While I was never an old school D&D player, I spent a lot of my youth reading the old D&D manuals, even as far back as the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide. One of the elements of the older systems I’d always enjoyed was the dichotomous roulette of the Critical Strike and the Critical Botch. On one hand, newer tabletops tend to avoid some of the crueler, random elements in favor of systems that better enable player choice. However, I also enjoy enhancing the importance of the d20 in the d20 system and forcing roleplaying to occur within the dangerous and realistically-random field of battle (typically not where most roleplay goes on in D&D). Either way, older critical tables feel very out of date, particularly for 5e, so I wanted to make a new one for my own D&D games. As of this posting, I haven’t playtested this at all yet, so use it at your (players’) own risk.

The first half of my Critical tables is the Critical Botch table. Foremost in my mind while creating this table was a desire for realism: what would happen to you on the field of battle if you opened a massive hole in your defenses? As such, the table is split into three categories based around the primary combat styles: Melee weapons, Ranged weapons, and Spells. This might not cover every category in your game, but it hits enough of the basics to apply to most situations in 5e. To determine what occurs on a botch, the player who rolls a Natural 1 on their attack roll rolls a second d20. The result of that second roll determines how the enemies on the field take advantage of their mistake. Obviously, different fighting styles lead to different kinds of mistakes, which is why the three categories exist. I tried to make it such that Critical Botches could be extremely dangerous, but not outright fatal. Most consequences only apply to the next round of combat, but they do severely inhibit the character who rolled poorly.

If you have your own Critical Tables, let me know how you use them and what you think of the options on this one! And, if you do take this one for a spin, let me know how it goes at your game. Next week I’ll release the accompanying table, the Critical Strike table.

Link to imgur because TL doesn't like big images.

---

You can check out this post and a lot more about D&D Fifth Edition at the N3rd Dimension.