Needs Help: Critical Hit

Let me lay it out

• Critical Hit: Bonus damage fulfilled by accomplishing some condition, standard numbers are 50% or 100% bonus damage. Bonus effects that are in addition to the Critical Damage would get a mention or split off into a subtrope. No Critical Damage then not this trope.
  • Random Critical Hit: the usual RNG diceroll critical hit
  • Conditional Critical Hit 100% chance of critical hit by fulfilling the condition like using a skill that causes a critical hit during a back attack and such. These notably can not cause a RNG Critical Hit in of themselves which helps balance them.
    • Weakpoint Critical Hit, what one half of Boom, Headshot! will become. Hit the weakpoint with anything for bonus damage, any other place does normal damage. Sister to Attack Its Weakpoint which is 'the only way to damage an enemy is to attack its weakpoint'.

• Chance On Hit: RNG effects that are not critical hits and exist separately from Critical Hit, the bonus hit might get its own Critical Hit effect too based on additional diceroll. Basically everything that is not a Critical Hit goes here. In game lingo an activation of the effect is known as a Proc, short for process. Some games manipulate the chances this will happen by using a technique called PPM, Procs Per Minute, which increases the odds after a hit till you get a proc and then the odds return to base value and/or put the effect on a hidden internal cooldown.

• Chance On Crit, RNG effects that are not critical hit but only get their dice roll when you happen to get a critical hit. Typically Higher chance than Chance On Hit due to the less frequency of critical hits. A Critical Hit getting another Critical Hit for x4 damage would fall under this.

How is that?

edited 31st Aug '15 6:28:46 PM by Memers

This is what I disagree with. The definition of Critical Hit should include any sort of bonus effect above and beyond normal damage for a hit, whether that includes additional damage, status effects, stat penalties, debuffs, instant death, or what have you, as long as something happens every time you crit.

I also think that Chance On Crit should be included in with Chance On Hit; the distinction doesn't really deserve its own page. (I'd also note that Random Critical Hit is actually a subtrope of Chance On Hit as well as Critical Hit.)

edited 31st Aug '15 6:34:10 PM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

It's almost unheard of for a game to call something a critical hit when it doesn't do extra damage. That's not the definition that it has in the wild.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

I gave half a dozen examples of exactly that on the last page. Crits always do something extra over and above the normal damage from a normal hit, but it's not always simply extra damage.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

That would be a Chance On Hit effect not a Critical Hit. Its something completely different and something typically confined to specific skills or weapons and not a Core game mechanic like Critical Hit is.

Take FFXIV for example you can get 'the heavy effect' from hits taken while mounted, its about a 10% chance per hit I think. That dice roll is a separate dice roll from a Critical Hit, any hit that causes heavy can crit or not depending on that second dice roll.

Or Thunderfury◊ in diablo and World Of Warcraft. that effect is a perfect example of Chance On Hit, each one of those bounces can critical hit on themselves based on your crit chance.

EDIT: all the examples you have brought up have been ancient Chance On Hit mechanics, one being quite elaborate and non-standard at all. You can have just Chance On Hit mechanics without actually having a base critical hit system.

edited 31st Aug '15 6:47:48 PM by Memers

The problem is that all of the examples he gave are explicitly called a Critical Hit by the game. It's falling into the same reason we're expanding it here. It seems that in the wild, criticals are a lot broader than extra damage.

edited 31st Aug '15 6:59:00 PM by shimaspawn

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Its not a critical hit as defined by modern gaming though. They are just relics of old stuff before the terms were standardized/popularized. Its just extremely complex multiple choice Chance On Hit mechanics being called critical hits and one of the effects must happen.

edited 31st Aug '15 7:06:25 PM by Memers

Modern Table Top Role Playing Games often use those same kind of tables for critical hits. I think this might be a video game/table top disconnect.

edited 31st Aug '15 7:06:22 PM by shimaspawn

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Those are not in anyway Critical Hits though, some effect must happen. Its not a strict '1 or 0 with a set chance of 1 occurring based on critical rate' situation that is key to Random Critical Hit or even the broader Chance On Hit mechanic or the even broader Critical Hit.

Strikes me as a wholly unrelated trope. Maybe file it under Hit Effect Table or Multiple Choice Diceroll On Hit, or something I don't know All I know is it is quite unrelated to this.

edited 31st Aug '15 7:20:38 PM by Memers

No, those examples are not Chance On Hit. They're Critical Hit. Something happens every time you get a critical hit in those examples, and it's not always just "extra damage". (In the Battle Tech example, it's never just "extra damage".) Chance On Hit would be rolling to see if you hit, and if you do hit, then you roll to see if you get an "on hit" effect. That's not how the examples I've given work. You roll to see if you hit, and if you roll well enough, you score a Critical Hit, so you roll on the crit table to see what effect your critical hit has.

In Battle Tech, if you score a critical hit on an enemy machine, then you break part of the machine. You don't do any additional HP damage, but you might destroy a weapon (making it unusable for the rest of the battle), or damage the reactor (lowering the mech's energy output) or ruin specific components (jump jets, sensors, heatsinks, etc, making you lose the benefits of having them) or kill the pilot (instantly defeating the mech), etc.

Similarly, if you're playing D&D and using crit tables (originally, the effects of all crits were determined by rolling on crit tables, until the "just do extra damage" thing was introduced to help streamline play), then you might damage their armor and give them a penalty to defense, or make a hit on their arm that gives them a penalty to attack, or you might kill them instantly by caving their skull in, or you might score a particularly hard hit and do extra HP damage. All of these things are still considered "a critical hit".

Here's another crit table from something a little more modern (Dark Heresy, released in 2008) since you keep saying "but no one does it that way anymore". Link◊ (watch out for 1d4chan if you go Wiki Walking — it can be NSFW). Actually, I'll copy/paste the Critical Hit example entry on our Dark Heresy page while I'm at it:

(As an aside, when did the strikeout markup start working again?)

Anyway, none of these crits do any extra damage (well, not to the target — if the target explodes hard enough they might damage anyone standing nearby, though), it's just additional effects that happen when you're already at zero HP (which would make these a type of Conditional Critical Hit), ranging from "you're knocked to the ground and stunned" to "you explode, all the ammunition cooks off, and any explosives you're carrying also explode".

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

They're called Critical Hits, Memers. They're what the term refers too, and has since it's invention. It's just broader than you're trying to box it in to. They're just not how you're used to seeing critical hits. It's a table top thing.

edited 31st Aug '15 7:49:33 PM by shimaspawn

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

I disagree on calling weak points or other conditional bonus damage "critical hits." They should get their own tropes with their own names, because they are not normally called crits and they are not normally mutually exclusive with crits. Crits are lucky hits and should be random.

A "Guaranteed Critical Hit" -trope could be added for attacks/buffs/etc that raise the chance of a random crit to 100%, if that's significant.

edited 2nd Sep '15 4:44:18 AM by DiamondWeapon

https://books.google.com/books?id=dcYLAAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

The Game Developer's Dictionary:: A Multidisciplinary Lexicon for Professionals and Students by Dan Carreker.

This is the "modern gaming" you say doesn't include the Chance On Crit. This definition would cover Chance On Hit as part of the concept of "Critical Hit".

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

If games don't use the term "Critical Hit" in a consistent way, then we shouldn't try to have a single overarching trope page for it at all. We should just have our Random Crits et al. as subtropes, and make Critical Hit into an appropriate redirect instead of a supertrope.

Rhymes with "Protracted."

I guess that would be an alright definition to go with, although that broad might be an index instead of a supertrope.

Critical Hit: any hit that does more then it should.

• RNG Critial Hit: Random dice roll damage, innate mechanic built into games. The chance of a crit is typically manipulated by a stat such as Dexterity, Agility, Critical Hit Chance and have a set bonus damage of typically 50% or 100% more without other external modifiers. Bonus effects that are in addition to the Critical Damage would get a mention or split off into a subtrope. Nearly every MMORPG or JRPG runs with this mechanic, Its up in the air with WRP Gs as some don't use it at all or use Weakpointcrit like Mass Effect.
• Conditional Critical Hit: Critical Hit fulfilled by meeting certain conditions or skills. MM Os love this, it is especially common with dagger wielding rogues.
  • Weakpoint Critical Hit: What one half of Boom, Headshot! will become. Hit the weakpoint with anything for bonus damage, any other place does normal damage. Sister to Attack Its Weakpoint which is 'the only way to damage an enemy is to attack its weakpoint'. Most hybrid RP Gs and Shooters use this like Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker and Destiny
  • Attack Its Weakpoint: Attacking anywhere else but its weakpoint will No-Sell or Scratch Damage, hitting its weakpoint is the only way to do damage.
• Critical Hit Tables: Something is going to happen when hit, its up to the dice roll to tell you what happens. Exclusively a Tabletop thing
• Chance On Hit: RNG effects that are not critical hits and exist separately from RNG Critical Hit, the bonus hit might get its own Critical Hit effect too based on additional diceroll. Basically everything that is not a Critical Hit goes here. In game lingo an activation of the effect is known as a Proc, short for process. Some games manipulate the chances this will happen by using a technique called PPM, Procs Per Minute, which increases the odds after a hit till you get a proc and then the odds return to base value and/or put the effect on a hidden internal cooldown. This is not an innate mechanic nor is it controlled by a stat. These almost always already have a Critical Hit damage system in place and used to add more effects into the game.
  • Chance On Crit, RNG effects that are not critical hit but only get their dice roll when you happen to get a critical hit. Typically Higher chance than Chance On Hit due to the less frequency of critical hits.
• Elemental Weakness.

There are probably a few more that could fit in it.

edited 2nd Sep '15 1:55:22 PM by Memers

Elemental weaknesses (already covered under Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors) aren't a subtrope of Critical Hit, they're a separate mechanic. I'd mentioned Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors (and its sister trope Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors) under the Conditional Critical Hit trope as something that can guarantee a crit in some games (Persona 3 and Persona 4, for example, have random crits with physical attacks, but hitting an enemy's elemental weakness is a guaranteed crit). The Perfect Timing Critical Hit trope we talked about earlier (crits for executing Action Command sequences perfectly) seems to have gotten lost, too, but thinking about it, I'm not convinced that it's worth splitting from Conditional Critical Hit. Attack Its Weak Point isn't a Critical Hit subtrope, either — hitting the weak point causes normal damage and hitting anywhere else does reduced damage, which is a different trope.

I'd lay it out like this:

• Critical Hit: An attack that has an extra bonus effect above and beyond normal attacks.
  • Random Critical Hit: A Critical Hit that has a Chance On Hit to occur.
  • Conditional Critical Hit: A Critical Hit that happens automatically upon meeting certain conditions, like executing an Action Command perfectly, exploiting Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors or Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors, getting a Back Stab or a Boom, Headshot!, or simply increasing the chance of a Random Critical Hit to 100% somehow or other.
  • Critical Hit Table: A type of Critical Hit that has a randomly determined effect rather than doing the same thing every time.
• Chance On Hit: An attack that has a chance to cause an additional effect. Critical Hit + Chance On Hit = Random Critical Hit. I'd also include Chance On Crit here, as I don't think the two concepts are different enough to warrant separate tropes.

edited 2nd Sep '15 10:39:12 PM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

At this point we're basically talking about "Attacks sometimes deal extra damage or do extra things under some circumstances," which sounds way too broad to fit the pre-existing term. When my Articuno uses Ice Beam and it freezes the enemy Pokémon, is that a critical hit? When I enchant my Serra Angel with Curiosity so that I draw a card whenever it deals damage to a player, are those attacks critical hits? My intuition says no.

edited 2nd Sep '15 11:18:07 PM by troacctid

Rhymes with "Protracted."

Ice Beam would be a flat 10% Chance On Hit effect, it's a separate mechanic to the innate 'Base Speed / 512' crit mechanic that is built into all attacks 'Base Speed / 64' for high chance critical hit moves for +50% damage. The freeze effect is an entirely different dice roll.

They are quite alike but still different, like sister tropes.

But really I think we will really need an index that broad, considering that Critical Hits are THAT different in games like Destiny, Final Fantasy, World Of Warcraft, Tabletop Games. I thought we had the perfect layout till people nitpicked the definition to make it even broader...

And I would say Elemental Weakness hits are a form of conditional critical hit, or at least VERY closely related.

edited 2nd Sep '15 11:38:42 PM by Memers

Critical hits are virtually always explicitly identified as such (or the game's equivalent, like Earth Bound with it's "SMAAAAAAAASH!" hits) within the game itself.

No, that's a Chance On Hit.

Not familiar with the specific game you're referring to, but that just sounds like an ability or something, not any of the tropes under discussion here.

Elemental weaknesses can cause a Conditional Critical Hit in some games, absolutely. But 1) not all elemental weaknesses cause crits (eg, Pokemon, which has "super effective" attacks and critical hits as two separate mechanics, 2) elemental weaknesses in and of themselves are already covered by Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors, and 3) I don't think "Elemental Critical Hit" is worth spinning off as a subtrope because it's literally just "Elemental Rock Papers Scissors + Critical Hit", which is just The Same, but More Specific.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

If we put that into the definition, then I can roll with it.

Rhymes with "Protracted."

I'm good with adding that into the definition.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Unless anyone can come up with some examples of things that are clearly critical hits without being identified as such, then I'm fine with that too.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

They might not always use the word critical, but they tend to be something in that vein.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

x5 I was not saying we need a new trope, now I am after reading that trope though.

Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors defines itself as a cycle like Rock–Paper–Scissors, Elemental Weaknesses a lot of times don't have that at all with whatever the mob is weak too being seemingly random, specifically built with the characters you have on hand, have a weakness but no strength, strength but no weakness, multiple weaknesses, multiple strengths etc. missing a super trope there.

And yes Elemental weaknesses are a form of conditional critical hit, their condition is the enemy has that weakness so you use the appropriate skill. In many games this is the only way you can do extra damage with spells due to the fact that only physical skills can RNG crit (another trope?) in others the critical hit damage on spells is lessened because they already get bonus damage weakness mechanics.

In say Persona 4 Spells can not RNG Critical Hit however hitting enemy weaknesses it does the exact same thing as a Crit, does additional damage, knocks them over and giving the caster an additional turn. It's very much a conditional Critical Hit. You can conditional critical hit with physical skill too in the same manor if they are weak to it, does no more damage than a RNG Critical Hit and can not RNG Critical Hit itself.

They do tend to call em at least something along those lines like Shadow Hearts's 'strike attack'. Or at minimum have the damage number be bigger than normal or have a unique sound effect when you critical hit.

edited 3rd Sep '15 11:05:13 AM by Memers

Something that probably needs to be added is Immune To Critical Hits, as some games have creatures that cannot be crit or there's just a spell that temporarily stops it. For example, Elementals^note Not entirely sure if it's this creature type in particular since I don't feel like going through the Bestiary, but I know it's a thing. in Pathfinder are immune to precision damage (crits and Sneak Attack), while some Outsiders have a chance to negate the extra damage because their bizarre biology making finding/hitting a weak spot difficult.

edited 7th Sep '15 4:24:30 PM by Karxrida

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