In this example it was an attack roll, and a critical hit as a result of the halfling luck trait, so it played out perfectly.
In the case where it were a skill check, you are correct that there are no crits for skill checks. However rolling a natural 20 is a rare event and as a DM you could choose to reward it. Conversely hitting delicate machines with a battle-axe is usually a mistake.
The machine working at half capacity is a reasonable reward and consequence.
The problem is it isn’t that rare. If you reward it very much at all it encourages doing stupid shit (that won’t hurt you) because you’ll succeed 5% of the time. Maybe they get to do a particularly cool action while trying it on a 20, but it still shouldn’t always succeed. You might just look slightly better while failing.
If it isn’t dangerous, it just encourages doing stuff your character wouldn’t do. Your barbarian shouldn’t be going around picking locks. Having a 1/20 chance to randomly succeed encourages then to though. Yeah, they’ll usually fail, but there’s no harm in most skill checks, so why not take them?
Skill checks don’t succeed on a natural 20 in the rule book. It’s a house rule thing, that got passed to a lot of players. It’s not a good way of handling it. Pathfinder 2e has a good system for it if you’re interested. It has degrees of success falling above/below the DC by 10 is a critical. Also, a natural 1/20 decreases/increases the degree of success by 1. That means if you really don’t know what you’re doing, you can easily critical fail and have negative consequences. If you’re really skilled you may critically succeed even without a nat 20.
In this example it was an attack roll, and a critical hit as a result of the halfling luck trait, so it played out perfectly.
In the case where it were a skill check, you are correct that there are no crits for skill checks. However rolling a natural 20 is a rare event and as a DM you could choose to reward it. Conversely hitting delicate machines with a battle-axe is usually a mistake.
The machine working at half capacity is a reasonable reward and consequence.
The problem is it isn’t that rare. If you reward it very much at all it encourages doing stupid shit (that won’t hurt you) because you’ll succeed 5% of the time. Maybe they get to do a particularly cool action while trying it on a 20, but it still shouldn’t always succeed. You might just look slightly better while failing.
But that also means that you would fail 95% of the time? I’m not sure why that seems unfair.
Sorry, I don’t really play but I like hearing and reading the stories.
If it isn’t dangerous, it just encourages doing stuff your character wouldn’t do. Your barbarian shouldn’t be going around picking locks. Having a 1/20 chance to randomly succeed encourages then to though. Yeah, they’ll usually fail, but there’s no harm in most skill checks, so why not take them?
Skill checks don’t succeed on a natural 20 in the rule book. It’s a house rule thing, that got passed to a lot of players. It’s not a good way of handling it. Pathfinder 2e has a good system for it if you’re interested. It has degrees of success falling above/below the DC by 10 is a critical. Also, a natural 1/20 decreases/increases the degree of success by 1. That means if you really don’t know what you’re doing, you can easily critical fail and have negative consequences. If you’re really skilled you may critically succeed even without a nat 20.