Critical hits

I was having problems with balance where if you played a fighter you would of course have better than average melee stats. And that seemed to work out quite well when you were fighting the tougher monsters who packed a bit of a punch, but the basic starting enemies couldn't really put a dent in you. The numbers just didn't work out, and it ended up being a situation where you would walk into a room full of kobold soldiers and dire rats and just wait around for them to hurt you but it was impossible.

The Dead Simple rules provide for a perfect roll on a d20 always hitting but I think it's silent as to what that means when you take into account the damage calculations. A normal hit checks the attacker's attack roll against a defender's toughness roll to see if there's any damage and then mitigates that a bit for armour and shields. And that seems to work fine apart from the fact that it practically means that light-weight enemies find it tough to penetrate both the toughness part and the armour.

So now critical hits have been put in, which effectively mean that we skip the toughness and armour checks. If you roll perfectly on the d20 then you automatically cause damage to your opponent. Even the weakest enemy you fight has a 1 in 20 chance of hurting you.

That message log is all sorts of messed up but that's a problem for another day.