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I'm thinking of a concept of a spellcaster that fight in melee from the moment I re-read the "blade" cantrips (green-flame blade and booming blade), and realized that they can deal a lot of damage. Long story short, I re-read the Assassin subclass, and was thinking about how they interact with critical hits.

If it is obvious that the secondary damage from booming blade doesn't care about whether or not the initial attack was a critical hit, but how about green-flame blade (which basically gives you an automatic hit on another enemy)? How does green-flame blade's secondary damage interact with critical hits?

If I get a critical hit on the attack roll of green-flame blade, is the number of damage dice doubled for the damage to both targets? Or does it only double the damage dice for the first target?

V2Blast
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Rorp
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1 Answers1

11

From the Player's Basic Rules:

Critical Hits

When you score a critical hit, you get to roll extra dice for the attack’s damage against the target. Roll all of the attack’s damage dice twice and add them together. Then add any relevant modifiers as normal. To speed up play, you can roll all the damage dice at once.

For example, if you score a critical hit with a dagger, roll 2d4 for the damage, rather than 1d4, and then add your relevant ability modifier. If the attack involves other damage dice, such as from the rogue’s Sneak Attack feature, you roll those dice twice as well. (PHB, p. 196; BR, p. 75)

It's an interesting edge case, but the rules are pretty clear. The damage dice you roll against the target you were attacking are doubled by a critical hit, but there's no particular indication that damage that hits other targets is affected. As such, the extra damage to a secondary target remains normal.

Additionally, while he's no longer a canonical rules source, we do have a Crawford tweet that confirms.

The splash damage of green-flame blade isn't affected by the attack critting. Think of the attack as process X & the splash damage as Y #DnD

(thanks to @Medix2 on the tweet link)

Ben Barden
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