This ever happen to you?
You're in a tough D&D fight, you need to take down some nasty monster. Your DM has been talking about how they're not just bloodied, but looking real rough (which I usually say when a monster gets down to, like, less than 20 HP and I'm running for my tier 4 party,) and then, miraculously, you roll a critical hit on your attack. This is it, you're going to defeat the monster, you're going to give your Paladin the turn they need to run over and pop the Cleric up with a few points of Lay on Hands.
And then, you roll 4d10 on your Fire Bolt and do... Like, six damage.
Yeah, it can happen. It's unlikely, of course, but if you roll two 2s and two 1s, even though your average damage for a tier 2 Fire Bolt crit is like 22 damage, if you're SOL and roll like garbage, you might do less than you might have done with a good roll for a regular hit in tier 1.
The homebrew solution that some people use, then, is what I've heard referred to by a few different names, but the one I like is a Chunky Crit. Here, rather than doubling the dice, you take the maximum result for that roll and add it to a regular roll.
So, our Wizard in that above scenario would, rather than rolling 4d10, instead roll 2d10+20.
The average damage here is, unsurprisingly, much higher - 4d10 has an average result of 22, while 2d10+20 is an average result of 31, an upgrade of around 41%.
The real benefit here is that a critical hit will always thus do more damage than a regular hit. Even if you roll minimum damage, it'll be respectable damage no matter what.
But it does also skew things a little.
First, let's just consider how it will affect the value of critical hits.
A non-subclasses Fighter with a... let's say Maul so we don't have to think about Graze, and, say a +3 to hit (reasonable for levels 1-3) will do 2d6+3 damage on a hit, or an average of 10. Normally, crits will deal an extra 2d6 (average of 7) damage.
So, if we're fighting Goblin Warriors with an AC of 15 (that must have gone up from 2014) and a +5 to hit, we're hitting 55% of the time and critting 5% of the time. Thus:
Hits: 10x55%, or 5.5
Crits: 7x5%, or .35
And so our average damage per attack is 5.85
If we use the Chunky Crits, the percentage chances are the same, but now our crit damage is much higher - 2d6+3 does a maximum of 15 damage, so we're adding 5 on top of our previous 7 to our crit bonus damage for a total of 12 over our normal hit damage.
Thus, rather than adding .35, we're now adding .6.
And so, our average damage is now 6.1.
Is that huge? Perhaps not. It's only 0.25 more damage per attack, or a jump of like 4%.
Where I think this gets complicated, though, is how it doesn't scale the same with everyone. This is, to be fair, true for the official critical hit rules as well.
But consider the following: A 5th level Rogue with +4 to Dex and a mundane shortbow critting with a Sneak Attack will deal 8d6+4 piercing damage, which comes out to an average of 32 damage.
With a Chunky Crit, they'll instead deal 4d6+28, which comes out to an average of 42, jumping by about 31%.
A similar Barbarian who is lucky enough to crit twice with their Greataxe deals 2d12+6 on a crit, an average of 19, and doubled to 38. With two chunky crits, we're looking instead at 1d12+18, or 24.5, doubling it to 49.
It's still, of course, and improvement, but it's not as big of a boost to a Barbarian as it is to a Rogue (it winds up being about 29% - actually closer than I had expected) because the Barbarian is getting a smaller fraction of their damage out of their dice. (I do think this is an argument that Rogues probably needed a damage buff).
Now, I don't raise these issues to argue that this is a bad house rule. Players will most likely love it, but I also think that it has to go both ways - monsters will become deadlier with this, especially big scary boss monsters that roll a lot of dice.
It will also skew things slightly in favor of crit-fishing builds. Champion Fighters will get a bit more powerful with their expanded crit range (though my sense has always been that Champions do respectable damage, and their only sin is that they're boring).
It does really increase the odds that a stray crit from a low-level monster can kill a low-level character. Technically, this doesn't expand anyone's maximum crit damage, but it skews things to make crits higher. Thus, a Zombie, who crits for an average of 8 damage with the normal rules, will instead crit for an average of 10.5, making it far more likely to knock out most 1st level characters with d8 hit dice (i.e., the majority of classes).
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