Crits Over +10

2026-10-02

I had bandied about a number of names for this mechanic, not totally sure if the one I settled on was the best, the other options were things like: Critical Accuracy, Attack Bonus to Crits, To-Hit Overflow, but I guess Crits over +10 is actually the most descriptive name for it.

I tend to enjoy uncozy games like Quasimorph or X-Com, games that tend to be exercises in patience and thinking ahead as opposed to being purely vegetative. I often find some degree of inspiration from these for tabletop design as they tend to run closer to the pen-and-paper experience, in this case it was another bit of inspiration from the usual suspect of Quasimorph.

To briefly explain, in Quasimorph accuracy cannot go above 95% on an attack, every 10% gained on accuracy above the cap gives you +1% to crit chance. That idea struck me as kind of interesting as a way of introducing a soft form of Bounded Accuracy into a system, allowing you to keep armor and attack values below a certain threshold while also rewarding players for stacking bonuses/to-hit modifiers by improving their lethality.

If you had to justify this from an in-fiction thing, it’s important to keep in mind in things like competitive combat sports, shot selection is just as important as strike accuracy.

When your total attack bonus exceeds +10, each point above +10 instead expands your critical hit range by 1.

Attack Bonus	Critical Hit Range
+10	20
+11	20–19
+12	20–18
+13	20–17
+14	20–16

Your attack roll is always made at +10 maximum; excess attack bonus applies only to your critical range.

There are a couple of ways this mechanic could be dialed in a bit, a 1:1 ratio might prove excessive if bonuses are high and easily stacked, as such, a 2:1 ratio, where every 2+ over 10 counts towards expanding the crit range.

To close, off the top of my head I haven’t seen an OSR game, or really any game, that has a mechanic like this, although that might speak to my naïveté, I’m not totally sold on the efficacy of this concept and I’d want to play around with it first though I certainly could see it as an optional rule in a system.