Satisfying Crits

Rules As Written

If you score a critical hit, you roll all damage dice twice instead of once to calculate the damage for your critical hit.

House Rule

When you score a critical hit, add the max damage for your weapon instead of rerolling those dice. For example, if you crit with a greatsword and rolled an 8 on your damage originally, your crit damage would become 20 (plus whatever bonuses you had).

This does not affect features like savage attacks, brutal criticals, etc. It also only applies to the damage of the base weapon. Extra damage such as from hex, hunter's mark, or any other effect that adds dice of damage (such as flametongue) are rolled as normal.

Example

A ranger attacks with a longbow on a target they have marked with hunter's mark (this example will ignore flat damage, since that is always only added once, RAW and houseruled). Their normal damage would be 1d8 (longbow) + 1d6 (hunter's mark). They score a critical hit. Under normal rules, their total damage would be 2d8 + 2d6. Under the house rule, their damage becomes 1d8 (longbow) + 8 (critical longbow) + 2d6 (hunter's mark, rolled twice for crit). This ensures that the critical hit will always be greater than a normal hit.

Rationalization/Reason for the Rule

It super sucks to get a critical hit and roll two ones on your damage, so your "crit" does less damage than your last attack did. At the same time, there are a lot of ways to add dice to your attacks, and maximizing all of them would lead to paladins being way more powerful than those self-righteous pricks already are.