Hi

I have wondered for a while: Are there any consequences of doing a critical miss?

When I play P&P AD&D we normally have some sort of penalty decided by an extra 1d20 roll (the lower the worse), the situation and the mood of the DM. It could be something like:

Loosing the rest of your attacks for the round.
Dropping your shield or/and weapon
Chopping your weapon into a wooden pole/door or the like.
Breaking your weapon
Hitting one of your friends (I tried that once, when my sword slipped out of my hand. What a disgrace for a self-appointed leader - in fact my character was the only one in the party with a military background (former city guard)).

Insane

i think it just means you rolled a 1. I don't think there are any added penalties

I thought I read somewhere that you lose your attacks for the rest of the round, but I could be wrong.......

from what i understand and i could be wrong.
when you roll a 1 it is a critical miss. It means no matter what your modifiers and the targets ac is you miss. So you could have a Deathsword +50 and if you rolled a 1, you'd still miss the target

IIRC a natural 1 makes you skip the next attack also .. not sure though

If you roll a critical miss, the main effect is that your attack misses (Doh ;) ). Apart from that you have made such a strange move that you'll need sometime to recover your balance. This means you'll lose your next attack. No big consequences unless it's happening at a critical moment.

Ok - thanks to you all.

It would have been funnier if some of the above mentioned penalties were implemented [img]smile.gif[/img] .

In P&P AD&D when someone is firing into a melee with a bow or other missile weapons there are some special penalties too:

Ex: 1 buddy and 3 baddies are in a melee fight. You try to shoot 1 of the baddies from a distance. You then have to roll 1d4 to find out which of the 4 melee fighters you hit (assuming they are all of equal size).

If fire a lot into melees, you probably ends up with your former buddy turning a baddie [img]smile.gif[/img]

If this rule was implemented in BG1, we would not have the feeling that bows/missile weapons were overpowered [img]smile.gif[/img]

Insane

Rolling a Critical Miss has two effects: 1) Your attack is a Miss, not matter how low your THAC0 is and how high the target's AC is; and 2) There is a delay imposed before you can attack again. In BG1, this equates to losing the rest of your attacks in that round.

If you are in Stealth and trying to Backstab someone, normally you have time to take 2 or 3 swings before the last of your Stealth runs out. But if you roll a Critical Miss, you become visible immediately--essentially, you swung too wide, you lose your balance and fall flat on your face, with a loud "OW!" This would probably alert the bad guy that there's someone behind him. (Of course, actually *hitting* the guy with your Backstab brings you out of Stealth as well.)