itch.io

Hello, thanks for playing!

Depending on how often I want crits to happen, I use on of these two rulings:

1.  Critical on double 1 / double 20. These must be spectacular (as they have 0.25% chance to happen)
2.  Critical on Fail with at least one natural 1 and on Strong hits with at least one natural 20

First ruling makes critical rolls particularly rare, and particularly important, whereas second ruling makes them more likely to happen. Of course, even with the second ruling I tend to give double 1s / 20s special treatment ;)

I’m two years late, but I like the way Ironsworn handles these “critical” rolls: when you roll doubles on the dice, something unexpected happens. A Strong Hit with a match on the dice is like a critical success, and a Fail with a match is like a critical failure. Your odds of rolling a critical in general are lower though. If you want the same odds, maybe you could designate one of your dice as the “critical die;” say if the first (or leftmost) die ever rolls a 20 or 1, you count the result as a critical/automatic Strong Hit or fumble/automatic Fail.

Happy playing!