A player of my group asked how to deal with ball or area spells in conjunction with Martial Laws criticals. Does the target receive a critical on each hit location as the ball covers all the area?
Seems too powerful, doesn't it?
So, how do you deal with this situation?
The critical table in Martial Law are designed specifically for use with weapons/attacks that can strike specific parts of the body.
If dealing with an attack that does not or cannot target a specific portion of the body, you have 2 choices:
1) Simply roll for a random location for the attack. The consistency of the elemental material within a ball attack is not uniform (hence 2 people side by side can receive different crits, based on OB), and thus the damage will not be uniform. In this case, the random location then translates into where MOST of the damage occurs, and any "hits" from the crit could be presumed to be spread over the rest of the body.
2) Simply use the original tables.As was pointed out, there are some tables that are not suited for translation into the hit location tables. The same holds true in reverse, that there are some attacks that just do not work well in a hit location system.
Additionally, if you use the ML tables for bolts, and the original tables for balls, that will help separate out those two types of attacks from one another more fully.
