Critical Damage, Righteous Fury and a few talents.

By Snidesworth, in Game Mechanics

I've noticed that the 1d5 critical results inflicted by Righteous Fury aren't affected by any talents, whether they boost or reduce the result. While I can understand people not wanting to a single lucky Righteous Fury result completely destroying a target it does seem strange to have talents that are all about modifying how much critical damage is dealt that don't consistently come into play whenever critical damage comes up. In the case of Crack Shot the maximum result you could get if it did factor into Righteous Fury is a 7 which would only lead to an automatic kill if it were a headshot with an explosive weapon.

Both Crack Shot and True Grit have substantial requirements, being Tier 2 and Tier 3 talents respectively and requiring solid scores in their related attributes, yet they only come into play when whoever is being hit is near death. If they factored into Righteous Fury it would make them much more attractive talents and give them a more substantial effect on gameplay.

I vehemently disagree. Righteous Fury should provide a certain extra "bang" when you manage to get it. It should neither be almost completely negated (as True Grit would mean) nor regularly result in lost limbs or worse (-> Crack Shot). The latter part would be especially worrysome for me: Regardless of how well-armoured and tough the PCs are, about one in twenty hits they suffer will be a confirmed Righteous. By allowing Crack Shot or similar talents to work, this hit has a serious tendency to at least lop off a limb.

This would combine extremely well with Crippling Strike and Street Fighting - a +4 bonus to all Crits. Um, ouch?

Perhaps reduced effectiveness would work better? Each talent giving half the bonus it otherwise would? Though that does make things slightly clunky to work around and True Grit would remain quite powerful, especially if the target has Unnatural Toughness. Maybe have the result of the roll capped at 5 but allow the talents to function normally? That way characters who've invested in critical damage boosting talents consistently get better RF crit results without being able to inflict loss of limb and potentially instant death.

Man, righteous fury statistically occurs more often than once in ten attacks. Last session, I've seen just one player roll three of them in three attacks in a row.

Do you seriously want it to be more deadly? Because it's one of the worst ideas I've heard.

Giving Righteous Fury the bonus from talents will be devastating. I'm currently running a DH game with the BC rules, the amount of times my players receive crits is a lot higher, these crits are allready deadlier than those in DH.