I know, blasphemy. Hear me out, though.

Crits are great against Minions, PCs, and Nemeses. Against most rivals, though, my groups have always been sorely disappointed. A lot of the Critical Injury results are interesting if you're settling in for an extended battle against a hated foe, but for the most part, the job of Rivals, like minions, is to provide a challenge and then die. Most of them aren't going to come back in a few sessions with a cool scar from the crit you once gave them (some of them should, when it makes sense, but that's when a Rival becomes a Nemesis). I've had a number of fights with Rivals slog on because they were tough as nails and mildly hampered by crits.

I'm considering giving my players the option, before rolling the crit, to treat it as extra damage. Roll d100 as usual, and the target takes extra damage equal to the Severity. Assuming no modifiers, that's a 40% chance of 1 extra wound, 50% chance of two, and a 10% chance of 3. It's not much, but it's fast, it's less for the GM to keep track of, and it ends the fight more quickly.

I add an "at GM discretion" clause so that you can save some of the more important Rival NPCs, but yeah, that doesn't sound so bad. It makes sense as one more in-between step.

I would suggest rolling 1 d10 and adding 1 for every rank of Vicious/Lethal Blows, then dividing by 2 (round down). With the equivalent of 150 (15 on a d10), that would be 7 extra damage.

I would say a "mook rule" is appropriate.

Just rule that minions and rivals can, at the GMs discretion, be removed from the board.

I had similar experience and the post made me think. I probably wouldn't give more damage, but maybe crits by Triumph killing the rivals as per minion rule, that seems appealing. It gives Triumph a bit more power and satisfaction. I have to think about how it would affect games on the long run.

So up front, not a fan of the idea of just changing crits into what may just be a couple extra points of damage.

That being said, the concept isn't without merit, especially if you have a party where nobody can really (or reliably) crank out substantial damage. I'll be honest that I've not run into this issue, as there's always been PCs in the games I've played in and run that could bring on the pain (be it via lightsabers or blaster rifles).

Rimsen's idea of having it be a crit that's triggered on a Triumph automatically defeat a Rival is a good one, especially as it takes a very dedicated character build to even have a chance of being able to roll Triumphs with any sense of regularity (barring those "born lucky" players that just roll hot, but no game system can truly account for those folks). One wrinkle though is the existence of talents that allow a player to simply hand out a Triumph result to a fellow player; granted those are generally a once per encounter effect, but being able to say "I use this free Triumph I didn't have to roll for to dispatch that annoying Rival" is pretty beefy. To that end, I'd suggest making so that it has to be a rolled Triumph to get this particular crit effect. This would have the perk of speeding up combats (the main goal of the proposal) while keeping that degree of crit to be important but not a near-constant thing.

I wonder why you want that to be the case?
You could instead just boost the HP for some rivals or use minions instead, depending if you want to make the crits more worthwhile on rivials and just remove enemies quicker.

I would think that GMs start switching to Rivals over Minions to give players something that does not die incredible fast? Meanwhile rivals still do die quickly to critical hits, especially the brawlers among them with high soak values.

13 hours ago, Rimsen said:

I had similar experience and the post made me think. I probably wouldn't give more damage, but maybe crits by Triumph killing the rivals as per minion rule, that seems appealing. It gives Triumph a bit more power and satisfaction. I have to think about how it would affect games on the long run.

In the long run you end up with pretty decent chances to kill rivals in a singel shot. You get a roll from the crit which can be deadly with enough deadly talents and advantages spend and you can up with players getting every other roll at least one triumph. And if dice manipulation skills come into play on top, you might be talking about players getting all the time triumphs or even multiple ones.

I almost forgot! A house rule I use (that doesn't come up that often) is that Rival can be killed on a Crit roll of 100 or more. That makes it possible without talents or vicious, and very achievable with.

Here is a list of all of the crits past 100:

Maimed (permanently lose a limb)
Horrific Injury (reduce Characteristic by 1 until healed)
Temporarily Lame (no more than one maneuver per turn until healed)
Blinded (loses sight permanently)
Knocked Senseless (staggered for the remainder of the encounter)
Gruesome Injury (reduce Characteristic by 1 permanently)
Bleeding Out
The End is Nigh
Dead

As you can see, with the exception of Knocked Senseless, all of these have serious and permanent (or permanent until healed) effects. And the exception, Knocked Senseless, basically removes them from the encounter anyway.

The other crits of Hard Difficulty, At the Brink and Crippled are borderline of being in this category (Crippled in particular), but At the Brink is an effect that is more liveable as far as continued action, and Crippled can result in a kill as it reaches up to 100.

Alternatively, just say that Hard+ crits result in death.

Teied this out in lasy night's session, there were a couple of crits against Rivals that would ultimately haveHound-W2 been pointless (Head Ringer against a rampaging rontu for one), that I let the players have the option of swapping out for the 2 damage.

It worked well, sped the figjt up a little and stopped the crirs from feeling like a waste.

4 hours ago, Stethemessiah said:

Teied this out in lasy night's session, there were a couple of crits against minions that would ultimately have been pointless (Head Ringer against a rampaging rontu for one), that I let the players have the option of swapping out for the 2 damage.

It worked well, sped the figjt up a little and stopped the crirs from feeling like a waste.

Did you mean Rivals when you posted that? Because RAW, a crit against a minion = instantly defeated minion without ever rolling on the crit chart.

24 minutes ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

Did you mean Rivals when you posted that? Because RAW, a crit against a minion = instantly defeated minion without ever rolling on the crit chart.

I did meam rivals, posting half asleep.

So one other item to consider with this house rule that may have been overlooked...

What about instances of stacking crits? In the RAW, each critical that the target is already carrying adds a bonus to each subsequent critical injury roll, which means that even lesser crits can have a cumulative effect on a foe, making latter critical injuries potentially nastier.

If this house rule is adopted and instead of the standard crit effect the player just gets additional damage, would the target still be considered to have a critical on them the next time an attacker scores a crit?

I ask because I've seen more than a few build themes over the years that are reliant upon scoring critical injuries on a regular basis (needing only a single advantage to trigger and stacking ranks of Lethal Blows and/or Vicious on top of it). For those sorts of builds, being able to score additional damage and still have the target considered to have a critical injury gets potentially worrisome. However, for groups that don't have a crit-monster, not being able to stack critical injuries can still lead to fights dragging on if dealing with high wound threshold foes and they keep rolling low critical injury results.

17 minutes ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

However, for groups that don't have a crit-monster, not being able to stack critical injuries can still lead to fights dragging on if dealing with high wound threshold foes and they keep rolling low critical injury results.

His is why it very much has to be used at GM discretion, so that you can tailor it not only to the hardiness of the adversary, but also the abilities of your PCs.

2 hours ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

What about instances of stacking crits?

I think crit stacking would definitely be a thing. The target would still have taken a Crit, he's just suffered damage instead of whatever the effect would be.