Yes crits and other RNG in Darkest Dungeons was too much, I agree.
But I will problably use some crit to keep things harder to FULLY calculate in advance. Add a cup of unpredictability.
Maybe block it from dealing killing blows though as previously suggested...
Maybe block it from dealing killing blows though as previously suggested...
Why?
The suggestion of ranges and statistical curves addresses both the luck aspect and the skill aspect. That is why it has survived from the pre-PC era all the way through to today's modern games.
With a stats curve you can see that the weapon does around 240-273 damage. You can see another weapon does around 294-367 damage, and a spell can do 45-73 damage per strike over a 10 second duration. That is enough information for the numbers-heavy people to do all the tactical planning they want, and enough information for the chaos-loving speed demon to do what they want. It also includes enough random that you can't exactly predict it, while still giving you an opportunity to estimate that a player has two or three strikes remaining before you need to heal or flee.
Occasionally people in the design forum take that approach and it seems cowardly to me. We'll add some random variation, but if it would actually kill the player we'll keep them barely alive.... Nope. Give the player the information they need and let the character die if they take too much damage. The player knew the risks and the consequences. Don't soften it or dumb it down.
Tell them clearly up front, let them decide, then throw the dice and accept the results.
In the end it's really only a matter of who you are making this game for. Rng will frustrate people looking solely for a strategic experience (the chess players), but it will appeal to people enjoying the feeling of gambling (the slot machine players).
How much rng you put in and how it's balanced with skill and strategy will determine where the experience your game provides is on that spectrum. May be it's in the middle like poker, appealing to people enjoying both.
You have to be careful though, because it needs to work with the format of your game.
Games that have a significant amount of rng while mostly appealing to the strategy side of things (like poker or ccg) also have a format that allows strategy oriented players to not be overly frustrated by the rng. In poker you don't just play one hand, you play hundreds or thousands of hands, effectively negating any possible bad luck. You are frustrated when you play well and still lose because of rng, but you tell yourself "I lost this time, but I played well and most of the time I will win in this situation". The finality is not a single hand, it's the state of your bankroll on the long run. In your game, it might be different, may be the finality is a single run, then rng is a bad idea because you can't negate the frustration using that type of thinking.
First of all crits is a shit useless mechanic and developer should understand it.
Some already did, most didnt yet, but they will eventually.
If you want to persist with using such a outdated and bad mechanic there are many solutions to smooth it, like for example making crit multiplier very low and chance high, with 30% crit bonus and 30 % crit chance, it deosnt feel at all you died for RNG, if you have 12 hp and you face an enemy that hits for 10 with 30% crit chance you try to avoid getting hit, if you do you know you have high chance of dying.
Still it is a wrong and bad mechanics and you should just avoid crits altogether.
Another decent use of crits is using a ratio like in WOW, where ppl have much more hp than a single hit, lets make some number, even with high multiplier like 3x if you hit for 100 (300 crit then) but ppl on average has 5k hp then it doesnt feel much like RNG, you know sometimes you will crit and you know it usually wont matter, ofc there is gonna be some edge case where you have 299 hp against a guy with 5 % crit and that crit will kill you and make you mad.
The advantage of thi approach is that crits mantain their emotional impact since they are huge and "rewarding" compared to the previous.
But if crits are so weak its better to just skip it (it just messes up the interface without having a real impact)
How are crits messing the interface?
Anyway yeah, it is better to avoid crits like it was pox if you prefer, thre are many other stats to use, and ways to spice up the combat.
Why dismiss a tool outright? Crits are a simple way to introduce multimodal statistical distributions (along with their natural mirror, the "miss"). The primary advantage to doing so is that it creates more discrete outcomes, which are generally easier for humans to reason about, and counteracts a tendency for longer sequences to converge exclusively on the mean. This can assist in tactical planning and also encourages player to introduce narratives (in the negative case, a malevolent RNG, in the positive case the attribution of heroics/cowardice to units). Rolling on the high end of a normal distribution doesn't tend to create the same excitement/anger as jumping to a different damage region.
Depending on how this one aspect interacts with the rest of the system, it can have a positive, negative or neutral effect on strategy and on gameplay variation. It's just a tool, it can fit well or poorly, be implemented intelligently or haphazardly. The addition of crits doesn't inherently make a game more strategic, it can move the needle either way.
As a game gets longer, the players will all congregate at the mean outcome. One hand of poker is luck, 1,000 are skill. A game involving one attack will be lucky, a game of 1,000 attacks should require skill.
An important detail to keep in mind is that people vary a great deal in risk-aversion or risk-seeking behavior. The risk-averse will focus on the times a crit lost them a battle, the risk-seeking will focus on the times it won them a battle. When designing a game you can target one group or another, try to balance it so both are somewhat satisfied, or provide gameplay options to enhance/mitigate risk (e.g. a class that can't crit and is immune to the effect).
That's a game designer's job, to find fun ways to put features together. One use is to ratchet up tension and then release it. Instead of the player feeling surprised and cheated 1 in 10 times, if you telegraph the feature properly then 9 in 10 times they might instead feel excited/relieved that the crit didn't get them. Using other tricks you can make the sense of impending doom seem greater than it really is, so the player is disproportionately relieved.
If you give them the tools to mitigate critical hits, then there's the satisfaction of having planned for an event and weathered the storm. A bad round for the opponent might force you into plan B. If you have a plan B and it brings you back from the precipice to victory, that's satisfying. With predictable combat rounds, you might not have needed a plan B.
Overcoming impossible odds is fun. Crits can create situations where you shouldn't win but do anyways. If that was the only way to win it feels cheap, but if a player made obvious mistakes and then won despite them, that's its own flavor of fun. It relieves situations where winning is impossible but the game isn't over yet (and vice versa).
Variety is fun. Crits in a wargame let you know somewhere along your front the opponent will have an upper hand and somewhere you'll be hard pressed, but not know where until a particular playthrough.
My point is that "good game has feature X" or "bad game has feature X" or "feature X didn't work in this game" is much more a question of how the pieces fit together then a statement that your game must/can't have feature X. As a game designer I think you have to figure out what the impact of a feature is, how it interacts with other ones, and then put it into play if you have a particular role a feature fills.
What about making a checkbox for "crits on/off" when launching a new campaign? Along with the difficulty setting? That way a player can just disable crits altogher (both for heroes and enemies).
