this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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Thats literally not a critical success though. Your example of doing critical successes right is not having critical successes
Not at all. A crit is never doing the impossible, it's doing the best possible. A crit at first level isn't going to one shot an elder dragon, but you'll hit it and do some damage.
A crit trying to lift the castle's giant, wrought iron portcullis isn't going to lift it, but it just might help you realize one of the bars isn't as firmly connected as it ought to be...
A critical success trying to lift the portcullis lifts the portcullis. If it doesn't, you arent playing with critical successes.
Which is good, because they are dumb
But saying crit successes are fine because they can still fail, with other results? That's not a crit success.
Does a crit on an attack automatically kill the attacked thing? Of course not, that would be absurd. Depending on the rules you're using it either does max damage, or bonus damage. It also often is a successful hit even if the attacker would not successfully hit. It is the best outcome the attacker could hope to accomplish.
A crit success at a skill check is no different. You can not expect to convince the Dwarven kingdom that you, a human, are the long lost prince with a deception check any more than you can expect a first level rogue to sneak attack any noticable damage onto the Tarrasque. But you can score a hit, or convince them you believe you are the long lost prince and that maybe they need to find out why.
It sounds like what you think a crit anything is is pretty dumb. Success doesn't begin and end at accomplishing the entirety of your goal with a thing. If it did we're still going to have to make every combat crit a kill shot.
Flavor the failure to a success then: in an impossible feat of strength, you managed to lift the iron gate high enough for a small creature to crawl through.
Then, depending on how important this situation is for progressing the narrative (whether you as the DM want them to get through or not), you have options to build on their success. Do they have a small creature in their party? Will they be willing to split the party? Do they have the strength to continue holding it up or is there a risk someone would be crushed crawling under? Or maybe their crit success was enough to move it but not enough to hold it at all for a chance for any one to get through.
Thats not a critical success. You are describing a normal DM response to a high roll.
If its a crit success, they succeed in their attempted goal
Semantics I guess. I see your point and don't see a problem with a DM running things that way, but I don't think there's a problem with letting the players enjoy the idea of a critical success on their roll while keeping things functionally the same so as not to break the game.