Another Critical Hit Fumble Table Question

Hello!,
I'm new to Fantasy Grounds but have been playing 2E AD&D since the 80's. In one of the Dragon Magazines long ago, they had a great article called something like "Good Hits and Bad Misses" that had tables of effects for critical hits/fumbles. They were like the Players Option critical hits, but I think a bit more detailed. In addition, the chances of a natural 20 being a critical was not fixed, but based on the difference between AC hit and actual AC, and similarly for a fumble. So if on a nat 20 you hit an AC 0, and the target had AC 5, the chance for critical would be the amount over what you needed to hit (5 in this case) times 5%. So in this case it would be a 25% that the hit was a critical. Once you determined if the hit was critical, then you rolled on the appropriate table for weapon type: Slashing, Bludgeoning, or Piercing, to get the critical result. Those tables were also in a d100 format.

My gaming buddies and I came to love these tables and always felt cheated if we couldn't play with them. So of course I'd love to automate this in FG to some extent if possible. I've done a good amount of searching on custom critical tables, but haven't found what I'm looking for. I did see Sternos https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...le-house-rules thread, but this is the Players Option stuff that's not really the same.

So there are a couple ways I'd like to try and handle this. At the very least, I'd like to output a message when a natural 20/1 is rolled that takes the amount over/under what you needed to hit, multiplies it by 5%, and outputs that to the chat window with a message like: "Roll for critical hit, 25% chance". Not exactly an automated thing, but it was always fun to roll you own chances for a critical, as well as rolling your own results when it was.

The next level would be to automate the % chance for critical, so after the natural 20/1, FG would roll the chance for critical automatically, then output the result in chat, telling you to roll on the critical effect table.

The next level after that would be to automatically roll on the effects table based on the type of weapon that was used.

I've found the fumblecrit.mod file in the FG Modules folder and added 2E in the definitions.xml file so this works now. However, as noted before, it just uses a fixed d6 roll to determine if a roll was critical or not. Is it possible to add logic in the db.xml file that will implement the above? If not, can someone point me in the right direction to get the other parts of my above scenarios to work?

Thanks!
Craig

I think if you want your crit/fumble tables to take into account the target number needed to hit, you'll have to handle this by writing an extension.

Hmm, OK. Is there an existing extension out there that I can use as a template?

Hey Sterno. Actually, looking at your extension on Github, I think I found where you're handling crits. Is it in manager_crit_po.lua? I might be able to start with that. I love what you've done there by the way!

Sorry if this response shows up twice... I posted a response but it never showed up.

Anyway, you're half right. manager_crit_po.lua is where I do all the handling of Player's Option crits, and manager_crit_hm.lua is where I do the handling of Hackmaster crits.

However, what you're really interested in is manager_action_attack_po.lua, and the onAttackOverride method. Up in the onInit() method in that file, you'll see that I have this code:

ActionAttack.onAttack = onAttackOverride;
ActionsManager.registerResultHandler("attack", onAttackOverride);

What that does is replace the onAttack method from the 2E ruleset code with my code. Then I copy and pasted the onAttack method from the 2E ruleset and started modifying it to make calls to my methods that would handle the crits (and fumbles). So really, that's where you want to focus.

If you want to know how to see the 2E ruleset code, go to your "rulesets" folder in FantasyGrounds, copy the 2E.pak file somewhere, rename it to 2E.zip, and then you should be able to unzip it and see the code.

I actually almost made that exact extension a couple of months ago after reading this post:
https://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2012/...ical-hits.html

But once I read them fully, I thought having them to roll on manually made more sense.

Got it, thanks Sterno! I'll see what I can figure out.

Thanks for the link bmos, those are the tables I use! Interesting. It's been so long since I've seen the actual article the tables come from I forgot that the method we use to determine if a hit/mis 'is' critical is not what was originally published. We only check if the attack roll is a natural 20/1. But instead of having a saving throw determine it, we use the method I noted in the OP. So it makes higher level characters more likely to get crit hits on lower level people with worse AC's, and less likely on the high level monsters that they barely hit with that 20. Same for the critical misses. It has always balanced well, and adds just the right amount of spice.

It also has led to some extremely memorable moments in my D&D history. Like in the Lost Caverns of Tsojacanth at the final encounter, the whole party was almost dead and the female vampire just woke up with full hitpoints. One of our party got a critical hit and killed her with one blow. Likely the whole party would have died otherwise.