Is cut damage meant to be more dangerous than stun?

[Magnate]

I haven't run the numbers, but if this is an issue an obvious fix would be to use launcher weight instead.

That said, I haven't looked at the code doing criticals so it may be the case (as you and Magnate say) that we need a more drastic overhaul.

Oh it's ghastly. There are five arbitrary thresholds with hideously unattractive mathematical distributions and completely irrational damage increments (+15 ... no, x2+10 .... no wait, how about x3+20 ....). The formula is something like (weapon weight x 775 - randint(17)) / Wednesday. Just nonsensical.

IMO criticals should include:

Weight of weapon
Quality of weapon (i.e. +dam, with boost for ego/artifact)
Quality of hit (i.e. the to-hit roll, or perhaps the extent to which to-hit exceeded AC)

IMO they should add damage in smooth increments of base dice, i.e. +1dX for a minor crit to +5dX for a top crit ... ok so I got that bit from O-combat ...

[Timo Pietilä]

Oh it's ghastly. There are five arbitrary thresholds with hideously unattractive mathematical distributions and completely irrational damage increments (+15 ... no, x2+10 .... no wait, how about x3+20 ....). The formula is something like (weapon weight x 775 - randint(17)) / Wednesday. Just nonsensical.

That's correct, except that there is a exception that if you manage to supercharge the blow then it is divided by Thursday.

[EpicMan]

And for maces of disruption the result is further multiplied by Pi and then added to the largest prime factor of the current date in milliseconds

[Derakon]

Okay, here's a quick high-level approach at a new critical-hit algorithm. The basic theory is that the player's chance of getting a critical hit depends on their to-hit roll, while the quality of the hit depends on strength and weapon weight for heavy weapons, or dexterity for light weapons.

difficulty of hitting monster = d
player's to-hit bonus = h
chance = randint(h)
if chance > d:
  player hit.
  if chance - d > 20:
    critical hit occurred
if critical hit occurred:
  power = strength modifier * weapon weight
  accuracy = dexterity modifier / weapon weight
  quality = max(power, accuracy)
  if quality < 10:
    damage *= 2; print "It was a good hit!"
  elif quality < 20:
    damage *= 3; print "It was a great hit!"
  elif etc...

I'm mostly throwing this out there as an example to compare alternate approaches against. How would you change it?

[PowerDiver]

Okay, here's a quick high-level approach at a new critical-hit algorithm. The basic theory is that the player's chance of getting a critical hit depends on their to-hit roll, while the quality of the hit depends on strength and weapon weight for heavy weapons, or dexterity for light weapons.

It shouldn't be switching like that. If no one thing fits, you are going about it wrong IMO.

My past suggestion was that it should be a function of (hit roll)/(monster AC). So if you roll a 100 to hit a monster with an AC of 10 that would be a pretty good critical hit.

[Derakon]

That implies that weapon weight has no direct impact on critical quality. I suppose then weight is subsumed into improved damage dice, i.e. the reason a mace of disruption has 5d8 dice is because it weighs 40 pounds. I can see some logic behind that.

One side-effect of such an approach is that items that improve your to-hit roll will have a direct if hard-to-measure impact on your expected damage.