Smiting on Crits: Beginning Curse of Strahd

Well, we finally started the Curse of Strahd game that we'd been planning for months.

I'm playing a Fallen Aasimar Paladin, and planning to go with Oath of Vengeance at level 3 (we're doing the Death House starting dungeon.)

Sadly, even after months of trying to fit everyones' schedules, two of our six players had to bow out tonight (we recorded the session so they'd be caught up) including one whose character my character knew prior to the campaign.

Anyway, as always, level 1 is pretty dull, but we got far enough into Death House that we're all level 2, and we got to fight a pack of ghouls.

3 ghouls is actually quite a bit for four level 2 adventurers, and our Fighter/Warlock (assuming I guessed his build correctly) got knocked unconscious. Thankfully, we also have a Grave Cleric, which I suspect will be very good to have during this adventure, who was able to get him back up without too much trouble.

At level 2, Paladins get their most interesting ability: Divine Smite.

For those unfamiliar with the mechanics of this:

When you hit with a melee weapon attack, you can spend one of your spell slots to deal additional radiant damage. When you spend a 1st level spell slot, you deal 2d8 additional radiant damage, plus an additional 1d8 if the target is undead. If you spend higher-level spell slots, you gain an additional 1d8 for each slot level above 1, to a maximum of 5d8, or 6d8 if the target is undead or a fiend. (Essentially, I think that this means that a 5th level slot will do the same as a 4th level slot because of that cap, and if you're multiclassed, you aren't going to be able to do ridiculous 9th level smites.)

What makes this really cool is that, because you wait until you know whether you hit or not, you can choose to wait until you know if you've landed a critical hit before smiting, and because this damage is part of that same attack, you get to double the smite damage as well.

When the Paladin in the campaign I run first did this, I was sure it had to be a misreading of the rules, but I looked it over several times and realized: nope! That's totally how it works.

So naturally, in the first combat at level 2, we're fighting undead, my party member is unconscious, and I'm worried that we might be screwed.

And I crit on a ghoul. So, with a maul (the paladin's going Polearm Master at level 4, but for now is using a maul,) that's 2d6+3d8+4 (the latter for my strength modifier - I rolled well for three stats and crap for the other three) plus, with Great Weapon Fighting I get to re-roll 1s and 2s, which means that that's 8 1/3 + 15 3/4 + 4 damage on an average hit, and thus on a crit it's 16 2/3 + 31 1/2 + 4, or 48 1/6 average damage (which I think I roughly got - I don't recall off the top of my head.)

The ghoul only had 10 hit points left.

So I vaporized it. Actually, I got the killing blows on two of the three ghouls, which seems appropriate for a monster-hunter paladin.

Anyway, this isn't really a bit theory, lore, or speculation post. This is just a post to say that smiting on a crit (especially against undead) is really, really fun.