Originally Posted by clavis

you don't have to kill anyone. Albiet damage is stupid much like my comp eating my text. doing 1 or 2 damage a crit success is 3 damage when your fighter is wielding a great axe, or if your wizard is wielding a dagger is beyond me. Sure your pulling blows but that axe has more impact then a dagger, and you know as a fighter that your still going to have to put more force behind a blow to knock someone out. Your not just trying to sneeze them into oblivion.



I know this is going to come out sounding bad but I honestly have no idea what you are saying here...It sounds like you are complaining that the minimum for a Great Axe Crit is 3 damage?

That isn't really the case, the minimum is 1 + Str Mod, or for a Crit 2 + Str Mod. If a Character is (a) a Fighter and (b) using a Greataxe, I would assume that it has Strength as one of it's highest stats, so at level 1 that would be either a +2 or +3 (with potential to jump to +3 or +4 at level 4), meaning that your minimum damage would be c.3-4 and a Crit would be between c.4-5 damage. Yes a Dagger has a similar profile (assuming that your hypothetical Wizard has a Dex mod of +2, which they probably ought to) dealing 1d4 + Dex Mod as a finesse weapon. This gives the same minimum values for a hit and for a crit,

However one has to remember that a dagger has a 25% chance of dealing that minimum damage, whilst a Greataxe only has 8.33% chance of rolling minimum damage (and this ignores the fact that technically a Critical in 5E is not "Roll the Damage Dice and Double the Number" but "Roll the Damage Dice Twice and Add them together" which would mean that the chance to roll two ones on a dagger is actually 1/16 = 6.25% whilst the chances of rolling two ones on a greataxe are only 1/144 = 0.7%)

Additionally, as a fighter one would assume that you picked a Fighting Style relevant to your weapon, meaning Great Weapon Fighting which specifically states "When you roll a 1 or 2 on a damage die for an Attack you make with a melee weapon that you are wielding with two hands, you can reroll the die and must use the new roll, even if the new roll is a 1 or a 2.". This means that the chances of rolling two 1's on a Critical drop to a rather insignificant number (the dice roll calculator I was using couldn't even factor that low, instead just giving a value of 0.0)

However, all of this completely ignores the fact that if your Wizard is in melee and using a dagger in 5e then you have bigger problems than the damage being done, namely a soon to be dead wizard.