You haven’t really played Dungeons & Dragons until your very first roll of 20 on a d20. It really is the hallmark moment of the game, and one of the greatest thrills in all of role-playing games.
But where does the expression “natural 20” comes from? Why was it coined in the first place? And why don’t we ever mention natural 12s, natural 17s, or natural 1s?
It comes from the Attack Matrices in First Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Each character class had its own Attack Matrix, and there was one for the monsters, too. This one here is for the fighter types. Look at how the To Hit requirements progress on the table: 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 20, 20...
The number 20 is repeated 6 times. It is the same on all Attack Matrices.
The first “20” there is a normal die roll, which can include all the usual bonuses. Your fighter has a +2 To Hit bonus because of her strength, and she wields a +2 magical longsword; she rolls a 16, add her bonuses, and the final result is 20. It’s a hit.
The 5 subsequent 20s are a different kind of beast. Regardless of your character’s bonuses and magic items and spell effects, she’ll need to roll a 20 if she wants to hit that opponent. So, you get 5 rows of Armor Classes that are not exactly hit proof, but... your character is gonna have to roll heroically. Who rolls multiple 20s in the same fight, right?
In the AD&D heyday, we only ever used this expression when someone or something attacked someone else or something else whose AC put them right into those five “perfect hit” rows for that class.
“You’ll need a natural 20 to hit that will-o’-wisp.”
“But I have my +6 flaming vorpal holy avenger two-handed relic blade thing!”
“Won’t do you any good this time.”
Here’s what Gary Gygax wrote in his 1979 Dungeon Masters Guide:
“Consider the repeated 20 as a perfectly-aimed attack which does not gain any benefit from strength or magical properties of any sort – spell, missile, or weapon. That is, the 20 must be attained by a roll of natural 20. All bonuses accrue only up to and including a total of 20, so that even if a character attacked with a bonus for strength of +3 and a +3 magic sword he or she would have to roll a natural 20 in order to score a hit on any creature normally hit by the second or successive repetitions of 20, i.e. the bonus (+3 for example) could not exceed a total score of 20 unless an actual 20 is rolled.”
Regular readers know that I have been running a First Edition AD&D campaign since 2014, and yet I never had to tell a player he needed a natural 20 to hit an opponent. The party never faced anything so strong that their Armor Class placed them within those five dreaded rows of the Attack Matrix.
That gives you an idea of how rare an occurrence this is: it wasn’t put to use at my table in over 20 game sessions.
It is a level 1 fighter trying to smite Demogorgon. Literally.
In 5e, rolling a 20 doesn’t entail anything special besides giving you your highest possible To Hit score. If all your bonuses amount to +8, then you can hit Armor Class 28, and that is quite impressive, since Demogorgon in 5e has an AC of 22.
Chris Perkins still uses the expression whenever he rolls a 20, but it is just an old habit and nothing more. 5e Dungeon Masters never ask players to roll natural 20s – it is simply not part of the game mechanics anymore.
In 2018, my players were fighting a giant troll in a giant swamp. The ranger rolled a 20 on his To Hit and instinctively yelled, “Natural 20!”
He remembered that those words had some special meaning; but in this case, it wasn’t relevant, since the ranger needed 17 to hit the troll. Anyway, all the other players latched onto that like it was the Second Coming of Christ or something. Now they say “natural” ALL the time.
Player: “Natural 11.”
Me: “But what’s your total – with bonuses?”
Player: “Natural 15.”
Me: “There you go. It’s a hit!”
*
I only ran Empire of the Petal Throne once, and it was a rather short campaign. The City Half As Old As The World proved deadlier than Lankhmar, and the party never even made it out of the Underworld. Plus, the guys (it was an all-boys school) were obsessed with Middle-earth, and few were interested in Tékumel. So Greyhawk was a good compromise, with all the usual Middle-earthy kingdoms, and some nice, exotic realms to the south and west. Ekbir, Zeif, Tusmit and Ull certainly had some EPT undertones – and you could still get your hands on puzzling technology à la Tékumel if you ventured to that mountain range called the Barrier Peaks, or to the “City of the Gods.” But I digress.
At school, in the days of the D&D club, I introduced my players to the mechanics of Empire of the Petal Throne. In that game, an attack dealt double damage whenever you rolled a 20. Plus, you could get an instakill if you were lucky enough to roll a second consecutive natural 20 or a 19.
So, you had one table playing regular D&D, and another table playing EPT. Once in a while, someone at the EPT table screamed, “20! Double Damage!”
Some of the players sitting at the other table naturally assumed that double-damage-on-a-nat-20 also applied to D&D, but it didn’t. I saw several DMs hopelessly scour their books to find the elusive rule – to no avail.
Here’s what Professor M. A. R. Barker wrote in his 1975 Empire of the Petal Throne:
“A 9th Level warrior who hits a 1st Level opponent (i.e. an opponent with one hit die) does FOUR 6-sided dice of damage – almost certainly killing him! This becomes important, of course, in melee conditions where one advanced-level person fights more than one low-level opponent. [...]
If a player hits with a 20-sided die score of 20, he does DOUBLE hit dice damage.”
That’s how it happened for me, in ’84. And it must have happened to countless other gaming groups all over the world. Even today, players I didn’t know back then can roll natural 20s and shriek, “Double Damage!”
Most of the time they have never heard of Empire of the Petal Throne.
The double damage feature is the one thing most AD&D players know about EPT, without knowing that it comes from EPT.
Dungeon Masters are welcome to use it, though. If you want to implement that rule in your campaign, why not?
Personally, I prefer the “full damage” rule. Indeed, what’s the use of dealing double damage if you roll poorly on your damage dice and do just 10 points? You’ll never deal just 10 damage with the full damage rule, unless you play a magic-user with a non-magical dagger.
This concludes our little piece about the origins of the natural 20, as well as another year of blogging.
Adios, 2020.
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