D&D 3.5 Crit Tables

One problem my old table ran into in Dungeons & Dragons 3/3.5 was that crits were just kind of...boring. I mean, sure, it was exciting to get a critical hit, and upsetting to get a critical miss, but the game mechanics for them just felt like they didn't live up to the weight they really deserved. So we had two house rules to address this. The first was practiced by every one of us when we DMed, and it was that anyone who rolled a critical hit got to tell the story of that hit however they wanted, with all the epic flair and physics-defying footwork they desired; but if they rolled a critical miss, the DM got to tell the story of it.

The other was a series of crit tables. A couple of us had our own versions of this, but essentially, it was a percentage chart we'd roll to get varied mechanical results from both critical hits and critical misses. Rather than a simple x2 or x3 modifier, there was a chance you would cut the target's arm off or cause them to bleed for a number of rounds.

How this worked in practice is that, when a crit was confirmed, the DM would roll a percentage, compare it to the chart, and tell the player the mechanical effect of their attack. Then the player (or DM, for a failure) would tell the story with the knowledge that it had to include that mechanical effect. The result was a creative approach to attacks, as players were always trying to be prepared to tell a great story, as well as a more varied and exciting critical result system.

Here is the chart I use when running 3.5 campaigns. Feel free to use it, or treat it as a source from which you will develop your own charts for use in various games. Note that it maintains the crit multiplier function; 'base' represents the weapon's critical multiplier, whereas the multiplier bonuses are actual additions to the critical multiplier. So a weapon with a x2 critical multiplier is treated as having a x4 critical multiplier on critical hit percentages from 51-75.

This pack includes a pdf of the Critical Hits and Critical Miss tables, as well as a compendium that stores the Roll Tables for use with Foundry VTT.