In previous games that I have played, I have enjoyed having the chance of lowly characters or NPC's making a fluke shot or melee strike that could take down a much superior enemy. While there are severe crits, none of these are death crits and the amount of hits that can be caused in an attack are limited. I love to back the underdog so I am toying with the idea of introducing a way of enabling an attacker to have a very slim chance to cause more damage and triumph in the face of complete disaster…

I am thinking that I could have a rule that was something like 'If the dice pool rolls all successes, boons and comets, and the adversary dice are all blank then the dice pool could be rolled again and added to the same attack.'

I haven't worked out the the odds for this happening but I bet it is not much. There are some problems with it though: adding fortune dice would reduce the chance of this happening and conservative dice would be better than reckless dice, so I am not sure.

I thought I would share my thoughts here to see if anyone has any comments…

I currently use the officiant variant rule that extra successes convert to extra damage, 1:1 up to the attacker's training level. I then add that every extra success on the expertise die (the hammer with the plus) counts as outright damage. But if you need truly explosive dice, it might be best to go with an extraordinary success, no challenge dice, etc.

good idea, thanks!

I like both suggestions

Hmmm, my immediate thought is that it's easier to do the less dice you roll; an agility 2 character is going to have an easier time of getting this 'death crit' than a character with 5 agility, ballastics skill and some fortune dice, that seems counter intuitive. The agility 2 character may succeed less (and do less damage overall) but the times when they do succeed will be more likely to be incredible successes that will be talked about by those lucky enough to witnesses it.

Yeah you are right, it does feel counter intuitive. The previous system I used had d100 rolls and a roll of 96+ mean that you could roll again and add the score. Looking back, one of the most memorable moments of the campaign was when a low level character killed a wyvern with a lucky arrow shot to the eye.

I think the wfrp system is great though, and it is brutal enough, I just wanted to give the underdog a remote chance of glory in the face of certain death.

I've ruled that the severe injuries inflicts the permanent effect immediately on creatures if a PC scores a critical hit and manages to pull a severe injury from the deck. That means that "Head Shot" becomes an instant death shot, and overall makes severe injuries worse for creatures.

To clarify, if a PC is inflicted with a severe injury they do not suffer the permanent effect right away. I use the normal severe injury rules for PCs. The same goes for nemesis NPC's.

This makes it possible to do a million to one shot, although the chances are slim. The players get very happy each time they manage to inflict a severe injury on a creature. Maybe this is a simple solution to your problem?

That's a good way around it and I like simple solutions. I will give this a go. Thanks for your help

May I ask where these official variant rules can be found?

I've been thinking about finding a bit more use for unused successes, but not sure if I'd go beyond extra Pierce (that only affects armour), and the effects shouldn't be greater than what is normally gained from cards,

IIRC the variants are listed in the Errata doc, but they're found in the published Game Master's Toolkit.