so most games try to avoid that route. Some of us definitely enjoy it though.
You can easily make one shotting work in games just make sure you give players either an easy out either by fast resurrection or a good checkpoint system people enjoy challenges when they seem doable also always make the one shotting mechanics work both ways it's not fun if you are the only one getting one shot have the players also get the ability to one shot it's one of the most fun things in tabletop RPGs which most video games can't capture.
Brian Rodriguez Yeah I definitely agree, I prefer the element of fast deadly strategic combat over bags of hp and static combat for sure. I think this help facilitate more frenetic, unpredictable and tactical situations.
This is how I see it too. For unarmored combat, the amount of damage done by a non-critical hit is more like a hit with bad edge alignment, that glances, or impacts with low power anyway, so a critical hit is much more like a good hit to begin with
Only Katanas can land critical hits because they are the best swords in existence, they are made from a solid sheet of titanium the size of a football field and folded over 9,000 times to produce the physical manifestation of a Samurai's honor. *tips fedora* Nothing personal medieval kids.
But a "luck" based crit as you call it, like in D&D for example, is not just the luck where the weapon hits, but also the curcumstances that allow for a good hit, maybe the enemy falters and allows you to get a very damaging hit in. So I would say that this is pretty realistic.
There is 2 scenarios for critical hits used in RPG games: 1)An attack that multiplies your current power by 2x or 3x 2)An attack that ignores the defensive points/value of the opponent (as if exploiting an armor gap in theory)
Ignoring armour means it penetrates defense, but that doesn't equal a crit. It's not uncommon to see stuff like crossbows penetrating armour, yet that's not a critical hit.
I don't necessarily agree that ALL combat is always 100% nor can I see every successful attack being a critical hit. You may very well successfully make contact with your opponent and not cut deep enough to end the fight. People have survived being shot in the heart with a 9mm +P JHP long enough to run a full city block. Also in some types of combat you need to pace yourself. Like MMA for example. If you wear yourself out in the first few seconds you've lost. Most MMA fighters (which are REAL combatants) will feel their opponent out in the first few seconds with light jabs or low kicks. If you go in full force you get a fight like UFC 2's Pat Smith vs Scott Morris. Check it out its brutal and it ended VERY badly for Morris who ran in going full steam in the first few seconds. Even in Hema when fighting an opponent you don't want to make the mistake of underestimating your opponent. Even if the weapons are swords and boards you need to think and attack strategically. Most of the time just going all out will get you killed if you underestimate your opponent. If you're facing a skilled opponent you may very well surprise your opponent with the ferocity of your attacks and win, but YOU didn't win that fight your opponent LOST the fight because he underestimated YOU. Critical hits (at least in my opinion) are like feints to vital organs that work and fully connect. You don't always go for the decapitation due to situation, opponents guard, position, etc. If you always go for the neck you become predictable and lose very quickly.
Boxing is another perfect example, every fighter is looking to land that "ender", but its never that simple, no matter how skilled they are, the other guy will try to avoid it, its been confirmed that a good blow to the chin, or the liver WILL down anyone, no matter how good they are, but landing that blow is never a garantee. so consider them as real life critical hits, attacks with devastating effect on the opponent.
I always thought of critical hits as a kind of attack where there is an additional effect apart from the damage, which usually would come from luck. Take a hit with a mace, it's going to hurt, but it might not break bones. You could argue that if you hit in a specific way, at a specific angle, when the target is in a specific stance, you can hurt in addition to break a couple of bones, therefore incapacitating the target. Of course, breaking bones is among the priorities of a mace, but I think you get my point. What you were saying about the sneak attack, the primary advantage you would consider is bypassing the armor, but if you can also hit a specific vulnerable spot, such as the back of the head, you could say that dealing critical damage you would incapacitate them instantly too.
I always saw critical hits as less "putting in maximum effort", and more "getting a lucky lethal blow in". You always aim for those lethal strikes, but rarely do you manage a direct hit (also why it requires a 20 roll or the equivilant in most games), at least that's how it works in my tabletop campaigns that I personally run for D&D. Examples of this are in my own videos as well, Neverwinter Nights words it specifically in that manner, so I think they're entirely acceptable, from that point of view at least. In any case, thank you for the content, Skal. As always I enjoyed it tremendously, and your videos continue to inspire me and help me in my scripting for videos, writing my books, worldbuilding, and more. Thank you, can't wait for the next video!
I always imagined crits as breaking through the opponents defences and hitting somewhere that would do a lot of damage like an artery or severing tendons etc etc
few days ago i made a rpg damage system, which goes like this: You have about 100 HP (if you are bigger, more, if smaller, less) which means your blood and other body liquids; Cut (any cutting damage) gives bleeding effect: it can be small, 1/sec, as you would cut your finger with a knife, or you can cut major artery, and deal 30/sec, and kill enemy in 3 secs. Cuts work good anywhere you will hit, it depends how good the cut will be. Thrust gives bleeding effect, but much smaller, and can give critical hits, for example, if you would thrust in your oponents chest, you can damage heart, and that is almost instant kill (or can give bleeding effect 60/sec), but thrust in arm or leg, it will not be as lethal as thrust in chest or head. Thrusts are made to give you fast kills, but only if you aim them right. Blunt damage does not give any bleeding, but it has very high chance of critical (breaking bones, damaging organs etc), so you can end your oponent quickly without killing him, for example if you would strike someone's arm and brake it, he would be very easy target, if you would aim at his head, then you have chance of instant kill (high chance, even 80% if you will get good hit). Blunt force is good because it can give damage even in armour, and if you would aim it, you can win in basically 1 shot, but only if you would get good hit. armor just gives resistance for that type of weapons, for example plate would give 100% resistance against cut, and also 95% against thrust, and almost nothing against blunt force, mail would be worse in thrust resistance, and gambeson would give actuall blunt resistance. what do you think? Ps. axes would give both cutting and blunt damage, but both would be lower.
Buzdygan because bleeding does not last indefinitely, consider some type of mechanism like: Cuts do x damage every timeframe and last until 10 times x or 10 to the power of x damage is done. With this a major or medium cut can still be life threatening if untended but minor cuts expire after doing their max damage. For your armor section. Gambesons are quite good against arrows (depending on arrow head and flight distance) and even cuts. So perhaps consider even the light armor variants to give some kind of protection to all damage types. Depending on your setting perhaps you want to consider heat / cold and other external damage sources.
about that cutting mechanics: That's very good idea, healing factor of cuts could be nice to implement, i think that in fantasy setting if creature can heal itself very fast, then your mechanics can explain that. and about armor, of course gambeson would have nice protection against cuts and thrusts, drawback of gambeson would be that it will get easily destroyed (kingdom come deliverance has good thing about it). for elemental damage i'm not sure yet, but heat would be separated into 2 types, heat that you produce while moving in armor, or because of sunlight, that will affect your stamina, and heat as fire, that melts your skin and burns muscles, but i have no idea how to implement that.
Sounds good, but needs some adjustments. Something like "hold hand on cut to reduce damage" or "move more - lose more hp from bleeding / broken bones" should be a thing imo.
The way I see it is a critical hit isn't a killing blow, it just does more damage. So in the context of a real fight, where you can't get perfect edge alignment or ideal strikes because of how unpredictable the battlefield is, a critical hit would then be a hit that has all the variables lined up for it; it's got good edge alignment, it hit the ideal target in that situation, did the most possible damage, and so on. But that's just my take.
Personally I've always read the "luck based" critical hit as more of a situation where your opponent's defenses simply faltered and your blow connected exactly as you wanted it to, through some major vital organ like the heart, liver, throat, or what have you. As opposed to your opponent managing to mitigate some of the damage by dodging backwards just as your blow connected, resulting in a shallow wound, or managing to partially deflect a blow, or the like.
That was my thinking too. Your opponent was momentarily distracted by something else on the battlefield and made a mistake. He left an opening that you were able to capitalize on. If it's not that a critical hit is a hit that that randomly does more damage, but that the situation changed in a way that let you take a more ideal shot. It's also why most RPGs have a critical hit stat of some sort. You can learn to better notice these openings and take advantage of them. The animations just don't show it because of limited hardware and budgets.
@skallagim I very much see it when you compare it too how DnD does it, very much when looking at the idea of the rogues “sneak attack” hitting someone in a very vulnerable spot, like chances of hitting a perfect slash or something between the plates of their armor, ie low chance high damage
Whenever someone crits in one of my rpg sessions, I simply assume they did something they were thinking about doing, but didn't know would be that effective. For example, they strike an opponent in the shoulder and deal far more damage because that shoulder was injured years ago and didn't recover well, so they hit a more fragile point without knowing it
Yeah, something like this could work as well. Or maybe his armor wasn't properly repaired in one spot, there was some uneven footing, maybe you're aiming for the legs and he had knee damage and you made it worse etc. There are so many factors to count, that I think critical, or better said "lucky" strikes are easily a thing. Though I do wish games also incorporated a chance for failed strikes.
You might want to check out the GURPS method of critical hits. Different weapon classes had different damage modifiers, and since hit points were generally always low, combat was deadly. The game had different body parts to target. You could strike randomly or aim. Each part had a negative modifier based on how hard it would be to hit. It also included damage levels where a limb would be useless (though not necessarily severed), you'd get knocked out, damage might be increased (hitting the heart or brain). It was more involved than D&D, which did have optional critical hit tables now and then, but also made it more interesting. It especially emphasized the need for skill, armor (or evasion) and striking first (not first turn exactly but actually hitting) because fights were dangerous. Hit points were based on an attribute and didn't go up unless the stat was raised. No levels so no automatic gains. So, as Metallica said: "the knife can cut the hero down."
Firstly sneak attacks and critical are different. Secondly the question is do you make attacks that don't aim to incapacitate your enemy instantaneously? If yes there is a critical for sure since it's up to luck if you injure him. If no all your attacks are have a potential of critical if they injure someone more than expected. Example all ranged attacks. You might walk through a volley with no shield if you are lucky(maybe a critical defense), you may also get an arrow straight through your visor (example Achilles' death from an arrow in the only vulnerable place from semi-mythology , i'm sure you can find real ones too). On a melee level you can think of a knight fighting, a strike to the armpit is one of the few ways to injure him. Now if you go for that strike correctly you should injure him ,but if by luck/random factor your blade slides better than expected and goes further in ,for example in the heart, that is a critical. That goes for any attack that actually strike a more vital part like an artery or a tendon. TL;DR critical can be categorized as " It went better than expected" (no matter the skill)
"it's not a matter of luck" Uhm. You opponent moves and does other stuff, like parrying. You can't 100% predict what he's doing. So you are lucky if he does something in your advantage (or something that isn't to your disadvantage). Your opponent isn't a training dummy, therefore it's never 100% skill, there is always "luck" involved.
ö. . , yea... just like he stumbles on a loose rock or cobblestone and gives up his guard while trying to avoid falling over... or he accualy falls over or gets a minor injury limiting his mobility...
That requires skill rather than luck. If your opponent tries to defend you adjust and attack a different opening. Either way, what I was referring to is a hit that already landed, and now the question is what would count as "critical", if anything.
That's why in competitive matches you never do 1 round, guessing is a huge deal in this kind of sports so doing more rounds you make everything more skillbased
Skallagrim, yes it requires skill, but you probably had a sparring session where you or the person you are sparring with, landed a blow that was much more dangerous than it was meant to be, skill in a fight can account for 80%, but accidents happen, predicting your opponent's movement isnts a science, and actually landing a "good" blow is not as simple. if it was, every fight would end in a single exchange, and with both parties dead. you attack while trying not to get hit, that doesnt garantee that you will hit, nor will it garantee that you wont get hit. luck is a big part of a fight, no matter how good you are, like Tyson said: "everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth". so consider a critical hit as exactly that, landing that punch that takes the other guys plans out.
So I guess Rolemaster got it right back in the day with Arms Law/Claw Law. I always liked that pencil-and-paper role playing game for its detailed approach. You had 20 different armor types arranged on a table for each weapon. You would roll d100 + weapon skill put into offense by attacker - weapon skill put into defense by a defender, and then cross reference the result with AT to see a result as either a number or number and two letters. The number was "concussion hits" or bruise/laceration damage. Enough of that could cause shock induced death, but it wasn't likely and it would more than likely just result in reduced fighting effectiveness due to pain and maybe passing out. The two letters were critical damage. A-E is the severity, with A being the lightest and E being lethal critical hits. The other letter indicated the table you used for the critical hit - pierce, slash, bludgeon, etc. These charts gave a wide range of results - stun, knocked prone, bleeding, broken limbs (with penalties applied), damaged or destroyed organs, and went from "no effect" to "instant death". The armor types made sense. Higher numbered armor types (mail, plate, etc) made you easier to hit, but only for a few trivial concussion hits and no critical damage. Lighter armor types (padded, soft leather, rigid leather, animal hide, etc) were hard to connect, but if you did you often got a critical applied to you. It wasn't a perfect system, it started out as an add-on to D&D that eventually added Spell Law for magic (and unsurprisingly, things like electrical based attacks were more effective against someone in all metal armor) and then character law for skills... then became its own game system. Over the last few iterations its been dumbed down and the presentation reduced, but it remains one of my favorites to date - and seeing this video I think its approach to "critical hits" meshes more with the points made in this video than any most other systems I've encountered (for low tech combat).
It's strange to me that Skall seems to have such a hard time grasping this concept, with the huge amount of weapon testing and practicing that he's done, and most of it has footage as well. Simply think of all the times he has thrown a strike at a skull or a dummy, they don't always go very well, sometimes they go great, at the right angle and with the right amount of force and do a LOT of damage. I believe he's generally always trying to do damage and has the intention to make good/interesting footage, and that he's versed and practiced enough. So I'd argue that sometimes it takes a bit of luck. I think that's the same concept as a critical strike. So yeah, I think it's fairly realistic for the sake of argumentation and analysis. Just my 5 cents :)
interestingly enough in the early ShinMegamiTensei games critical hits were implied by a message that said " goes for the Throat!" which kinda goes in the same direction what skalls been showing in the first half, also makes sense for not only human enemys who can go for it with there weapon but also for animals who often also go for the throat. it was still a luck based mechanic since it was a turn based game, but maybe you can translate that as chance? since in a real fight you don´t get alot of opportunitys for a clean strike at the head you could interpret that luck means a higher chance to get in an opening to strike such a fatal strike.
1st of i do like your channel and you make a lot of valid points but.. I have several "argumentative" points to your premise on this video **[I apologize in advance but this is going to be a very long post]** 1st) critical hits being cause by a character doing maximum effort... well that don't sound silly[im 100% of my str instead of 60%] yea thats dumb but what about risk vs reward... example: Im going to do a full lunge on this attack and end the fight... but if i miss... ill probably lose, being off balance and open 2nd) a attack deals a 1 inch puncture wound.... well in most places on the body this isnt that bad... but it can also be fatal in many areas.... in many games u can take a perk or feat to improve critical chances to take into account skill om this [showing knowledge of Anatomy & skill with aiming] 3rd) being behind someone... I just have one point to make not really a critique.... human arms are made to Bend forward more than backwards... therefore it's incredibly hard to defend making it easier to hit vital spots like the back of the head, the neck, the spine, lungs, liver & kidneys.... while on the front or even the sides these attack would be guarded against final point...you said the greater the skill the lesser chance comes in the play... there is a stronger argument for melee combat for this, but still room for an argument But ranged combat with say firearms... most soldiers aren't snipers, most Small Arms or actually not made for 100% accuracy... take a 9 millimeter handgun put it in the vice and shoot it 50 yards away and you're going to see a natural spread, bullets don't hit in the same place... even though the Target or firearm hasn't moved... there are tons of things that cost this such as the wind for example but there are many many more minute imperfections in the bullet or barrel for example
And just because my firearm point was on handguns I wanted to briefly go in the rifles.... most modern military rifles fall into the category of SBR in America.... all SBR [short barrel rifle] means is the barrel is shorter than 16 in... in America in civilian that wants to purchase or modify a rifle you have a barrel of less than 16 in has to get a tax stamp and go through A lotta legal loopholes... from what I hear this usually takes over 6 months... point even rifles that have a barrel of 16in have it fully stabilize the round... I'm not an expert but I think on most rounds 2 considered fully stabilize where you no longer going to benefit from length is more like 20 or 22, in again not a hundred percent sure on this Why did militaries do this, well first off shortening the rifle lightens it and most people that have spent time in the military will tell you wieght is everything Second for the average Soldier having a shorter and more maneuverable weapon is more beneficial than having a more accurate weapon... these are quick points and I have not fully went through them... but at least I had some clarification.... anything more would be incredibly long-winded
nice video, the 2D animation stuff was awesome - great work, very funny :3 Also i think of lucky hits as Attacks which do more than what could be expected - like you aim at the shoulder but the opponent moves funky and you hit the eyesocket, something like this. The randomness that skill can account for but not always does. I also know a few systems where the liklyness of critical attacks rises with the skill of the Fighter anyway just my thoughts, great video :) your awesome
Great discussion! The best critical hit system I've seen was in the tabletop RPG called "Rolemaster." Their armor mods were a bit fishy, but the setup of categories and detailed wounds gives lots of variety, danger, and humor to a combat. Easily customizable by home game GM's.
Would kritikal hits with guns be like hiting the Heart, lungs, veins etc. and therefore doing extra damage? And wouldn't that Work in General with "random crit chance" being Like better aiming with shots/Stabs?
this guy against have you ever heard the statistic that in WWII, one person died for every 10000 bullets fired? If that statistic is true, I’d say that every hit is a critical hit
Also, this video ruclips.net/video/nycYxb-zNwc/видео.html shows that in typical civilian/police self-defense situations, about half the time it only takes a single hit to incapacitate someone with a typical handgun calibre (see 3:30 in the vide). I guess that means that the typical critical hit percentage is about 40%? Often, people will be "psychologically incapacitated" because a single hit will cause them to lose their will to fight (probably because they watch too many movies where people die in a single gunshot). The rest of this post assumes that you're in a gunfight to the death using modern equipment against a trained opponent, with the context favouring both of you equally. Keep in mind that most semi-auto firearms allow you to give extremely quick follow-up shots. Therefore, if one shot misses a "vital" organ, your next shot might not. And also keep in mind that wounding someone in an extremity (which probably isn't going to be lethal, especially if they're given quick medical attention afterwards) is still going to significantly degrade your opponent's ability to fight. For example, if you shoot your opponent in the shoulder, you will impart some kinetic energy into them which might throw off their aim enough to cause them to miss their next shot at you (especially if you're employing proper gunfighting techniques and exposing yourself as little as possible). And more importantly, your bullet will tear their soft tissue and therefore significantly degrade their ability to aim subsequent follow up shots at you. At that point, it's not so much a question of pain as it is a question of: how much force can a torn deltoid muscle exert? Likewise, if you hit them in the legs, you will significantly degrade their ability to maintain a steady shooting position, which will degrade their aim and recoil mitigation. Also, you will degrade their ability to move and turn to face new directions, which can give you a tactical mobility advantage. You can then maneuver to a different position and hit them from a different angle with less fear that they will do the same to you. If you hit them in a "vital" organ like the intestines, stomach, etc, they might die in 30 minutes if they don't receive prompt medical attention. However, this may not significantly degrade their ability to fight (at least, not any more than hitting them in the legs...). And how many times do you think they can shoot you in 30 minutes? This is the reason that plate carriers only cover the heart and lungs; if you get hit in those organs, you will die in seconds. Speaking of the heart and lungs, a hit there will kill your opponent in seconds. But again, how many times can your opponent shoot you in, say, 3 seconds? If your opponent is armed with a typical full auto assault rifle or smg, they can empty their entire magazine at you in 3 seconds (a full-auto M4A1 shoots more than 10 rounds per second, and it only has 30 rounds in its magazine). Their mag dump will still present a significant danger to you, even if it's not necessarily accurate. Remember that your objective isn't to kill your opponent; it's to survive. You aren't going to "win" the gunfight if you both kill each other. I've heard that some police departments train to aim for the spine specifically because a hit to the spine will immediately prevent your opponent from doing absolutely anything. But if your opponent is employing proper gunfighting techniques and shooting at you from cover, chances are it's gonna be impossible for you to shoot your opponent in the spine because their entire spine will be behind cover. The only parts exposed will be their shooting arm, their non-shooting hand, a tiny sliver of their head (just enough for a single eye to use their gunsights to engage you), and their gun. If you try to aim for vital organs, it will be impossible. In situations like that, the only thing you can hope for is to degrade their ability to fight you by shooting them repeatedly in any part that you can see, and try to do so before they do the same to you.
As Skallagrim says, real combat is no joke. You have no time to try extraneous moves because every thing your opponent does will present a lethal threat to you, and therefore you should be trying to do the same to them.
Fun fact: there are systems which are considered considerably superior to the usual "natural 20" mechanic found e.g. in D&D. For instance, the most pertinent examples I can bring up is the Wound System used in some d20 settings, and the multi-tiered system (which is the older of the two) used in Alternity. Needless to say, it's fairly obvious that Alternity inspired the people who made SW d20 (especially considering that some of them worked on both of these). In the Star Wars d20 games from WotC, you have two separate pools of "hit points:" Vitality Points, which are depleted and restored the normal way Hit Points would had been (plus in a number of new ways, such as actual in-game exertion), and which are a model of the amount of fatigue, exertion and minor damage inflicted by non-critical hits or attacks; and Wound Points, which represent your actual capacity to sustain damage proper, and which are equal to exactly your Constitution score (in most cases). Wound points are different, though: the only way to get Wound Point damage is by either first getting your VP to 0, or if you sustain a critical hit (which doesn't mean rolling more than once, as usual, but only applying the damage to the opponent's WP *directly*). Even 1 point of WP damage gets you fatigued, and then there's a rather involved process pertaining to what happens when your WP drop to 0, potentially leading to your death, but not necessarily immediately. In Alternity, also from TSR/WotC, you have 4 (!) different pools: Fatigue, Stun, Wound, and Mortal. It's a far more dedicated system, but it has the interesting benefit that it provides a lot of tracking/book-keeping ease, really, once you get used to it, so things become considerably easier to do rightly with minimal effort over time (the character sheet, with its helpful indicators, is immensely contributing to this). What makes the game work so well, in particular, is that *how well you do on a check* is defined by a very simple, yet clever rolling mechanic: borrowing off of the older AD&D 2e skill-check mechanics, Alternity has a unified roll-low system, meaning your roll succeeds if your roll result is *lower* than your relevant score (so, e.g. if your total "score" for a check is 18, you need to roll 18 or lower to succeed on the check). Alternity also uses a d20 die for the roll, but it also has a *modifier* die, which ranges anywhere between d4 and 3d20 (!) representing how favourable or easy the circumstances are (or are not), and which is subtracted (or added, respectively) from your roll (so, again, imagine you have a mildly favourable condition going for you, so your roll is d20-d4, and the result needs to be 18 or less). What's really clever about it, however, is that, as I said, this also reflects how well you do: if your roll is lower than *half* your "score" (e.g. for a score of 18, that's 9 or less), rather than an "Ordinary Success," you get a "Good Success," and which in the case of weapon damage means either more dice or, often, even upgrading the kind of damage you; and if you roll less than *a quarter, rounded down* (in this case, 4 or less), you get an "Amazing Success" (with the obvious further increase or upgrade of damage). Finally, Alternity also has a damage transfer mechanic, i.e. you can't get Mortal damage and still be without Wound or Stun damage (what this means is that you get additional damage dealt to the other pools depending on how much and what damage you received).
I think you may have misunderstood what a crit is. Skkal did the same thing at the beggining of this video before he movced on to talking about actual crits where luck and skill combine to result in a more effective injury such as an artery hit or even a headshot in fps. What you and skall seem to be talking about isn't really a crit,, it's more of a desperation attack (tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DesperationAttack ) or even just a special attack (heavy damage skills which often come with risks succh as leaving you open or costing ability points or even your health itself.
Mordy Fisher You're talking about "The Last Breath" affect wich usually happens when your HP drops really low and you get increased DMG(In other words, you're pretty much ain't gonna survive the fight because of your wound/s so you go in with everything you got at your enemy)
Id say critical hits are fairly realistic. Striking an organ can be considered a critical hit, and you can increase your critical hit % by training, studying anatomy and more training so that your ability to reliably hit vulnerable spots goes up. Like John Wick, for example. That mofo has like a 90% critical strike chance Now personally I think critical hits being "extra effort" is just silly video game nonsense.
Flint keep in mind that John Wick is a movie. In real gunfights, people tend to hit their opponents closer to 0% of the time than 90%. Nobody has time to aim for vital areas because any time you take to aim is more time for your opponent to put several more bullets into you. And bullets tend to tear holes in your muscles which will severely reduce your ability to move or aim
Also in my experience, the main challenge is merely seeing your opponent, who isn’t going to be dumb enough to expose himself carelessly. If you’re carrying hundreds of rounds of ammo, you’re better off semi-spraying rounds in his direction in the hopes of killing him. I think this is the reason that I’m WWII, approx 10000 rounds were fired for every death
I would disagree with the concept of "the longer I'm engaged in combat, the higher the chance of me dying." The chance of you dying wouldn't really change based on "time." It would be more closely related to fatigue, would it not? Your skill based chances of making a mistake or capitalizing on an opponents mistake don't change based on time. Depending on your opponent, your odds of victory might increase or decrease. But the passage of time itself would not increase your odds of dying. Personally, I would treat crits as... well... critical hits. It's just a "better strike." I've seen some of your videos where you take swings at rolled up mats and shit. Sometimes your strikes cut clean through, sometimes they don't. Just that alone could explain the difference between a strike and a critical strike. A glancing blow or a clean cut. Having your blow deflected or sneaking through an enemies guard to inflict a wound. You're going for a killing blow, but that doesn't mean you're going to GET it. Even more sensible in the case of fighting giant monsters. You spot a weak point between its scales, or a spot where the skin is thinner. Just because you know it's there doesn't mean you can strike the point between a flurry of claws and teeth. Imagine you're hunting. You're trying to kill a bear. Would it be easier to place a killing shot on a bear unaware of your presence, or one charging you down? Significantly more difficult in an engagement. If you just fire at it and hit it in the leg, bear's probably gonna shrug it off. Hence, the crit would be if you DID land that perfect shot despite the obstacles. Another good example would be from boxing or MMA. We've all seen the 20 second matches. They dance around, one person takes a swing, and the other guy just DROPS. The simplest explanation, a crit is just a "more effective" strike. However "more effective" would be defined in the expected setting.
the more hits traded, the more the chance of at least one of them to pass through your defense. I see it even in videogames: if a boss fight is not 100% predictable and has some sort of randomness in it, the rushing strategy can sometimes be safer that playing by the tactics implied by devs, because a shorter fight has lower chances of you to fail it to the point of dying
Video games aren't the same as real life. There's a concept in Dark Souls PvP that highlights this. A bossfight will never change. The attack is random, but the boss itself never makes "mistakes." Its attacks and defense stays exactly the same 3 seconds into the fight as two hours into the fight (barring phases etc). Meanwhile. in PvP, it's noticeable that at the start of the fight, most players are extremely difficult to corner. Most players will dodgeroll everything relatively easily. However, as the fight drags on, people start to lose focus and start making mistakes. Their timing becomes worse. BOTH players are susceptible to this. The advantage generally goes to whoevers focus lasts the longest. This is what I mean. Both combatants abilities and technique would degrade over time, wouldn't they? But it's not necessarily guaranteed that your advantage would start to slip away before theirs, so the idea that time = chance of death doesn't seem to be true.
"But it's not necessarily guaranteed that your advantage would start to slip away before theirs" - this wasn't the idea. you do not die only because you lost your advantage. you can lose and die after one unfortunate mistake. more time = more chances of mistakes
But that has nothing to do with the passage of time. A fight to the death can end at any time. The chances of making a mistake don't change with the passage of time, but other factors. And my primary point is that the same applies to your opponent. A longer fight could just as easily increase your odds.
from my understanding, it's not about the odds or advantages. as I said, you don't always win when you have an advantage and you do not always lose when you're at a disadvantage let's say you have 2% chance of making a mistake doing one move (hit, parry, etc.). and let's say it doesn't change for the whole duration of the fight then, if you end the fight in 5 moves, you have 90.4% chance of not making any mistakes, or 9.6% chance of making at least one mistake but if your fight lasts 25 moves, you only have 60.3% chance of not making any mistakes, or 39.7% chance of making at least one mistake that's what I'm talking about: longer fight = more chances to make mistake somewhere during that fight. when one mistake can result in an injury and then defeat and death, there's a reason why you'd prefer to end the fight quickly. not in every situation, of course, because there are other factors involved, too
interesting part about striking people from behind at dark hours, during the renaissance in Spain a way to make sure you wouldn't be attacked was simply to say good night or good day to any suspicious person crossing your way(specially if the person was waring a cape hiding their arms), not answering back was enough to make people get on their guard for any attack from behind
Skallagrim, on the part of sneaking up to a person, its actually quite easy, especially if there is some background noise. Its mostly a question of walking technique and proper shoes for the job. On top of that, guard in particular will be quite absentminded after a few hours of duty.
I think a good way to interpret crits is "the opponent made a mistake and I exploit the opening". This way there is a certain amount of luck involved, as well as skill enough to see and use the chance you're given.
In hand to hand fighting a critical hit is not too unrealistic. In boxing you might usually be able to withstand some punishment, but a lucky punch might floor you. Or think of a liver shot - unlikely to hit, but when it connects, it will put the hurt on your opponent; it will make each subsequent body shot hurt like hell and might knock him out instantly. Another aspect are weak spots of your opponent that are unknowingly exploited - say he has a bad knee and you kick his leg to wear him down or set him up for a follow-up, but he buckles under the impact that wouldn't have injured a person with a good knee. Bam! Critical hit!
Yep, exactly. Or maybe his armor was weak in the place you hit, maybe he parried your hit but it glanced in a way that still hit him and cut an artery or bashed his head and knocked him out, perhaps the ground was uneven and he slipped for a bit while your blade alignment was perfect and off with his head. In fights in games or whatever it's not a perfect environment with opponents being similarly skilled with the same type of armor or fatigue levels. Critical or better said lucky strikes are bound to happen.
I always thought of a critical hit as something like a severing of an artery, puncturing a vital organ or breaking a femur. Something to that effect where the opponent dies or can't continue the fight. It could be a lucky attack or a situation where everything goes better than planned and the intended mark is hit. A natural 20 of the dice roll.
About sneaking attacks, In medieval times, we need to remember that "very, very dark" is the default situation at night. Today, with all that artificial light around us, all the time, we can't have the exact idea about why our ancestors avoid do things at night and go to sleep so early. *Was because the darkness*: a candle, torch or even a bonfire doesn't help so much, and this kind of light obfuscate your sight at same time that create really darker shadows (big umbra, almost no penumbra, because the light source is very close). So, the "hiding in shadows" skill in most RPG medieval sets is really a thing. When the only source of light is points of fire, practically any object can generate really dark shadows, and you can hide yourself on it. I can remember about a tournament final in my HEMA club, outdoors. The things was a little bit late, and the last matches happened at night. We used training swords, of course, but no metal (the violently competitive baboons on the club have the habit of bend our precious swords of steel). So, the blades are made of black polymer. In the relative dark, it became f*cking INVISIBLE. The guys was fighting using "The Force"...
I see Skall's soul behind is eyes scream and die as he does his spot :( Still, it's very fucking cool he's getting sponsors. This guy deserves more views, shame RUclips swamps him.
in my pnp system i have both people roll for offense/defense, your offensive score is compared to the defensive score and the difference is your advantage over the enemy. Weapons scale damage with advantage and have a base damage, Knives deal 2+2x while swords deal 8+1x and since advantage usually is within 1-3 (if you connect at all) knives tend to do less damage, BUT if you manage to backstab or lower the defense of your opponent, and manage to gain like 15 advantage, a knife would do 32 damage vs the 23 of a sword (both are huge hits, capable of killing unarmored foes, but then there is armor and so on) so crits happen naturally through a series of circumstances, and in the game world they are represented by a blunder by any set of circumstances where you manage to score a big hit instead of little stabs or cuts
The sneak atack works in fights face to face... In boxing there is a technique called "cross counter" wich is a stright punch crossing over the oponents jab, it comes from a place where the oponent do not see it comming... And its a great twchnique... I admit is not as cool or deadly as a stab from the shadows tho...
Critical hits in turn based games is often an abstraction of "hitting them in a vital area", and why creatures without vitals are thusly immune to said critical hits. Also, hit points, again, particularly in turn-based games, is more of an abstraction of many factors like reflexes, fatigue and will to fight and ignore pain, more than it is "BAH! I CAN TANK DAT DERE MISSILE!". And so, even though in combat, you are trying your best to wound/kill your opponent, they are also deflecting your attempts (aka, eating it with hit points). The Star Wars Tabletop RPG actually has vitality and health, splitting the two in a more obvious way. Most hits are tanked by vitality (the reflexes, fatigue, and whatnot), until it runs out, then it's just straight hits to the health. But crits, aka attacks that bypassed the enemy's defenses, go straight to the health. But, let's take this video from where he addresses it: Crits as extra effort: Yeah, that's bullshit. But it looks cool, and is simply meant to accentuate your luck with a unique action sequence. Backstabs: How is it hard to sneak up on someone? I assume you mean against someone actively on lookout, and not currently impaired (by boredom or otherwise). But even then, if you are in a crowd, then they can't watch everyone, especially if they are a part of it. That's about the one exception I can think of against such a person though. Luck-base: As I said above.
One thing with accuracy and hitting what you're aiming for, part of it is that you're up against another person/creature. You're moving and so are they. Some of the crit being a thing like spotting an opening you can shift your own attack to in order to take advantage of it is a possibility such as a join in the armor or the like that would not normally be targetable. You might also have that perfect hit where the blade can shift things unexpectedly for whatever reason. A slight flaw in the opponents armor that leaves a dent or cracks as you hit, or even the opponents heel catches slightly in debris on the floor that shifts his motion just enough that you're causing more damage than you expected.
I note you glossed over an important aspect - the games' health systems. Those are rather important for determining the mechanics of a Critical Hit, too. Take, for example, the Vitality/Wounds system used in a number of d20 games, where a regular hit first reduces the opponent's Vitality (representing exhaustion more than anything else), while a Critical Hit represents an actual injury, inflicting Wounds directly. There's certainly an element of luck there, too, but that could as easily be interpreted as the opponent failing to defend themselves properly; guarding against an attack from the wrong angle, distracted by momentarily poor footing, that sort of thing. There are other systems that reflect other aspects of Critical Hits, too, but I honestly don't have all of them fresh in mind, and need to get to work. :P
easy explanation: D&D, you roll to see if you hit or miss your target, if you roll a very high number it means that you managed to make a perfect hit so you deal perfect damage.
I agree in general but still there is a luck factor also. For example: wet terrain under your foot can displace your step even if you're competent and you know what you're doing. If we're not talking about duels then fight rarely happens on an ideal dry and flat terrain. Also in real life combat you will not be hittting static target - opponent movement can affect your edge alignment and if he's wearing some kind of armor it might affect your "critical chance" greatly. Another thing I want to mention is a making best hit you can - if you can hit opponent without disposing yourself you will definitely do it. It means that it may or may not be "critical". You would want to hit them either way even if it's not a 100% killing blow. This example is more about opponent mistake than luck but in videogame context I think it might be a good explamantion for the concept.
Hi, Love your channel, and would love to know your analysis on Rurouni Kenshin´s Reverse Blade katana, how (un)practical would be and how even its dull side would deal massive damage when hitting someone. Thank you
Im just a newbie to your channel skall, but after watching other videos where you were explaining the exchange of swings between the fighters to measure the rival and the videos of the longsword tournament, i have an idea for this. Never did hema, but i thought about this many times, and i think the crits in rpgs just represent the time when you just get luck. I mean, in most rpgs they do not represent an actual long exchange of swings and cuts, mostly you just make all or almost all of your attacks hit the target with a normal damage. If you want to represent a combat, you have to make a diference between the normal hits (aka the ones you in hema take parrying and sparring, with in the rpgs hurt) and the real hits, when you connect to your rival body. As i saw in your channel, you have an scoreboard in longsword competitions, these scores represent the damage of danger that a hit represent (taking count of the rival getting in an bad postion like the counter thrust. The critical hits its a way to represent that kind of hits in a system where all you hits make damage, also its a nice way to represent the time when you just make a decent cut with all your effort but just with the wrist and not a full swing, but that cut just go through a joint and cut an artery and makes your enemy bleed out in few seconds. Anyway, thats just my opinion. Love your channel and thinking of getting in hema, but in Spain there are few schools.
In a lot of games, critical hits bypass damage mitigation. If not entirely, mostly. The concept is that, when you land a critical hit, you've circumvented your opponents defenses. Sniper shots, stabs in the back, staggering with a follow up... these would all be situations where your next hits would be critical. In some games they give players skills that max their critical hit rate for one blow or multiple. These techniques or self buffs are generally considered supernatural. One of my personal favorites was the two hour superpower, "Mighty Strikes," from FFXI. For the next 45 seconds all physical damage would be critical hits. You could still miss, but if your accuracy check passed, then BAM! It was suddenly like level difference and monster defense suddenly did not matter.
Well on a rpg table, where few of the players are unexperimented fighters, the dice rolling luck is here to determine both your position/movements/field irregularity adaptation and capacity at the moment to launch a good attack. So the critical hit is kind of the : well you got an opening here. (well at least it's how i am trying to play it) Of course rpg fighting were the players and DM discribe theirs movements and attack is way more accurate, but it takes time to learn how to do it good without taking an hour for each skirmish. Anyway thanks for the video.
Towards the end, ya got around to one of the things I was initially thinking: RPGs, even pen and paper ones, often ignore hit location, so crit becomes a way simulate landing a shot to a vital point. Also the main book for Cyberpunk 2020 brings up the point of shock: even a trained officer can take an otherwise trivial shot to the foot and die from the shock.
in games, crits are a tool to represent some exceptional circumstances in a fight. These are mainly: - incapacitated opponent (no defense) - sneak attack (opponent unaware, maybe the assassin is even in front of the target, just talking as he gained the trust prior, then all of a sudden the dagger is unleashed from the hidden pocket and gg) - weapon hitting a particularly vulnerable target due to luck (opponent mistake, slip...) or exceptional events (arrow entering the fissure in the helm and getting an eye) or else (armor joint fissure, foot stab and consequential no mobility...) - physics being a bitch (let's say a spear does 1d6 dmg when used normally and you try to poke an elephant with that. Probably it will barely bypass the DR. Now let's say the aforementioned spear is actually concealed on the ground in the grass with a rope tied to it's front end and that the elephant is charging at you. You pull the rope, lift the spear having the rear end planted into the ground. The elephant will most likely get a huge crit dmg due to its mass X its velocity in charge. Almost surely a lethal hit)
Very interesting for an analysis based on the idea of HP being representative of how much physical damage you can avoid. However, I think there is one other to consider, the system of AC as ability to avoid damage completely, and HP as ability to avoid fight-ending damage. Some RPGs codify this with separate HP pools of lethal damage and stun, strain and wound points, etc. Anyway, critical hits in this case make a lot more sense. When you just barely miss, someone dodges or parries your blow. When you get a normal hit, maybe they dodge a little too slow, and take a cut to the arm, or block too late and take a thrust in the side of the gut, or even (especially with strain systems and guns, thank you Star Wars 3.5) you expend a non-trivial amount of your valuable energy reserves to get out of the way. But a critical hit, you find that perfect moment, or strike with such speed and accuracy that he can't dodge or block, so they take the full force of the hit, instead of some of it deflected, or you hit the chest or head pretty dead-on.
Now, from what I noticed, in most computer RPG games, crits are usually not really explained beyond "random chance to do whatever multiplier more damage". Pen and paper on the other hand... That is a different story and depends on quality of players AND game master. And critical hit or critical failure may represent different scenarios. That gives them some context. Take a good old D&D - a standard attack is just that - an attack, boring simple attack. But nothing prevents a player from elaborating more - it won't have a MECHANICAL meaning, but improves immersion. Say, a fighter swings at the enemy from the left, trying to avoid shield. - counts as a regular attack still. You roll good 20. A crit. And here goes the Dungeon Master - at the time you were making your attack, enemy was trying to dodge - you see the opening, his neck is exposed and you go directly for it. - roll for damage - His head rolls on the ground. That is how I see it. Crits and the like are mechanical representation of this type of stuff - making up for deficiencies of animations or mechanics. Randomness of crits on the other hand also represents enemy's movement. Say - you aim for the heart, but instead enemy defects the blow and your attack grazes his arm instead, dealing less damage. In a similar manner to how armour class works in D&D - having high armour basically makes you... harder to hit. But in game terms it is meant to represent both dodges, parries and attacks glancing off your armour.
Even though you might hit a finger perfectly with a rapier during practice, I imagine most people would have trouble with it in real combat - even experienced fighters. A critical hit is what you get in a fight, when everything goes as you practiced: you find the gap in the armor perfectly, the edge alignment is perfect, you opponent misses the beat or misjudges something, etc. Parts of it can be improved through practice, others depend on your opponent, or simply everything being juuuuust right. It's the perfect mix between luck (a centimeter or a couple milimeters might be the difference between a deadly and a major, but ultimately not fatal blow, or even a total miss) and skill (knowing when, where and how to strike). In some RPGs, you can increase your critical chance as you level up, I think this might represent the real world better: as you grow as a fighter, you get better at executing your attacks correctly, increasing the part of the crit that depends on you, while still maintaining that some factors are beyond you, either because it's about your opponent or because it's something so minor, that you simply need some luck to pull it off.
Hey Skall, just some constructive criticisms with this video (Also I'm finally getting notifactions from RUclips again!) the editing at the beginning seemed to cut off the end of a sentence, and the hiss in the video is very noticeable. Other than that, I liked the video. It's interesting to think about the idea of crits, especially how important they are in something like D&D. My thoughts on critical while DM'ing is that it's more of a chance occurrence where your attack finds a particular weakness in your enemies defense, where it's a conscious effort by the character to take advantage of a parry that went to far out, or bad shield placement etc. Even well trained foes sometimes make mistakes, and it also applies when the enemies get criticals too.
Video game dev here.. love your vids bud. I think balancing your power reserves is more for spellcaster combat. Melee is all out all the time, as you say. You convinced me that proficiency scaling up to 100% crit chance is the "realistic" way to do things. But realistic is not always the most fun :)
The way I see it, there are three kinds of crits in videogames: random crits (where you get lucky and hit a weak point), setup crits (like backstabs and ripostes in the _SoulsBorne_ games), and body part crits (the most popular being the headshot).
i always thought of critical hits as simply a matter of reading your opponents movement quickly and counter moving to a position to strike a lethal blow faster then normal, not so much having to do with not going all out or anything like that, but just having higher, or faster concentration, you can go all out 100% and still be slower than someone else but if their technique is off and yours isn't and you side step or parry and then kill them, that would be a critical strike, in my mind.
7:40 don't forget that if you have exceptional footwork and you get your opponent to defend you can get to the side if not the back but still be in the position to attack the back a great example of this would be lomachenko
There are also many RPGs that allow characters' skills or equipment to append additional effects onto the target with a critical hit, like damage over time (excessive bleeding), losing its turn (Shock/dazed), a slowing effect (As if a strike had heavily injured a leg), or disarming them (As if a strike had damaged the hand/wrist/arm). To me, a Critical Hit is how an RPG might simulate the ideal circumstances of a strike, perhaps bypassing armor, perhaps cutting especially deep, or perhaps the enemy reading your character's action incorrectly and failing to compensate in time. Perhaps the armor the enemy was wearing had an inconsistency to the material, allowing a strike to hit with an uncharacteristic amount of force and penetration, or perhaps the enemy moved in such a way as to deepen their wound or expose a bare spot right as the weapon made contact.
I always imagined critical hits as your weapon getting through when it would not have, most of the time. A crossbow bolt sliding off one scale just right, and going right between the two scales underneath. A point glancing off the elbow joint and straight into the armpit. A cord in the kusari being loose, and the plate hanging slightly askew, allowing a blade in.
I tend to think of criticals happening like some of my experiences with boffer weapons. I lunged, thrusting at my opponent's chest. He used a rising parry to redirect my blow into his face.
For Pen and Paper enthusiasts, the star wars rpg had a good method of doing critical hits. normal hits remove vitality (Simulating you getting banged up but not deathly injured), which you would acquire lots of as you progressed (like Hit points in most rpgs), But Hit points you'd generally have less than 20. Critical hits would bypass vitality and go directly to hit points making them quite devastating.
I think the most valid crit systems are those from RPGs, where characters have a dodge and/or parry -, crit - and reduction of enemy dodge/parry/crit-chance. You can parry or dodge a hit from an enemy to a certain extent because of your trained skill or superior reaction or whatever, and you can have trained skill or something else to counter those advantages. And it should be the same with crits aka. hits to vitals. Btw. the best way would be if an enemy gets negative crit reduction if his lvl is too far below yours to fit properly to what I'm about to explain. Landing a successful hit can come in many different variations. A thrust with a sword through your heart is more effective than cut vertically along the front of your upper body. An overhead axe swing to your head has more power than one that has its momentum reduced by a not fully successful parry of your opponent. Having a high crit chance means being more aware of how to make those attacks and a high crit reduction means being more aware of how to avoid receiving them. Looking more on luck type crits, it's more when something unexpected happens, like the unintended/clumsy dodge master cliché of falling on your face right when an arrow is about to hit where your head was before. Or when your over fancy triple barbed high stupidity fantasy sword makes it unpredictable for the opponent (and yoursel) to guess at which angle his weapon will repell from yours or if it might get stuck. At which place you could put in the fantasy concept of luck for how often something like that happens to your advantage. Greetings from a random game designer that very much appreciates your opinions in those nerd rambles :)
I agree with the statement of luck/skill comparison because it follows logic but fighting doesn't usually follow logic unless you have situational foresight or know the opponents style or whatever(unless it's like a karate move set or whatever)
I have never heard a Crit beeing explained as a charcter "putting max effort in". But yeah that's stupid.
I've always heard it explained as a lucky strike that connects with a vital spot of the enemy.
And that sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Yes ofcourse a fighter always aims for the killing blow, but in most cases the target dodges or just moves enough that you don't quite get the perfect blow.
A crit is simply that perfect blow that hits the vital spot.
Therefore I think it is a perfectly valid concept.
I think "putting max effort in" crit is when you hold button to charge attack and it does much more damage. So its kind of intended crits, not random based.
My logic on "putting in max effort" is basically that they had a read and pushed to the point of putting themselves at disadvantage either before or after the blow in hopes of finishing it in that one shot
I always thought a crit was an attack, like a successful feint in your favor the enemy didn't counter so well.
Charged attacks aren't crits. Battletech does crits well, as subsystem destruction.
My exact thought.
The funniest critical i have ever seen in a table top roleplaying game: a enemy wizard stands on flying disc hovering over a lava pit.
We are unable to hit him with close combat weapons and our supply arrows and throwing weapons had been spent fighting the wizards minions.
One of my friends had enough of it all and picked up a rock from the cave floor and threw it at the wizard and scored a critical hit with the effect: normal damage, target stumbles back ten feet.
The wizard fell off his disc into the lava pit and died horribly.
The end.
masterblasterT47 If Rambo can take down a helicopter with that tactic, it's plausible
masterblasterT47 Thanks for the laugh haha
Hahaha. I love things like that in RPGs. I once had a player run out of bolts for their crossbow and throw the thing at an enemy, scoring a critical hit and killing them. One of my favourite things in pen and paper games.
Playing a level 0 chatter in the prologue session of a campaign. I'm just a farm boy, trying to free the guards captured by the invading dark elves slavers and their orc mercs. I take an arrow from my quiver and cut the first guard loose. As he is a guard and I'm a farm boy, I give him the bow and arrows and I just keep the one arrow to cut the rest of the guards free. The orc captain is charging towards us. The freed guard shoots an arrow and misses and the orc swings it's scimitar so hard it cuts the guard's head clean from his neck. He is charging and will be on me next round, I don't have a weapon except the arrow to hand. I thrust it out, putting all my strength into a punch like attack to stick the arrow in the eye. Natural 20, critical hit, max damage plus strength modifier (I was a STRONG farm boy) meant I killed the orc by punching an arrow into its eye and brain.
That character was the king of the clutch.
AnonEyeMouse Hmm, looks like pen and paper RPGs are way more fun and intressting than I tought they were
Before warching the video, id like to say i have always thought of critical hits as you succsefully hitting a gap in the armor, or hitting an opponent in a vital organ. Stuff like that.
kamatong Yes. That's what how I've always seen it.
Im surprised i didnt see it in the video. It was like most expected thing here to talk about.
kamatong yeah, i was just about to comment that. Most of the rpg's I've seen or even if I think about a critical hit in real world terms I imagine or have mostly experianced a normal/ish attack that does way more damage because the luck of hitting a vital organ or gap in Armour or weak spot. Not an action that required more force or a special move to be able to create the critical hit.
indeed and thinking in a realistic sense, one can increase their critical strike % by training so that their attacks are more precise, therefore hitting critical areas more often.
In DnD I've always thought of the attack roll as being the ability to pass through an opponent's defenses, and the damage roll is how large of a wound you inflict on them. Thus higher armor class, or using a shield etc reduce the opportunities to land a damaging strike, and require a higher roll. Sometimes the novice hits and the veteran misses,
I'd say that the random sort are an attempt to simulate circumstances in actual combat where a person is both presented with and notices a significant vulnerability in their opponent's defenses and manages to land the blow. Because games that use these mechanics aren't able to capture the intricacies of actual combat, it's sort of their way of adding in something to simulate that dynamic. In cases of games that allow you to increase the chance of critical hits, it's like they're increasing the character's ability to notice and capitalize on those vulnerabilities.
FortyTwoBlades Good point. That's what how I've always imagined it working in D&D.
Exactly, thank you.
Especially in games where you can't even aim where you attempt to strike, like the vast majority of RPG games, it's a damn good approximation to the character spotting and exploiting a weakness or mistake from the enemy.
It also helps explain why rapiers tend to have higher crit rates since they're better able to capitalize on armor weaknesses.
RioluMan not to mention that they tend to penetrate a lot deeper than blades with a larger cross sections and thus has a greater probability to reach internal organs rather than just cutting flesh and fat.
FortyTwoBlades As a D&D DM, I make use of this same idea, and as a result, I actively describe critical hits, and give them added effects if enough land on the right weak spots. When I put together an encounter, in my notes I have all the critical points, and I do let players call their attacks (I aim for its head). If they roll a nat 20 the effectiveness of the critical depends on where they called, and, with bosses, if they've been struck there before with crits. The most recent boss encounter was a powerful winged swordsman, who used lightning fast attacks and dodges. However, after being crit by a lightning bolt in rapid succession (Witch Bolt), and the barbarian landing a nat 20 while aiming for his shoulder on his sword side, a term I like to use was put into place: "Reality Ensues." His arm came off.The dude was battered, then had a massive axe slip past his minimal armor, and cleave his limb clean off.
A more well-armored opponent might get caught under the armpit, or through the eye slit of their helmet, etc, or in the case of spells, the metal armor might melt at a certain point, or act as a pressure cooker, or be welded by a bolt of lightning, or become brittle under extreme cold. A hammer blow could stave in a chest plate, or break off an armored scale of a dragon, or an axe could remove the dragon's tail after a few powerful blows. The beauty of tabletop is that the game is never more or less sensible than the DM.
I would imagine that once in a blue moon an attack might, for example, hit a major bloodvessel and do a lot more damage than that attack would normally do even mere centimeters to the left or right. One would think that could count as a "critical hit" or what not. An unexpectedly effective attack if you will.
Yes. Good point. That's what how I've always imagined it working in D&D.
King Harold took an arrow to the eye on a battlefield. That was a true critical 20 rolled by some lucky archer. (or perhaps it was a critical miss from a firendly archer... who knows)
Less blue moon than you might think.
Hiting the stomach might gonna sptipical shock
I'm glad more companies are sponsoring videos. I'd rather hear about a game from the owner of the channel instead of some cheesy commercial that you can't skip.
Twirl your weapon around equals 3 times the damage!
MarthTheHeroGod larger momentum?
larger momentum indeed....altho stupid in the middle of battle.
Profile and name checks out
It didn't work so well for General Grievous.
lol i didnt even notice the pic and name
That little animation in the episode when you cut his head off, amazing. It was funny and I hope you do it more often!
GamerGriffin THANK YOUUU
Gotta love me some Samurai Shodown.
Lmao true xD
0:57 What sorcery is this?, he made the sword disappear and reappear at 1:13, because he's real good.
he should go on penn and teller fool us. He certainly fooled me.
Bound weapon.
Shardblade.
He just puts it back in his inventory
He held down the 'R' button for a second.
in games i played critical hits were said to be either:
1) a strike that hits a vital spot of the opponent and thus does extra damage
2) a strike that hits in a weak spot of the armor thus ignoring armor worn by the opponent
3) an event of luck in which the enemy botches his parade and actually runs into the blade rather than parrying or dodging it
all those sound reasonable to me
crits are important because the numbers are *literally* bigger.
The best system I think is non lethal and lethal critical hits. so it multiples based on parts of the body that are armored, and not. For instance there was a hidden point based system in Dark age of Camelot. A lot of people wore helmets, and a lot didn't. If you were critically hit in the head without a helmet the damage would be lethal and you could die in one hit, if you wore a helmet it would be non lethal and calculate that damage against the armor until the armor failed it's duty.
Beardshire I think that is Armour Penetration stat
In most games now crits just bypass all armor. This actually damaged armor to the point it broke then the attacks dealt more damage. It didn't negate a critical hit though, it just dealt with it differently, like if you put "Max effort" in hitting a piece of armor, still not going to do much to the wearer. but often demonstrated time and again if you keep striking a piece of armor it will fail. but nearly all the time a first strike on an unfamiliar armor will do no damage and no one is going to stand there and let you hit them in the head 20 times in a row.
Beardshire The "You put more effort into your attack" Is actually just a powered attack. Crits are luck based
I don't believe in luck in combat. It's about opportunity and capitalizing off of your opponents mistakes.
"there's a lot of good juicy stuff in the back"
I'll take note of that sir
All the best bacon, for a start.
Right when I see was listening to it
I would imagine a critical hit being basically a perfect hit for the most part.
You hit perfect edge alignment, maximum force, on the weakest part of the armor with zero deflection or interference from your opponent. That's how I describe it anyway. No extra flashy shit, the technique itself doesn't look any different, you just landed a perfect hit doing what you normally do.
If you've ever sparred before, sometimes you land those really juicy ones that hurt even if you weren't even trying to hit hard.
EDIT: Mostly for game balancing reasons, this has to do just double damage in most cases, because generally landing a "critical hit" in real life is going to instantly mortally wound that person if not outright kill them.
I love games where criticals can one hit kill you or cripple easily because they are way more than double damage like Fallout were a critical hit can severely cripple your character till you find some healing juice.
Brian Rodriguez Agreed, and in my personal table top rpg im making, its definitely a thing. Most people though don't like being one shot, so most games try to avoid that route.
Some of us definitely enjoy it though.
You can easily make one shotting work in games just make sure you give players either an easy out either by fast resurrection or a good checkpoint system people enjoy challenges when they seem doable also always make the one shotting mechanics work both ways it's not fun if you are the only one getting one shot have the players also get the ability to one shot it's one of the most fun things in tabletop RPGs which most video games can't capture.
Brian Rodriguez Yeah I definitely agree, I prefer the element of fast deadly strategic combat over bags of hp and static combat for sure. I think this help facilitate more frenetic, unpredictable and tactical situations.
This is how I see it too.
For unarmored combat, the amount of damage done by a non-critical hit is more like a hit with bad edge alignment, that glances, or impacts with low power anyway, so a critical hit is much more like a good hit to begin with
Only Katanas can land critical hits because they are the best swords in existence, they are made from a solid sheet of titanium the size of a football field and folded over 9,000 times to produce the physical manifestation of a Samurai's honor. *tips fedora* Nothing personal medieval kids.
Commissar Gamza You downplay the power of the Katana.
Chain Katanas have a chance for double crits, but only when wielded by a truly honarabu mecha samurai.
you guys know what's better than a katana ? A lasgun with a Katana as a bayonet.
Guardsman with chain katana mounted on their lasgun?
How can anyone compete?
Giampierogildo Tantisoldi
It is a weapon that surpasses the might of even cyclonic torpedoes.
But a "luck" based crit as you call it, like in D&D for example, is not just the luck where the weapon hits, but also the curcumstances that allow for a good hit, maybe the enemy falters and allows you to get a very damaging hit in. So I would say that this is pretty realistic.
I love the 8 bit overlaid on video animation examples. As great as evil Skall is, having such a straight forward example is very clean.
There is 2 scenarios for critical hits used in RPG games:
1)An attack that multiplies your current power by 2x or 3x
2)An attack that ignores the defensive points/value of the opponent (as if exploiting an armor gap in theory)
Ryu Fireheart 3)Or simply both(I may be wrong tough)
Ryu Fireheart 4) One shots you/enemies
Ignoring armour means it penetrates defense, but that doesn't equal a crit.
It's not uncommon to see stuff like crossbows penetrating armour, yet that's not a critical hit.
Burn Angel In other words, Armour Penetration
MR JTR Well, yes.
I do believe magic is the most obvious way to do armour penetration, and most know magic can also score critical hits.
Love your editing work Skallagrim! The bits like 3:34 are kickass and I love how they fit seamlessly into the rest of the video.
I don't necessarily agree that ALL combat is always 100% nor can I see every successful attack being a critical hit. You may very well successfully make contact with your opponent and not cut deep enough to end the fight. People have survived being shot in the heart with a 9mm +P JHP long enough to run a full city block. Also in some types of combat you need to pace yourself. Like MMA for example. If you wear yourself out in the first few seconds you've lost. Most MMA fighters (which are REAL combatants) will feel their opponent out in the first few seconds with light jabs or low kicks. If you go in full force you get a fight like UFC 2's Pat Smith vs Scott Morris. Check it out its brutal and it ended VERY badly for Morris who ran in going full steam in the first few seconds. Even in Hema when fighting an opponent you don't want to make the mistake of underestimating your opponent. Even if the weapons are swords and boards you need to think and attack strategically. Most of the time just going all out will get you killed if you underestimate your opponent. If you're facing a skilled opponent you may very well surprise your opponent with the ferocity of your attacks and win, but YOU didn't win that fight your opponent LOST the fight because he underestimated YOU. Critical hits (at least in my opinion) are like feints to vital organs that work and fully connect. You don't always go for the decapitation due to situation, opponents guard, position, etc. If you always go for the neck you become predictable and lose very quickly.
Indeed, good point.
Boxing is another perfect example, every fighter is looking to land that "ender", but its never that simple, no matter how skilled they are, the other guy will try to avoid it, its been confirmed that a good blow to the chin, or the liver WILL down anyone, no matter how good they are, but landing that blow is never a garantee.
so consider them as real life critical hits, attacks with devastating effect on the opponent.
Yes, is always depends but. MMA fighters aren't "REAL fighters" it's a sport... a sport is not a real fight...
There's been a subtle improvement in Skall's editing that has gone mostly unnoticed.
This'll be good.
I quite like you nerding out like this, it's fun content.
Who would win: Skallagrim or Matt Easton?
Answer: It depends on the context.
I always thought of critical hits as a kind of attack where there is an additional effect apart from the damage, which usually would come from luck.
Take a hit with a mace, it's going to hurt, but it might not break bones. You could argue that if you hit in a specific way, at a specific angle, when the target is in a specific stance, you can hurt in addition to break a couple of bones, therefore incapacitating the target. Of course, breaking bones is among the priorities of a mace, but I think you get my point.
What you were saying about the sneak attack, the primary advantage you would consider is bypassing the armor, but if you can also hit a specific vulnerable spot, such as the back of the head, you could say that dealing critical damage you would incapacitate them instantly too.
Classic Star Trek, Captain Kirk sneaks up on someone and does a hand chop to the side of their neck from behind, Spock does the Vulcan nerve pinch.
@@krispalermo8133 Captain Kirk would use his trademark "double fist".
I always saw critical hits as less "putting in maximum effort", and more "getting a lucky lethal blow in". You always aim for those lethal strikes, but rarely do you manage a direct hit (also why it requires a 20 roll or the equivilant in most games), at least that's how it works in my tabletop campaigns that I personally run for D&D.
Examples of this are in my own videos as well, Neverwinter Nights words it specifically in that manner, so I think they're entirely acceptable, from that point of view at least.
In any case, thank you for the content, Skal. As always I enjoyed it tremendously, and your videos continue to inspire me and help me in my scripting for videos, writing my books, worldbuilding, and more. Thank you, can't wait for the next video!
I always imagined crits as breaking through the opponents defences and hitting somewhere that would do a lot of damage like an artery or severing tendons etc etc
yes
I like the fact that you talk about things from video games and see if they work in real life. Keep at it!
few days ago i made a rpg damage system, which goes like this:
You have about 100 HP (if you are bigger, more, if smaller, less) which means your blood and other body liquids;
Cut (any cutting damage) gives bleeding effect: it can be small, 1/sec, as you would cut your finger with a knife, or you can cut major artery, and deal 30/sec, and kill enemy in 3 secs. Cuts work good anywhere you will hit, it depends how good the cut will be.
Thrust gives bleeding effect, but much smaller, and can give critical hits, for example, if you would thrust in your oponents chest, you can damage heart, and that is almost instant kill (or can give bleeding effect 60/sec), but thrust in arm or leg, it will not be as lethal as thrust in chest or head. Thrusts are made to give you fast kills, but only if you aim them right.
Blunt damage does not give any bleeding, but it has very high chance of critical (breaking bones, damaging organs etc), so you can end your oponent quickly without killing him, for example if you would strike someone's arm and brake it, he would be very easy target, if you would aim at his head, then you have chance of instant kill (high chance, even 80% if you will get good hit). Blunt force is good because it can give damage even in armour, and if you would aim it, you can win in basically 1 shot, but only if you would get good hit.
armor just gives resistance for that type of weapons, for example plate would give 100% resistance against cut, and also 95% against thrust, and almost nothing against blunt force, mail would be worse in thrust resistance, and gambeson would give actuall blunt resistance.
what do you think?
Ps. axes would give both cutting and blunt damage, but both would be lower.
Buzdygan I like it. In D&D, they call it Slashing, Piercing, and Bludgeoning damage.
Buzdygan because bleeding does not last indefinitely, consider some type of mechanism like:
Cuts do x damage every timeframe and last until 10 times x or 10 to the power of x damage is done. With this a major or medium cut can still be life threatening if untended but minor cuts expire after doing their max damage.
For your armor section. Gambesons are quite good against arrows (depending on arrow head and flight distance) and even cuts. So perhaps consider even the light armor variants to give some kind of protection to all damage types. Depending on your setting perhaps you want to consider heat / cold and other external damage sources.
about that cutting mechanics: That's very good idea, healing factor of cuts could be nice to implement, i think that in fantasy setting if creature can heal itself very fast, then your mechanics can explain that.
and about armor, of course gambeson would have nice protection against cuts and thrusts, drawback of gambeson would be that it will get easily destroyed (kingdom come deliverance has good thing about it).
for elemental damage i'm not sure yet, but heat would be separated into 2 types, heat that you produce while moving in armor, or because of sunlight, that will affect your stamina, and heat as fire, that melts your skin and burns muscles, but i have no idea how to implement that.
Sounds good, but needs some adjustments. Something like "hold hand on cut to reduce damage" or "move more - lose more hp from bleeding / broken bones" should be a thing imo.
I like all of it, except the 'bigger=more HP' bit. You'd have to balance it so that 'bigger=easier to hit' otherwise every player would be a giant.
The way I see it is a critical hit isn't a killing blow, it just does more damage. So in the context of a real fight, where you can't get perfect edge alignment or ideal strikes because of how unpredictable the battlefield is, a critical hit would then be a hit that has all the variables lined up for it; it's got good edge alignment, it hit the ideal target in that situation, did the most possible damage, and so on. But that's just my take.
Personally I've always read the "luck based" critical hit as more of a situation where your opponent's defenses simply faltered and your blow connected exactly as you wanted it to, through some major vital organ like the heart, liver, throat, or what have you. As opposed to your opponent managing to mitigate some of the damage by dodging backwards just as your blow connected, resulting in a shallow wound, or managing to partially deflect a blow, or the like.
That was my thinking too. Your opponent was momentarily distracted by something else on the battlefield and made a mistake. He left an opening that you were able to capitalize on. If it's not that a critical hit is a hit that that randomly does more damage, but that the situation changed in a way that let you take a more ideal shot. It's also why most RPGs have a critical hit stat of some sort. You can learn to better notice these openings and take advantage of them. The animations just don't show it because of limited hardware and budgets.
@skallagim I very much see it when you compare it too how DnD does it, very much when looking at the idea of the rogues “sneak attack” hitting someone in a very vulnerable spot, like chances of hitting a perfect slash or something between the plates of their armor, ie low chance high damage
Sneak attack is when the enemy is distracted by multiple targets and or you have the innate ability to hit weak points on their armor
Yeah. That's what how I've always seen it.
Whenever someone crits in one of my rpg sessions, I simply assume they did something they were thinking about doing, but didn't know would be that effective. For example, they strike an opponent in the shoulder and deal far more damage because that shoulder was injured years ago and didn't recover well, so they hit a more fragile point without knowing it
Yeah, something like this could work as well. Or maybe his armor wasn't properly repaired in one spot, there was some uneven footing, maybe you're aiming for the legs and he had knee damage and you made it worse etc. There are so many factors to count, that I think critical, or better said "lucky" strikes are easily a thing. Though I do wish games also incorporated a chance for failed strikes.
@@cadeyrndragheim22 roll a 1 on a d20 equals to a 5% chance of a critical fumble.
You might want to check out the GURPS method of critical hits. Different weapon classes had different damage modifiers, and since hit points were generally always low, combat was deadly.
The game had different body parts to target. You could strike randomly or aim. Each part had a negative modifier based on how hard it would be to hit. It also included damage levels where a limb would be useless (though not necessarily severed), you'd get knocked out, damage might be increased (hitting the heart or brain).
It was more involved than D&D, which did have optional critical hit tables now and then, but also made it more interesting. It especially emphasized the need for skill, armor (or evasion) and striking first (not first turn exactly but actually hitting) because fights were dangerous.
Hit points were based on an attribute and didn't go up unless the stat was raised. No levels so no automatic gains. So, as Metallica said: "the knife can cut the hero down."
Firstly sneak attacks and critical are different. Secondly the question is do you make attacks that don't aim to incapacitate your enemy instantaneously? If yes there is a critical for sure since it's up to luck if you injure him. If no all your attacks are have a potential of critical if they injure someone more than expected. Example all ranged attacks. You might walk through a volley with no shield if you are lucky(maybe a critical defense), you may also get an arrow straight through your visor (example Achilles' death from an arrow in the only vulnerable place from semi-mythology , i'm sure you can find real ones too). On a melee level you can think of a knight fighting, a strike to the armpit is one of the few ways to injure him. Now if you go for that strike correctly you should injure him ,but if by luck/random factor your blade slides better than expected and goes further in ,for example in the heart, that is a critical. That goes for any attack that actually strike a more vital part like an artery or a tendon.
TL;DR critical can be categorized as " It went better than expected" (no matter the skill)
Been loving the edits in these vids! Also very fun to watch
"it's not a matter of luck"
Uhm. You opponent moves and does other stuff, like parrying. You can't 100% predict what he's doing. So you are lucky if he does something in your advantage (or something that isn't to your disadvantage). Your opponent isn't a training dummy, therefore it's never 100% skill, there is always "luck" involved.
ö. . , yea... just like he stumbles on a loose rock or cobblestone and gives up his guard while trying to avoid falling over... or he accualy falls over or gets a minor injury limiting his mobility...
That requires skill rather than luck. If your opponent tries to defend you adjust and attack a different opening. Either way, what I was referring to is a hit that already landed, and now the question is what would count as "critical", if anything.
That's why in competitive matches you never do 1 round, guessing is a huge deal in this kind of sports so doing more rounds you make everything more skillbased
Skallagrim, yes it requires skill, but you probably had a sparring session where you or the person you are sparring with, landed a blow that was much more dangerous than it was meant to be, skill in a fight can account for 80%, but accidents happen, predicting your opponent's movement isnts a science, and actually landing a "good" blow is not as simple.
if it was, every fight would end in a single exchange, and with both parties dead. you attack while trying not to get hit, that doesnt garantee that you will hit, nor will it garantee that you wont get hit. luck is a big part of a fight, no matter how good you are, like Tyson said: "everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth". so consider a critical hit as exactly that, landing that punch that takes the other guys plans out.
So I guess Rolemaster got it right back in the day with Arms Law/Claw Law.
I always liked that pencil-and-paper role playing game for its detailed approach. You had 20 different armor types arranged on a table for each weapon. You would roll d100 + weapon skill put into offense by attacker - weapon skill put into defense by a defender, and then cross reference the result with AT to see a result as either a number or number and two letters.
The number was "concussion hits" or bruise/laceration damage. Enough of that could cause shock induced death, but it wasn't likely and it would more than likely just result in reduced fighting effectiveness due to pain and maybe passing out.
The two letters were critical damage. A-E is the severity, with A being the lightest and E being lethal critical hits. The other letter indicated the table you used for the critical hit - pierce, slash, bludgeon, etc. These charts gave a wide range of results - stun, knocked prone, bleeding, broken limbs (with penalties applied), damaged or destroyed organs, and went from "no effect" to "instant death".
The armor types made sense. Higher numbered armor types (mail, plate, etc) made you easier to hit, but only for a few trivial concussion hits and no critical damage. Lighter armor types (padded, soft leather, rigid leather, animal hide, etc) were hard to connect, but if you did you often got a critical applied to you.
It wasn't a perfect system, it started out as an add-on to D&D that eventually added Spell Law for magic (and unsurprisingly, things like electrical based attacks were more effective against someone in all metal armor) and then character law for skills... then became its own game system. Over the last few iterations its been dumbed down and the presentation reduced, but it remains one of my favorites to date - and seeing this video I think its approach to "critical hits" meshes more with the points made in this video than any most other systems I've encountered (for low tech combat).
It's strange to me that Skall seems to have such a hard time grasping this concept, with the huge amount of weapon testing and practicing that he's done, and most of it has footage as well. Simply think of all the times he has thrown a strike at a skull or a dummy, they don't always go very well, sometimes they go great, at the right angle and with the right amount of force and do a LOT of damage. I believe he's generally always trying to do damage and has the intention to make good/interesting footage, and that he's versed and practiced enough. So I'd argue that sometimes it takes a bit of luck. I think that's the same concept as a critical strike. So yeah, I think it's fairly realistic for the sake of argumentation and analysis. Just my 5 cents :)
That animation with no set-up or immediate reference right after, was perfect.
3:45
Holy shit, Skal just killed a man?!?! Call the police, clearly we must deal with this hastily!
Big Brother what a gruesome violent man
*demonetized*
I would be fine with the murder, but I really hate how he didn't end his enemy rightly!
interestingly enough in the early ShinMegamiTensei games critical hits were implied by a message that said " goes for the Throat!" which kinda goes in the same direction what skalls been showing in the first half, also makes sense for not only human enemys who can go for it with there weapon but also for animals who often also go for the throat.
it was still a luck based mechanic since it was a turn based game, but maybe you can translate that as chance? since in a real fight you don´t get alot of opportunitys for a clean strike at the head you could interpret that luck means a higher chance to get in an opening to strike such a fatal strike.
1st of i do like your channel and you make a lot of valid points but..
I have several "argumentative" points to your premise on this video **[I apologize in advance but this is going to be a very long post]**
1st) critical hits being cause by a character doing maximum effort...
well that don't sound silly[im 100% of my str instead of 60%] yea thats dumb but what about risk vs reward... example: Im going to do a full lunge on this attack and end the fight... but if i miss... ill probably lose, being off balance and open
2nd) a attack deals a 1 inch puncture wound.... well in most places on the body this isnt that bad... but it can also be fatal in many areas.... in many games u can take a perk or feat to improve critical chances to take into account skill om this [showing knowledge of Anatomy & skill with aiming]
3rd) being behind someone... I just have one point to make not really a critique.... human arms are made to Bend forward more than backwards... therefore it's incredibly hard to defend making it easier to hit vital spots like the back of the head, the neck, the spine, lungs, liver & kidneys.... while on the front or even the sides these attack would be guarded against
final point...you said the greater the skill the lesser chance comes in the play... there is a stronger argument for melee combat for this, but still room for an argument
But ranged combat with say firearms... most soldiers aren't snipers, most Small Arms or actually not made for 100% accuracy... take a 9 millimeter handgun put it in the vice and shoot it 50 yards away and you're going to see a natural spread, bullets don't hit in the same place... even though the Target or firearm hasn't moved... there are tons of things that cost this such as the wind for example but there are many many more minute imperfections in the bullet or barrel for example
And just because my firearm point was on handguns I wanted to briefly go in the rifles.... most modern military rifles fall into the category of SBR in America.... all SBR [short barrel rifle] means is the barrel is shorter than 16 in... in America in civilian that wants to purchase or modify a rifle you have a barrel of less than 16 in has to get a tax stamp and go through A lotta legal loopholes... from what I hear this usually takes over 6 months... point even rifles that have a barrel of 16in have it fully stabilize the round... I'm not an expert but I think on most rounds 2 considered fully stabilize where you no longer going to benefit from length is more like 20 or 22, in again not a hundred percent sure on this
Why did militaries do this, well first off shortening the rifle lightens it and most people that have spent time in the military will tell you wieght is everything
Second for the average Soldier having a shorter and more maneuverable weapon is more beneficial than having a more accurate weapon... these are quick points and I have not fully went through them... but at least I had some clarification.... anything more would be incredibly long-winded
nice video, the 2D animation stuff was awesome - great work, very funny :3
Also i think of lucky hits as Attacks which do more than what could be expected - like you aim at the shoulder but the opponent moves funky and you hit the eyesocket, something like this. The randomness that skill can account for but not always does.
I also know a few systems where the liklyness of critical attacks rises with the skill of the Fighter
anyway just my thoughts, great video :) your awesome
I know he might not always be worth the trouble but I hope you didn't retire your evil twin!
DGFTardin Llaks is great foil for Skall. I just want to know when his evil significant other Arac will make her appearance?
Great discussion! The best critical hit system I've seen was in the tabletop RPG called "Rolemaster." Their armor mods were a bit fishy, but the setup of categories and detailed wounds gives lots of variety, danger, and humor to a combat. Easily customizable by home game GM's.
Would kritikal hits with guns be like hiting the Heart, lungs, veins etc. and therefore doing extra damage? And wouldn't that Work in General with "random crit chance" being Like better aiming with shots/Stabs?
this guy against have you ever heard the statistic that in WWII, one person died for every 10000 bullets fired? If that statistic is true, I’d say that every hit is a critical hit
@@fi4re Well I gues you are right
Also, this video ruclips.net/video/nycYxb-zNwc/видео.html shows that in typical civilian/police self-defense situations, about half the time it only takes a single hit to incapacitate someone with a typical handgun calibre (see 3:30 in the vide). I guess that means that the typical critical hit percentage is about 40%? Often, people will be "psychologically incapacitated" because a single hit will cause them to lose their will to fight (probably because they watch too many movies where people die in a single gunshot).
The rest of this post assumes that you're in a gunfight to the death using modern equipment against a trained opponent, with the context favouring both of you equally.
Keep in mind that most semi-auto firearms allow you to give extremely quick follow-up shots. Therefore, if one shot misses a "vital" organ, your next shot might not.
And also keep in mind that wounding someone in an extremity (which probably isn't going to be lethal, especially if they're given quick medical attention afterwards) is still going to significantly degrade your opponent's ability to fight. For example, if you shoot your opponent in the shoulder, you will impart some kinetic energy into them which might throw off their aim enough to cause them to miss their next shot at you (especially if you're employing proper gunfighting techniques and exposing yourself as little as possible). And more importantly, your bullet will tear their soft tissue and therefore significantly degrade their ability to aim subsequent follow up shots at you. At that point, it's not so much a question of pain as it is a question of: how much force can a torn deltoid muscle exert?
Likewise, if you hit them in the legs, you will significantly degrade their ability to maintain a steady shooting position, which will degrade their aim and recoil mitigation. Also, you will degrade their ability to move and turn to face new directions, which can give you a tactical mobility advantage. You can then maneuver to a different position and hit them from a different angle with less fear that they will do the same to you.
If you hit them in a "vital" organ like the intestines, stomach, etc, they might die in 30 minutes if they don't receive prompt medical attention. However, this may not significantly degrade their ability to fight (at least, not any more than hitting them in the legs...). And how many times do you think they can shoot you in 30 minutes? This is the reason that plate carriers only cover the heart and lungs; if you get hit in those organs, you will die in seconds.
Speaking of the heart and lungs, a hit there will kill your opponent in seconds. But again, how many times can your opponent shoot you in, say, 3 seconds? If your opponent is armed with a typical full auto assault rifle or smg, they can empty their entire magazine at you in 3 seconds (a full-auto M4A1 shoots more than 10 rounds per second, and it only has 30 rounds in its magazine). Their mag dump will still present a significant danger to you, even if it's not necessarily accurate. Remember that your objective isn't to kill your opponent; it's to survive. You aren't going to "win" the gunfight if you both kill each other.
I've heard that some police departments train to aim for the spine specifically because a hit to the spine will immediately prevent your opponent from doing absolutely anything. But if your opponent is employing proper gunfighting techniques and shooting at you from cover, chances are it's gonna be impossible for you to shoot your opponent in the spine because their entire spine will be behind cover. The only parts exposed will be their shooting arm, their non-shooting hand, a tiny sliver of their head (just enough for a single eye to use their gunsights to engage you), and their gun. If you try to aim for vital organs, it will be impossible. In situations like that, the only thing you can hope for is to degrade their ability to fight you by shooting them repeatedly in any part that you can see, and try to do so before they do the same to you.
As Skallagrim says, real combat is no joke. You have no time to try extraneous moves because every thing your opponent does will present a lethal threat to you, and therefore you should be trying to do the same to them.
The opponent editing was AWESOME PLEASE KEEP IT
There's one way a critical strike could happen in real life.
_useyourpmmeltoendhimrightly_
Special technique for improved critical hit chance with Ingram M10 smg: insert the muzzle into your target's left nostril before firing.
Fun fact: there are systems which are considered considerably superior to the usual "natural 20" mechanic found e.g. in D&D.
For instance, the most pertinent examples I can bring up is the Wound System used in some d20 settings, and the multi-tiered system (which is the older of the two) used in Alternity. Needless to say, it's fairly obvious that Alternity inspired the people who made SW d20 (especially considering that some of them worked on both of these).
In the Star Wars d20 games from WotC, you have two separate pools of "hit points:" Vitality Points, which are depleted and restored the normal way Hit Points would had been (plus in a number of new ways, such as actual in-game exertion), and which are a model of the amount of fatigue, exertion and minor damage inflicted by non-critical hits or attacks; and Wound Points, which represent your actual capacity to sustain damage proper, and which are equal to exactly your Constitution score (in most cases). Wound points are different, though: the only way to get Wound Point damage is by either first getting your VP to 0, or if you sustain a critical hit (which doesn't mean rolling more than once, as usual, but only applying the damage to the opponent's WP *directly*). Even 1 point of WP damage gets you fatigued, and then there's a rather involved process pertaining to what happens when your WP drop to 0, potentially leading to your death, but not necessarily immediately.
In Alternity, also from TSR/WotC, you have 4 (!) different pools: Fatigue, Stun, Wound, and Mortal. It's a far more dedicated system, but it has the interesting benefit that it provides a lot of tracking/book-keeping ease, really, once you get used to it, so things become considerably easier to do rightly with minimal effort over time (the character sheet, with its helpful indicators, is immensely contributing to this). What makes the game work so well, in particular, is that *how well you do on a check* is defined by a very simple, yet clever rolling mechanic: borrowing off of the older AD&D 2e skill-check mechanics, Alternity has a unified roll-low system, meaning your roll succeeds if your roll result is *lower* than your relevant score (so, e.g. if your total "score" for a check is 18, you need to roll 18 or lower to succeed on the check). Alternity also uses a d20 die for the roll, but it also has a *modifier* die, which ranges anywhere between d4 and 3d20 (!) representing how favourable or easy the circumstances are (or are not), and which is subtracted (or added, respectively) from your roll (so, again, imagine you have a mildly favourable condition going for you, so your roll is d20-d4, and the result needs to be 18 or less). What's really clever about it, however, is that, as I said, this also reflects how well you do: if your roll is lower than *half* your "score" (e.g. for a score of 18, that's 9 or less), rather than an "Ordinary Success," you get a "Good Success," and which in the case of weapon damage means either more dice or, often, even upgrading the kind of damage you; and if you roll less than *a quarter, rounded down* (in this case, 4 or less), you get an "Amazing Success" (with the obvious further increase or upgrade of damage). Finally, Alternity also has a damage transfer mechanic, i.e. you can't get Mortal damage and still be without Wound or Stun damage (what this means is that you get additional damage dealt to the other pools depending on how much and what damage you received).
You can hit harder with a critical hit because you are throwing aside all desire of staying alive and replacing it with desire to kill
I think you may have misunderstood what a crit is. Skkal did the same thing at the beggining of this video before he movced on to talking about actual crits where luck and skill combine to result in a more effective injury such as an artery hit or even a headshot in fps. What you and skall seem to be talking about isn't really a crit,, it's more of a desperation attack (tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DesperationAttack ) or even just a special attack (heavy damage skills which often come with risks succh as leaving you open or costing ability points or even your health itself.
Mordy Fisher You're talking about "The Last Breath" affect wich usually happens when your HP drops really low and you get increased DMG(In other words, you're pretty much ain't gonna survive the fight because of your wound/s so you go in with everything you got at your enemy)
Bob Leonheart youre right i was bassically thinking of a power attack, in games they usually end with a critical hit
3:45 genius! Great way to show it ^^
5:36 your eyes are like "that sounded wrong"
Id say critical hits are fairly realistic. Striking an organ can be considered a critical hit, and you can increase your critical hit % by training, studying anatomy and more training so that your ability to reliably hit vulnerable spots goes up. Like John Wick, for example. That mofo has like a 90% critical strike chance
Now personally I think critical hits being "extra effort" is just silly video game nonsense.
Flint keep in mind that John Wick is a movie.
In real gunfights, people tend to hit their opponents closer to 0% of the time than 90%. Nobody has time to aim for vital areas because any time you take to aim is more time for your opponent to put several more bullets into you. And bullets tend to tear holes in your muscles which will severely reduce your ability to move or aim
Also in my experience, the main challenge is merely seeing your opponent, who isn’t going to be dumb enough to expose himself carelessly. If you’re carrying hundreds of rounds of ammo, you’re better off semi-spraying rounds in his direction in the hopes of killing him.
I think this is the reason that I’m WWII, approx 10000 rounds were fired for every death
I'd like to see a video like this about the concept of hit points.
I would disagree with the concept of "the longer I'm engaged in combat, the higher the chance of me dying." The chance of you dying wouldn't really change based on "time." It would be more closely related to fatigue, would it not?
Your skill based chances of making a mistake or capitalizing on an opponents mistake don't change based on time. Depending on your opponent, your odds of victory might increase or decrease. But the passage of time itself would not increase your odds of dying.
Personally, I would treat crits as... well... critical hits. It's just a "better strike." I've seen some of your videos where you take swings at rolled up mats and shit. Sometimes your strikes cut clean through, sometimes they don't. Just that alone could explain the difference between a strike and a critical strike. A glancing blow or a clean cut. Having your blow deflected or sneaking through an enemies guard to inflict a wound.
You're going for a killing blow, but that doesn't mean you're going to GET it.
Even more sensible in the case of fighting giant monsters. You spot a weak point between its scales, or a spot where the skin is thinner. Just because you know it's there doesn't mean you can strike the point between a flurry of claws and teeth. Imagine you're hunting. You're trying to kill a bear. Would it be easier to place a killing shot on a bear unaware of your presence, or one charging you down? Significantly more difficult in an engagement. If you just fire at it and hit it in the leg, bear's probably gonna shrug it off. Hence, the crit would be if you DID land that perfect shot despite the obstacles.
Another good example would be from boxing or MMA. We've all seen the 20 second matches. They dance around, one person takes a swing, and the other guy just DROPS. The simplest explanation, a crit is just a "more effective" strike. However "more effective" would be defined in the expected setting.
the more hits traded, the more the chance of at least one of them to pass through your defense. I see it even in videogames: if a boss fight is not 100% predictable and has some sort of randomness in it, the rushing strategy can sometimes be safer that playing by the tactics implied by devs, because a shorter fight has lower chances of you to fail it to the point of dying
Video games aren't the same as real life.
There's a concept in Dark Souls PvP that highlights this. A bossfight will never change. The attack is random, but the boss itself never makes "mistakes." Its attacks and defense stays exactly the same 3 seconds into the fight as two hours into the fight (barring phases etc). Meanwhile. in PvP, it's noticeable that at the start of the fight, most players are extremely difficult to corner. Most players will dodgeroll everything relatively easily. However, as the fight drags on, people start to lose focus and start making mistakes. Their timing becomes worse.
BOTH players are susceptible to this. The advantage generally goes to whoevers focus lasts the longest.
This is what I mean. Both combatants abilities and technique would degrade over time, wouldn't they? But it's not necessarily guaranteed that your advantage would start to slip away before theirs, so the idea that time = chance of death doesn't seem to be true.
"But it's not necessarily guaranteed that your advantage would start to slip away before theirs" - this wasn't the idea. you do not die only because you lost your advantage. you can lose and die after one unfortunate mistake. more time = more chances of mistakes
But that has nothing to do with the passage of time.
A fight to the death can end at any time. The chances of making a mistake don't change with the passage of time, but other factors. And my primary point is that the same applies to your opponent. A longer fight could just as easily increase your odds.
from my understanding, it's not about the odds or advantages. as I said, you don't always win when you have an advantage and you do not always lose when you're at a disadvantage
let's say you have 2% chance of making a mistake doing one move (hit, parry, etc.). and let's say it doesn't change for the whole duration of the fight
then, if you end the fight in 5 moves, you have 90.4% chance of not making any mistakes, or 9.6% chance of making at least one mistake
but if your fight lasts 25 moves, you only have 60.3% chance of not making any mistakes, or 39.7% chance of making at least one mistake
that's what I'm talking about: longer fight = more chances to make mistake somewhere during that fight. when one mistake can result in an injury and then defeat and death, there's a reason why you'd prefer to end the fight quickly. not in every situation, of course, because there are other factors involved, too
interesting part about striking people from behind at dark hours, during the renaissance in Spain a way to make sure you wouldn't be attacked was simply to say good night or good day to any suspicious person crossing your way(specially if the person was waring a cape hiding their arms), not answering back was enough to make people get on their guard for any attack from behind
Say CONTEXT, not it depends
Yes, if you stab someone in a non vital area, that's a "Normal" hit. If you stab someone in the heart, eyes, or genitals, those are "Critical" hits.
Marinanor That's what how I've always seen it.
It depends on the context. Literally the same thing
Skallagrim, on the part of sneaking up to a person, its actually quite easy, especially if there is some background noise. Its mostly a question of walking technique and proper shoes for the job. On top of that, guard in particular will be quite absentminded after a few hours of duty.
FIRSSSSSSSSSST!!!!!
Always wanna do that.
But still didint was this day... :P
I think a good way to interpret crits is "the opponent made a mistake and I exploit the opening". This way there is a certain amount of luck involved, as well as skill enough to see and use the chance you're given.
In hand to hand fighting a critical hit is not too unrealistic. In boxing you might usually be able to withstand some punishment, but a lucky punch might floor you. Or think of a liver shot - unlikely to hit, but when it connects, it will put the hurt on your opponent; it will make each subsequent body shot hurt like hell and might knock him out instantly.
Another aspect are weak spots of your opponent that are unknowingly exploited - say he has a bad knee and you kick his leg to wear him down or set him up for a follow-up, but he buckles under the impact that wouldn't have injured a person with a good knee. Bam! Critical hit!
Yep, exactly. Or maybe his armor was weak in the place you hit, maybe he parried your hit but it glanced in a way that still hit him and cut an artery or bashed his head and knocked him out, perhaps the ground was uneven and he slipped for a bit while your blade alignment was perfect and off with his head.
In fights in games or whatever it's not a perfect environment with opponents being similarly skilled with the same type of armor or fatigue levels. Critical or better said lucky strikes are bound to happen.
I always thought of a critical hit as something like a severing of an artery, puncturing a vital organ or breaking a femur. Something to that effect where the opponent dies or can't continue the fight. It could be a lucky attack or a situation where everything goes better than planned and the intended mark is hit. A natural 20 of the dice roll.
About sneaking attacks, In medieval times, we need to remember that "very, very dark" is the default situation at night.
Today, with all that artificial light around us, all the time, we can't have the exact idea about why our ancestors avoid do things at night and go to sleep so early.
*Was because the darkness*: a candle, torch or even a bonfire doesn't help so much, and this kind of light obfuscate your sight at same time that create really darker shadows (big umbra, almost no penumbra, because the light source is very close).
So, the "hiding in shadows" skill in most RPG medieval sets is really a thing. When the only source of light is points of fire, practically any object can generate really dark shadows, and you can hide yourself on it.
I can remember about a tournament final in my HEMA club, outdoors. The things was a little bit late, and the last matches happened at night. We used training swords, of course, but no metal (the violently competitive baboons on the club have the habit of bend our precious swords of steel).
So, the blades are made of black polymer. In the relative dark, it became f*cking INVISIBLE. The guys was fighting using "The Force"...
5:36 Always great when you back yourself into a corner like that xD
I see Skall's soul behind is eyes scream and die as he does his spot :(
Still, it's very fucking cool he's getting sponsors.
This guy deserves more views, shame RUclips swamps him.
rocket propelled grenades?
never thought I would hear Skallagrim talk about those
in my pnp system i have both people roll for offense/defense, your offensive score is compared to the defensive score and the difference is your advantage over the enemy. Weapons scale damage with advantage and have a base damage, Knives deal 2+2x while swords deal 8+1x and since advantage usually is within 1-3 (if you connect at all) knives tend to do less damage, BUT if you manage to backstab or lower the defense of your opponent, and manage to gain like 15 advantage, a knife would do 32 damage vs the 23 of a sword (both are huge hits, capable of killing unarmored foes, but then there is armor and so on)
so crits happen naturally through a series of circumstances, and in the game world they are represented by a blunder by any set of circumstances where you manage to score a big hit instead of little stabs or cuts
The sneak atack works in fights face to face... In boxing there is a technique called "cross counter" wich is a stright punch crossing over the oponents jab, it comes from a place where the oponent do not see it comming... And its a great twchnique... I admit is not as cool or deadly as a stab from the shadows tho...
Critical hits in turn based games is often an abstraction of "hitting them in a vital area", and why creatures without vitals are thusly immune to said critical hits. Also, hit points, again, particularly in turn-based games, is more of an abstraction of many factors like reflexes, fatigue and will to fight and ignore pain, more than it is "BAH! I CAN TANK DAT DERE MISSILE!". And so, even though in combat, you are trying your best to wound/kill your opponent, they are also deflecting your attempts (aka, eating it with hit points).
The Star Wars Tabletop RPG actually has vitality and health, splitting the two in a more obvious way. Most hits are tanked by vitality (the reflexes, fatigue, and whatnot), until it runs out, then it's just straight hits to the health. But crits, aka attacks that bypassed the enemy's defenses, go straight to the health.
But, let's take this video from where he addresses it:
Crits as extra effort: Yeah, that's bullshit. But it looks cool, and is simply meant to accentuate your luck with a unique action sequence.
Backstabs: How is it hard to sneak up on someone? I assume you mean against someone actively on lookout, and not currently impaired (by boredom or otherwise). But even then, if you are in a crowd, then they can't watch everyone, especially if they are a part of it. That's about the one exception I can think of against such a person though.
Luck-base: As I said above.
One thing with accuracy and hitting what you're aiming for, part of it is that you're up against another person/creature. You're moving and so are they.
Some of the crit being a thing like spotting an opening you can shift your own attack to in order to take advantage of it is a possibility such as a join in the armor or the like that would not normally be targetable. You might also have that perfect hit where the blade can shift things unexpectedly for whatever reason.
A slight flaw in the opponents armor that leaves a dent or cracks as you hit, or even the opponents heel catches slightly in debris on the floor that shifts his motion just enough that you're causing more damage than you expected.
I note you glossed over an important aspect - the games' health systems. Those are rather important for determining the mechanics of a Critical Hit, too.
Take, for example, the Vitality/Wounds system used in a number of d20 games, where a regular hit first reduces the opponent's Vitality (representing exhaustion more than anything else), while a Critical Hit represents an actual injury, inflicting Wounds directly. There's certainly an element of luck there, too, but that could as easily be interpreted as the opponent failing to defend themselves properly; guarding against an attack from the wrong angle, distracted by momentarily poor footing, that sort of thing.
There are other systems that reflect other aspects of Critical Hits, too, but I honestly don't have all of them fresh in mind, and need to get to work. :P
easy explanation: D&D, you roll to see if you hit or miss your target, if you roll a very high number it means that you managed to make a perfect hit so you deal perfect damage.
I agree in general but still there is a luck factor also. For example: wet terrain under your foot can displace your step even if you're competent and you know what you're doing. If we're not talking about duels then fight rarely happens on an ideal dry and flat terrain. Also in real life combat you will not be hittting static target - opponent movement can affect your edge alignment and if he's wearing some kind of armor it might affect your "critical chance" greatly.
Another thing I want to mention is a making best hit you can - if you can hit opponent without disposing yourself you will definitely do it. It means that it may or may not be "critical". You would want to hit them either way even if it's not a 100% killing blow. This example is more about opponent mistake than luck but in videogame context I think it might be a good explamantion for the concept.
Hi, Love your channel, and would love to know your analysis on Rurouni Kenshin´s Reverse Blade katana, how (un)practical would be and how even its dull side would deal massive damage when hitting someone. Thank you
Im just a newbie to your channel skall, but after watching other videos where you were explaining the exchange of swings between the fighters to measure the rival and the videos of the longsword tournament, i have an idea for this. Never did hema, but i thought about this many times, and i think the crits in rpgs just represent the time when you just get luck. I mean, in most rpgs they do not represent an actual long exchange of swings and cuts, mostly you just make all or almost all of your attacks hit the target with a normal damage. If you want to represent a combat, you have to make a diference between the normal hits (aka the ones you in hema take parrying and sparring, with in the rpgs hurt) and the real hits, when you connect to your rival body. As i saw in your channel, you have an scoreboard in longsword competitions, these scores represent the damage of danger that a hit represent (taking count of the rival getting in an bad postion like the counter thrust. The critical hits its a way to represent that kind of hits in a system where all you hits make damage, also its a nice way to represent the time when you just make a decent cut with all your effort but just with the wrist and not a full swing, but that cut just go through a joint and cut an artery and makes your enemy bleed out in few seconds. Anyway, thats just my opinion. Love your channel and thinking of getting in hema, but in Spain there are few schools.
In a lot of games, critical hits bypass damage mitigation. If not entirely, mostly. The concept is that, when you land a critical hit, you've circumvented your opponents defenses. Sniper shots, stabs in the back, staggering with a follow up... these would all be situations where your next hits would be critical.
In some games they give players skills that max their critical hit rate for one blow or multiple. These techniques or self buffs are generally considered supernatural. One of my personal favorites was the two hour superpower, "Mighty Strikes," from FFXI. For the next 45 seconds all physical damage would be critical hits. You could still miss, but if your accuracy check passed, then BAM! It was suddenly like level difference and monster defense suddenly did not matter.
Well on a rpg table, where few of the players are unexperimented fighters, the dice rolling luck is here to determine both your position/movements/field irregularity adaptation and capacity at the moment to launch a good attack. So the critical hit is kind of the : well you got an opening here. (well at least it's how i am trying to play it) Of course rpg fighting were the players and DM discribe theirs movements and attack is way more accurate, but it takes time to learn how to do it good without taking an hour for each skirmish. Anyway thanks for the video.
I love those videos!
Amazing concept
more of these kind of videos please! :D
Towards the end, ya got around to one of the things I was initially thinking: RPGs, even pen and paper ones, often ignore hit location, so crit becomes a way simulate landing a shot to a vital point. Also the main book for Cyberpunk 2020 brings up the point of shock: even a trained officer can take an otherwise trivial shot to the foot and die from the shock.
in games, crits are a tool to represent some exceptional circumstances in a fight. These are mainly:
- incapacitated opponent (no defense)
- sneak attack (opponent unaware, maybe the assassin is even in front of the target, just talking as he gained the trust prior, then all of a sudden the dagger is unleashed from the hidden pocket and gg)
- weapon hitting a particularly vulnerable target due to luck (opponent mistake, slip...) or exceptional events (arrow entering the fissure in the helm and getting an eye) or else (armor joint fissure, foot stab and consequential no mobility...)
- physics being a bitch (let's say a spear does 1d6 dmg when used normally and you try to poke an elephant with that. Probably it will barely bypass the DR. Now let's say the aforementioned spear is actually concealed on the ground in the grass with a rope tied to it's front end and that the elephant is charging at you. You pull the rope, lift the spear having the rear end planted into the ground. The elephant will most likely get a huge crit dmg due to its mass X its velocity in charge. Almost surely a lethal hit)
Very interesting for an analysis based on the idea of HP being representative of how much physical damage you can avoid. However, I think there is one other to consider, the system of AC as ability to avoid damage completely, and HP as ability to avoid fight-ending damage. Some RPGs codify this with separate HP pools of lethal damage and stun, strain and wound points, etc. Anyway, critical hits in this case make a lot more sense. When you just barely miss, someone dodges or parries your blow. When you get a normal hit, maybe they dodge a little too slow, and take a cut to the arm, or block too late and take a thrust in the side of the gut, or even (especially with strain systems and guns, thank you Star Wars 3.5) you expend a non-trivial amount of your valuable energy reserves to get out of the way. But a critical hit, you find that perfect moment, or strike with such speed and accuracy that he can't dodge or block, so they take the full force of the hit, instead of some of it deflected, or you hit the chest or head pretty dead-on.
In the game I play it's defenseless, Maybe when guard down or lucky hit.Some one use dexterity point but for critical hit use luck point.
Now, from what I noticed, in most computer RPG games, crits are usually not really explained beyond "random chance to do whatever multiplier more damage".
Pen and paper on the other hand... That is a different story and depends on quality of players AND game master. And critical hit or critical failure may represent different scenarios. That gives them some context.
Take a good old D&D - a standard attack is just that - an attack, boring simple attack.
But nothing prevents a player from elaborating more - it won't have a MECHANICAL meaning, but improves immersion.
Say, a fighter swings at the enemy from the left, trying to avoid shield. - counts as a regular attack still.
You roll good 20. A crit.
And here goes the Dungeon Master - at the time you were making your attack, enemy was trying to dodge - you see the opening, his neck is exposed and you go directly for it. - roll for damage - His head rolls on the ground.
That is how I see it. Crits and the like are mechanical representation of this type of stuff - making up for deficiencies of animations or mechanics.
Randomness of crits on the other hand also represents enemy's movement. Say - you aim for the heart, but instead enemy defects the blow and your attack grazes his arm instead, dealing less damage.
In a similar manner to how armour class works in D&D - having high armour basically makes you... harder to hit. But in game terms it is meant to represent both dodges, parries and attacks glancing off your armour.
Even though you might hit a finger perfectly with a rapier during practice, I imagine most people would have trouble with it in real combat - even experienced fighters.
A critical hit is what you get in a fight, when everything goes as you practiced: you find the gap in the armor perfectly, the edge alignment is perfect, you opponent misses the beat or misjudges something, etc. Parts of it can be improved through practice, others depend on your opponent, or simply everything being juuuuust right. It's the perfect mix between luck (a centimeter or a couple milimeters might be the difference between a deadly and a major, but ultimately not fatal blow, or even a total miss) and skill (knowing when, where and how to strike).
In some RPGs, you can increase your critical chance as you level up, I think this might represent the real world better: as you grow as a fighter, you get better at executing your attacks correctly, increasing the part of the crit that depends on you, while still maintaining that some factors are beyond you, either because it's about your opponent or because it's something so minor, that you simply need some luck to pull it off.
Hey Skall, just some constructive criticisms with this video (Also I'm finally getting notifactions from RUclips again!) the editing at the beginning seemed to cut off the end of a sentence, and the hiss in the video is very noticeable. Other than that, I liked the video. It's interesting to think about the idea of crits, especially how important they are in something like D&D. My thoughts on critical while DM'ing is that it's more of a chance occurrence where your attack finds a particular weakness in your enemies defense, where it's a conscious effort by the character to take advantage of a parry that went to far out, or bad shield placement etc. Even well trained foes sometimes make mistakes, and it also applies when the enemies get criticals too.
Video game dev here.. love your vids bud. I think balancing your power reserves is more for spellcaster combat. Melee is all out all the time, as you say. You convinced me that proficiency scaling up to 100% crit chance is the "realistic" way to do things. But realistic is not always the most fun :)
Glad you got sponsored ma dude
The way I see it, there are three kinds of crits in videogames: random crits (where you get lucky and hit a weak point), setup crits (like backstabs and ripostes in the _SoulsBorne_ games), and body part crits (the most popular being the headshot).
i always thought of critical hits as simply a matter of reading your opponents movement quickly and counter moving to a position to strike a lethal blow faster then normal, not so much having to do with not going all out or anything like that, but just having higher, or faster concentration, you can go all out 100% and still be slower than someone else but if their technique is off and yours isn't and you side step or parry and then kill them, that would be a critical strike, in my mind.
7:40 don't forget that if you have exceptional footwork and you get your opponent to defend you can get to the side if not the back but still be in the position to attack the back a great example of this would be lomachenko
I never thought of a crit being "extra effort". I always thought of it as hitting a vital organ or tendon or something.
There are also many RPGs that allow characters' skills or equipment to append additional effects onto the target with a critical hit, like damage over time (excessive bleeding), losing its turn (Shock/dazed), a slowing effect (As if a strike had heavily injured a leg), or disarming them (As if a strike had damaged the hand/wrist/arm).
To me, a Critical Hit is how an RPG might simulate the ideal circumstances of a strike, perhaps bypassing armor, perhaps cutting especially deep, or perhaps the enemy reading your character's action incorrectly and failing to compensate in time. Perhaps the armor the enemy was wearing had an inconsistency to the material, allowing a strike to hit with an uncharacteristic amount of force and penetration, or perhaps the enemy moved in such a way as to deepen their wound or expose a bare spot right as the weapon made contact.
I always imagined critical hits as your weapon getting through when it would not have, most of the time. A crossbow bolt sliding off one scale just right, and going right between the two scales underneath. A point glancing off the elbow joint and straight into the armpit. A cord in the kusari being loose, and the plate hanging slightly askew, allowing a blade in.
5:48 That makes me think of "Grandma's boy" (2006) when J.P. tries to hide by standing in front of a black wall wearing black clothes.
Love making those heavy crit builds
I tend to think of criticals happening like some of my experiences with boffer weapons. I lunged, thrusting at my opponent's chest. He used a rising parry to redirect my blow into his face.
@2:22-.-OK, you forced my hand… i’ll put an extra 5% of my power into my next attack!!😈
0:25 tbh he looks like soneone is holding a gun to his head and making him say that
Great video trough
For Pen and Paper enthusiasts, the star wars rpg had a good method of doing critical hits. normal hits remove vitality (Simulating you getting banged up but not deathly injured), which you would acquire lots of as you progressed (like Hit points in most rpgs), But Hit points you'd generally have less than 20. Critical hits would bypass vitality and go directly to hit points making them quite devastating.
I think the most valid crit systems are those from RPGs, where characters have a dodge and/or parry -, crit - and reduction of enemy dodge/parry/crit-chance.
You can parry or dodge a hit from an enemy to a certain extent because of your trained skill or superior reaction or whatever, and you can have trained skill or something else to counter those advantages.
And it should be the same with crits aka. hits to vitals. Btw. the best way would be if an enemy gets negative crit reduction if his lvl is too far below yours to fit properly to what I'm about to explain. Landing a successful hit can come in many different variations. A thrust with a sword through your heart is more effective than cut vertically along the front of your upper body. An overhead axe swing to your head has more power than one that has its momentum reduced by a not fully successful parry of your opponent. Having a high crit chance means being more aware of how to make those attacks and a high crit reduction means being more aware of how to avoid receiving them. Looking more on luck type crits, it's more when something unexpected happens, like the unintended/clumsy dodge master cliché of falling on your face right when an arrow is about to hit where your head was before. Or when your over fancy triple barbed high stupidity fantasy sword makes it unpredictable for the opponent (and yoursel) to guess at which angle his weapon will repell from yours or if it might get stuck. At which place you could put in the fantasy concept of luck for how often something like that happens to your advantage.
Greetings from a random game designer that very much appreciates your opinions in those nerd rambles :)
I agree with the statement of luck/skill comparison because it follows logic but fighting doesn't usually follow logic unless you have situational foresight or know the opponents style or whatever(unless it's like a karate move set or whatever)