New Special Moves - Designs needed!

Let's throw in some wild ideas, maybe add some viable design space to crits. These are off-the-cuff first drafts, so they're likely imbalanced.

Sabre Dance
You dance through the lines of combat, disrupting lines of battle and changing the shape of the battlefield as you dart in and out of enemy lines.

8: Target creature is dazed and considered to be on a side of your choice for the purposes of adjacency until the end of your next turn. This may include rendering them adjacent to no other creatures.
10: Rearrange the adjacency of a target creature, making them adjacent to and not adjacent to any combination of creatures you choose, until the end of the battle.
12: Rearrange the adjacency of up to six creatures. This remains until changed again or the end of the battle.

(For tabletop this would be a shift and slide heavy critical)

Crashing Charge
Moving with a terrible momentum, you smash through defences and opponents alike. Shield, spear, stone wall - they may as well be paper to you.

Gain the following talent:
[0] Irresistable Force - Interrupt Utility
Trigger: You make an attack and have at least one momentum token
Lose 1 momentum token. The triggering attack ignores resist, and it may trigger no other traits or talents.

8: Gain 1 momentum token
10: Gain 1 momentum token and target creature loses 1d8hp
12: Gain 1 momentum token and target creature and creatures adjacent to target lose 1d8hp

Counter-Magic
You know spell and sword like the back of your hand, and when you're in the zone nothing can get past you.

Gain the following talent
[0] Counterspell - Interrupt Utility
Trigger: An enemy uses a combat talent and you have at least one counterspell token
Lose 1 counterspell token. The enemy may not use that talent until the start of their next turn. This negates their use of the talent, but does not cost them their action or pips.

8: Pick one:
A) Target talent that you have counterspelled may not be used by the enemy until the end of their next turn.
B) Target enemy loses access to a random talent until the end of their next turn.
10: Gain 1 counterspell token.
12: Activate the 8 and 10 critical results.

@fury: I think the smoothest way to make that work would be like this:
d10: When you choose this special move, choose one combat talent with the name "conjure ____" and a cost less than [-X]*. Whenever you activate this crit, you may use that combat talent without paying its cost.
*X is TBD.

If you make it any conjuration, then anybody who doesn't know the combat manual cover to cover will have to go rooting through it for a conjuration they want, which takes time. And even if they think ahead and just stick every possible conjuration talent at the bottom of their character sheet, there will still be that obnoxious period when they sit there staring at the list, weighing their options.

@pingcode:
We're probably doing away with Adjacency. target+adjacents will just become "up to three targets creatures." It a little different from this, but Dazzling Performance is being remodeled into more of a "Duelist's flair" type crit, where you do some damage and weaken the enemy, which is a similar theme to this. A push/pull crit for tabletop would be very cool, too.

Crashing Charge is interesting, but other than ignoring resist it doesn't seem to bring much to the table (except screwing over the select group of monsters that rely on interrupts, which is either a really small pool or a really large one, depending on your DM). Is there any other effect you think would pair well with ignoring resist (other than Dazed, because its extremely cheap, and stun, because it's extremely expensive)? (either of those would be usable, just not grauitously. I could see a d12 that was "Your next single target attack ignores Resist and stuns the target until the end of their next turn.)

Counter-Magic Is either a really OP or a really UP ability, and I can't figure out which. I suppose you are technically slowing the monster down. I have a feeling that this would be troublesome for the same reason we've avoided making any new "steal pips from monsters" talents: Monsters run on a very different scale from PCs, and often run on scales of their own. Against some monsters this would do basically nothing, and against other monsters (say, if you have twin duelists that do extra damage if they use the same attack together) it absolutely wrecks them. Can you come up with some way of countering what a monster does that doesn't involve toying with the monster's moveset or pip count (ooh, what if you could spend tokens to get a bunch of different similar effects whenever a monster used a combat talent: )
[0] Counter Magic - Interrupt Utility
You must spend one counter token to use this ability
Trigger: An enemy uses a combat talent:
Result: Choose 1:
a) Deal 1d8 damage to the triggering enemy
b) The triggering enemy is weakened until the end of its next turn
c)Target ally gains 8 Temporary HP
etc.
The abilities could daze enemies, or maybe weaken them at the start of their turns, or even give them ongoing. Does that sound cool?

Conjurer's Trick
You gain the following combat talent.

[0] Conjurer's Trick - Free Utility 
You may spend 1 Trick. If you do, reduce the cost of the next combat talent you use to conjure a creature by 1.

8-12: Gain tricks. Do stuff.

Ping, I edited my last post to include a review of the stuff you suggested.

Masterful Meditator:

Idea/purpose of the special: Whenever you trigger your special, it gives you an benefit, and more importantly, makes your next crits easier to occur by "moving down" the crit threshold, eventually snowballing into easy repeating crits from virtually any roll.

What if we try to build a crit... That is for no-crit builds? I know a crazy idea to be sure, but just wanta put it out there.

Here's my take on a conjuror's crit; I really don't think it would be a DETRIMENT to have a class specific one:

Conjuror's Critical
8. You may sacrifice a conjuration you control to deal 2d10 damage

10. If you have a weapon or form conjured, you regain access to your other combat talents. If you do not have a weapon conjured, then the next time you do conjure one you will not lose access to your other combat talents.

12. You may use a conjuration talent as a free action. This action consumes the regular amount of pips if a -pip maneuver, and (gives one/gives zero) if a +pip maneuver.


With the 8, I assume requiring a sacrifice is worth 2.5 extra damage points... The d10 crit is a little hard to quantify, but I know that I would want it for certain builds... And with the d12, I think the combination of still costing pips and the fact that depending on when the crit occurs your familiar might miss the first turn; I think it might balance out.

Assuming that some of us are going to continue under the assumption that special summon is not a major factor; we could also add this talent:

[0 / -1] Aether Madness - Interrupt Utility
Trigger - you attempt conjure something
Effect - roll 2 dice of your choice

...potentially that could be 1 die, but you get the idea - take up a talent instead of a trait for the ability to let conjurers roll in an attempt to crit.

Pity about Sabre Dance. Might have been interesting seeing how someone screws with it.

Anyway...

Crashing Charge

Crashing Charge is at its heart a strongly armour piercing ability - using it guarantees that your attack goes through, since all the redirects, counters, and responses can't fire off it. It might not be the most powerful, or the most broadly applicable, but I do think that the ability to say 'Yup this one attack pierces everything' is going to be appealing. Anything really significant is likely to have at least some sort of defensive ability, so being able to punch through a lot of that is valuable - after all, does not everyone love to count on a sure thing?

Could actually be overpowered, but it does trigger off crits which are semi-rare and expensive to pick up even in crit-pumping builds.

As far as status conditions... Eh, that strikes me as trying to leverage something already costed in. You could make a case for vulnerability.

Counter-Magic

It doesn't actually steal pips or anything. It's a lockdown power that stops a particular attack for a turn. Monsters may run on different scales to PCs but they all still run on the system of combat talents and such. The 8 ability mainly has two options so that a lucky 8-crit at the opening of the combat still does something - its real power is in using crits to pin down an enemy by countering specific moves.

The alternative... eh, I dislike that idea because it doesn't expand the design space any more than a reaction focussed character would.

@Zarhon: I feel like if we make a crit that centers around making crits easier to activate, then a battle will get bogged down with crits. Admittedly, this is slightly mitigated by the lack of dice rolling in the crit, but the more crits that get activated, the slower that person's turn is.
My real problem with it though, is that mathematically I have to weight this as 1.25 damage or higher per die rolled per turn. If combat lasts 5 rounds, and you activate the d8 at the end of the first round, then roll 2 dice per turn for the next 4 rounds, it's worth 10 damage already. And it's easier to roll many more dice than that without losing much momentum from whatever you're trying to do. Basically, that ability is almost a step past prohibitively expensive. And even if we could somehow bring the power lower, somehow, it would still leave the rest of the crit looking lame compared to the others, which encourages trying to activate more crits to make up the difference, which brings us back around to the first problem.
The closest alternative I can come up with is a crit that has weaker effects but lets you just roll dice in addition to your effects, in the hope of procing another crit. That was sort of what the last build of wild lightning looked like before it morphed into Wild Power.

@Xel: Be a little more specific. How would it activate? The benefit of a no crit build is that if you don't roll dice, then the crit damage should already be folded into the talent's effect. For example, these two effects would cost the same:
[-X]=Deal 1d12 damage to target enemy
[-X]=Deal 8 damage to target enemy
One of them deals more damage (on average), but one of them has a chance of an explosive crit. So how do you balance a crit to be used by no crit moves? I'm not saying don't do it, I just want to know if there is a way to do it. Because if there is, then I want to try it.

@Z2: I'm not sure where you got your math for the 8, but 2d10 is worth 13.5 damage, which is 5.5 more damage than the d8 is worth. Depending on the conjuration you sacrifice, that might still make up the difference, honestly, but it's very dependent on what summons you took. The d10 is odd, because the other two moves are for conjurations, while this one is for a conjured weapon. The d12 is actually close to balanced, because granting a specific standard action at no change to the cost isn't actually worth that much, and it could definitely be worked with.

I definitely want a conjurer's special in the system, because they've been lacking one for quite awhile, and we've been getting a lot of good ideas for one in here, but I'm not sure that this is what to do with it, because it requires that you have certain combat talents. I always feel like a crit set should work the same way an individual crit occurence works: It's just the icing on the cake. It's nice when it happens, but you don't notice too much if it doesn't. Plus, it's often nice to take a crit that has nothing to do with your role, and just throw out unexpected things when you crit (Healer's Grace saved my Swordsman's behind, once). This limits that ability. Plus I'm worried about it cramping future design space, if we want to design a conjuration but then realize that it interacts badly with this crit.

I'd like to get everyone's weigh-ins, Honestly. What do people think of a special moves that require that you have certain moves/types of moves in your build? It's not really a thing outside of Conjurations, honestly, but it's worth thinking about. If it does become a thing, I think the best setup is one like what Z2 did with the d8 and the d12, because it doesn't push you towards any particular move, and actually encourages you to take multiple conjurations. The d8 makes you want one of the small [+] conjurations, so you don't lose much, while the d12 makes you want a chance to summon one of the larger ones.

@Ping: So Crashing charge would be straight damage without any capacity to counter it. I get that idea a little better now. That's definitely workable. I think I was taking the "crashing" part of it too literally. Now how do we keep that concept interesting across three special moves? Keep in mind that the damage is already going to be a little less impressive than a straight damage crit like Bucaneer Blaze. How can we keep it looking powerful?

On the subject of Counter-Magic, You mentioned that monsters still use combat talents, but they tend to use them in much different configurations from players. The biggest difference for our purposes is that they don't always have 5 well organized combat talents that don't overlap much with each other in terms of effect. A solo monster might have multiple [+] attacks and barely notice your ability, and the same with an elite (you might have luck, however, if he has a sole nuke talent, but if you lock it then you've just delayed it for one turn, as he can use a [+] move instead). When you get to smaller monsters (I don't think we have a mid-sized classification for monsters, because they're so uncommon), Losing one combat talent can be pretty disruptive. For Minions, You probably just locked them out of doing anything for the next round. Which is, admittedly, quite nice. At this point we're looking at a central technique for a special that works like this: "Freeze target minion (without killing it), or slightly inconvenience something larger." That's just not that cool of a crit, to me, and because the value is pretty much purely time-based (delay strategy for 1 round), you may have hit the most ethereal factor to balance ever (not that I won't try anyways).
Though this is a gripe that could be fixed with a wording change, I'd like to note that I'm pretty sure your current version doesn't let you see what talent the enemy is using before locking it. But like I said, that could be fixed with a wording change.
In summary, I think messing directly with a monster's talents+pips produces problems (for the monster) on a completely different level from messing with the monster's damage output, making it a very wonky effect. It might still be possible to do it, but we'd probably have to reign in the talent a lot.

Well my idea is that I enjoy building no-crit builds. IE: A build that doesn't do any rolling of d8, d10, or d12.... So I'd figure maybe having some options where you forgo the power to make a crit effect to gain something else... Yes, it does have very strong feelings of min-max-yness... But might be a fun idea to think about if nothing else.

Luckily, in the revamp that added power will be built into the system. If you aren't rolling dice that can crit, you're already gaining extra power for giving up the crit chance.

Well, I posted this in the other thread so I'll just post it again here with a few tweaks:

8: Deal X Ongoing damage to target enemy (save ends). If target enemy is already suffering from Ongoing, increase it by X.
10: Target enemy is subjected to your "Life Drain" (save ends). While subject to "Life Drain," a creature loses Y life at the beginning of each turn, and you gain HP equal to 1/2 that amount.
12: Target enemy is subjected to you "Life Steal" (save ends). While subject to "Life Steal," a creature loses Z life at the beginning of each turn, and you or target ally gains HP equal to the amount.

And an idea I had just now: you know how we have the Self Discovery destiny for people to pick and choose their destiny parts? What if we had something like that for special moves as well? Of course, it can't just be "choose a d8, d10, and d12 power from other special moves" because there would be no reason not to take it. But maybe we can take a page out of Self Discovery's book...

8: Choose a d8 move from another special move.
10: Choose a d8 move from another special move. [could maybe be a d10]
12: Choose a d10 move from another special move.

It's thus strictly worse in terms of power, but offers flexibility for people who maybe just can't find a crit that they like the entirety of.

I love the idea of a Build Your Own Crits system. And I do agree keeping it with a minor nerf might help keep it from being too crazy. Then again, in theory, the system crits are going to be balanced... So yeah.

Philadelphus wrote:Well, I posted this in the other thread so I'll just post it again here with a few tweaks:

8: Deal X Ongoing damage to target enemy (save ends). If target enemy is already suffering from Ongoing, increase it by X.
10: Target enemy is subjected to your "Life Drain" (save ends). While subject to "Life Drain," a creature loses Y life at the beginning of each turn, and you gain HP equal to 1/2 that amount.
12: Target enemy is subjected to you "Life Steal" (save ends). While subject to "Life Steal," a creature loses Z life at the beginning of each turn, and you or target ally gains HP equal to the amount.

And an idea I had just now: you know how we have the Self Discovery destiny for people to pick and choose their destiny parts? What if we had something like that for special moves as well? Of course, it can't just be "choose a d8, d10, and d12 power from other special moves" because there would be no reason not to take it. But maybe we can take a page out of Self Discovery's book...

8: Choose a d8 move from another special move.
10: Choose a d8 move from another special move. [could maybe be a d10]
12: Choose a d10 move from another special move.

It's thus strictly worse in terms of power, but offers flexibility for people who maybe just can't find a crit that they like the entirety of.

When you first suggested that crit, QK and I hammered out a full version of it:

Soul Siphon
8: Target creature suffers Ongoing damage 5 (SE).
10: Target creature suffers Life Drain 5 (SE). At the start of their turn, a creature with life drain X loses X life, and you regain X life.
12: Target creature loses 10 life, then choose one:
a)Target creature gains 12 life.
b)Up to three target creatures gain 4 life

On the subject of a self-discovery special move...hm...It would be mathematically patchy, but as long as we keep each special more or less downgraded from what it should be, then the versatility should balance out. I'm not certain how many people would take it, though, if you don't get some sort of fully-powered d12 crit (which you really can't have. it wouldn't be fair).
There's also the possibility that I'm reading this wrong. Do you choose each crit at character creation, or do you choose it each time the crit activates? Because there are very big differences in versatility there.

Summoner Idea
8: You craft one Component A
10: You craft one Component B
12: You craft one Component C

You also gain the following combat talent:
[0] Summon Guardian - Standard Utility
Expend one "Component A", one "Component B", and one "Component C". If you do, you summon a Guardian. It has the following stat block...
Guardian - 30HP
Trait - Justice
When Guardian is summoned, up to six creatures gain 1d6 HP.
[0] - Retribution
Deal 1d6 damage to up to six enemies.

Invocation Mk. II
When you select this special move, select one combat talent, one item worth 1000 Gold, and one combat trait.

8: Target creature gains access to the combat talent you selected until the end of combat.
10: Target creature gains access to the item you selected until the end of combat, even if they do not have an item slot for it.
12: Target creature gains access to the combat trait you selected until the end of combat.

Bloody Baron
Whenever you activate a Special Move, you pay 6 HP.

8: Deal 2d10 damage to target creature.
10: Deal 2d8 damage to target creature and gain a +5 bonus to your next saving throw.
12: Deal 1d8 damage to up to three creatures and gain two energy.

Plans of the Assassin
8: Apply an Assassin's Mark to target creature until the end of combat. Creatures under your Assassin's Mark suffers Vulnerability 2 to your attacks.
10: Apply an Assassin's Mark to target creature until the end of combat. That creature can not target you until the end of your next turn.
12: Apply an Assassin's Mark to target creature until the end of combat and deal 2d8 damage to that creature. If the creature dies, you may apply an Assassin's Mark onto another target creature.

Maybe one day I'll post a good idea for once...

sunbeam wrote:When you first suggested that crit, QK and I hammered out a full version of it:

Soul Siphon
8: Target creature suffers Ongoing damage 5 (SE).
10: Target creature suffers Life Drain 5 (SE). At the start of their turn, a creature with life drain X loses X life, and you regain X life.
12: Target creature loses 10 life, then choose one:
a)Target creature gains 12 life.
b)Up to three target creatures gain 4 life

Oh, that looks pretty neat. It works well as a combined ongoing damage/life steal crit, since anyone taking it could simply ignore either the 8 or the 12 if they don't want one or the other. The d10 is especially cool.

sunbeam wrote:
On the subject of a self-discovery special move...hm...It would be mathematically patchy, but as long as we keep each special more or less downgraded from what it should be, then the versatility should balance out. I'm not certain how many people would take it, though, if you don't get some sort of fully-powered d12 crit (which you really can't have. it wouldn't be fair).
There's also the possibility that I'm reading this wrong. Do you choose each crit at character creation, or do you choose it each time the crit activates? Because there are very big differences in versatility there.

My intention was that you choose them at character creation. So for example you might choose the 8 to be the 8 from Knight's Presence, the 10 to be the 8 from Buccaneer Blaze, and the 12 to be the 10 from Healer's Grace. In my experience, sometimes characters just can't seem to find a special move that they like all three parts of, so they either settle for something that they like most of, or else modify their combat so that they aren't rolling dice that can trigger the move(s) they don't like. (This may be less of an issue with all these new specials, but I know when I made my first character who was focused on Ongoing damage I was frustrated by the lack of an Ongoing-focused special move.) The special I'm proposing would let people grab moves from up to three different special moves, thus opening up character creation options, while (hopefully) still being balanced by not having access to a 12 move and being mathematically underpowered.

The total value for a special move is the damage value of its components, which is 8+12.5+18=38.5 for a regular special move. (Assuming I've got the math right.) My original proposal of having two 8's and a 10 move would have a value of 16+12.5=28.5, drastically less powerful (and I'm probably forgetting something related to the lower chances of rolling a 10 move on a d12). You could perhaps allow the 10 power to select another 10 power rather than an 8, which would bump it up to 8+25=33, a bit nicer overall. So it might look something like this:

Choose-Your-Own-Special Move
8: At character creation, choose an 8 move from another special move and replace this move with it.
10: At character creation, choose a 10 move from another special move and replace this move with it.
12: At character creation, choose a 10 move from another special move and replace this move with it.

@Philadelphus: You calculations for the total value of the crit is correct, here's the math for what it makes each die roll worth:
8/8/10
d8:+1 damage
d10:+.8 damage
d12:+1.04 damage.
8/10/10
d8:+1 damage
d10:+1.25 damage
d12:+1.04 damage
So really, this setup would deprecate the damage of every die you rolled (except for d8s). But if you're willing to do that for added variety, I see no reason to stop you. I'm leaning towards the first one, since the second provides almost no drawbacks.
Can I put you in charge of figuring out wording for this, so that it can work for every crit (say, if you chose a knight's presence crit and needed to use the oath tokens to activate defender, you would specify that you gain that talent)? I think this would go best at the very bottom of the special move section, as a sort of sidebar, where we explain that this setup will be weaker, but allows for unique crit combinations. Can you tinker with that? I think it's definitely an idea that should be introduced.

@Paper:
Guardian:A crit that requires that you activate each specific part of it once seems extremely awkward, and unlikely to be useful often. What if we combined this with Fury's Idea of some sort of evolving creature, and each crit gave you different components that could activate different abilities?

Invocation: Invocation could work, as long as it is one specific talent/item/trait. We'd have to do some mathematical rejiggering to make things work just right (I think the trait might need to have a slight delay on when it is granted, for example), but it's definitely a unique crit that would be cool to have. (We also need a note in there somewhere that the combat trait you choose can't have prerequisites, or you could go around granting stuff like expert duelist to everybody.)

Blood Baron: I like this idea, a lot. We'd need a sidebar reminding people that you can choose not to activate your crits. Honestly, I kind of want to combine this with Ping's idea, Smashing Charge. It changes the flavor of both of them a little, so I can understand if either of you don't want it, but it would solve Smashing Charge's damage problem.

Plans of the Assassin: I get the idea behind plans of the assassin, but I think long-term effects like that are going to prove prohibitively expensive. For example, vuln 2 to your attacks for the rest of combat is worth 21 damage, which is already more than a d12 crit. And if we get much lower than that, then the crit stops looking that powerful. Am I right in thinking that the idea behind this special move is to leave lasting effects?

sunbeam wrote:@Philadelphus: You calculations for the total value of the crit is correct, here's the math for what it makes each die roll worth:
8/8/10
d8:+1 damage
d10:+.8 damage
d12:+1.04 damage.
8/10/10
d8:+1 damage
d10:+1.25 damage
d12:+1.04 damage
So really, this setup would deprecate the damage of every die you rolled (except for d8s). But if you're willing to do that for added variety, I see no reason to stop you. I'm leaning towards the first one, since the second provides almost no drawbacks.
Can I put you in charge of figuring out wording for this, so that it can work for every crit (say, if you chose a knight's presence crit and needed to use the oath tokens to activate defender, you would specify that you gain that talent)? I think this would go best at the very bottom of the special move section, as a sort of sidebar, where we explain that this setup will be weaker, but allows for unique crit combinations. Can you tinker with that? I think it's definitely an idea that should be introduced.

Ooh, good point about the wording. I'll think about it and see if I can come up with something. So we're going with an 8, 8, 10 spread, then. And I definitely agree that it should go at the end with an explanation that it's for those who really just can't find something they like and want to put together something of their own (and who knows, some people might enjoy playing with it to see if they can find any odd combos of moves from different specials that work well together).

sunbeam wrote:Blood Baron: I like this idea, a lot. We'd need a sidebar reminding people that you can choose not to activate your crits. Honestly, I kind of want to combine this with Ping's idea, Smashing Charge. It changes the flavor of both of them a little, so I can understand if either of you don't want it, but it would solve Smashing Charge's damage problem.

I'm sure it'd be terribly cool but I haven't the slightest idea what you're trying to achieve here.

I mean, crits are near-impossible to stop anyway, since they're neither attacks nor utilities. You mean pay 6hp for a momentum counter instead of just giving it outright? Or resistance piercing damage on blood baron?

Paper Shadow wrote:Summoner Idea
8: You craft one Component A
10: You craft one Component B
12: You craft one Component C

You also gain the following combat talent:
[0] Summon Guardian - Standard Utility
Expend one "Component A", one "Component B", and one "Component C". If you do, you summon a Guardian. It has the following stat block...
Guardian - 30HP
Trait - Justice
When Guardian is summoned, up to six creatures gain 1d6 HP.
[0] - Retribution
Deal 1d6 damage to up to six enemies.

While awesome in theory, what'er the chances of getting a crit on /all three/ dice?

Pingcode wrote:

sunbeam wrote:Blood Baron: I like this idea, a lot. We'd need a sidebar reminding people that you can choose not to activate your crits. Honestly, I kind of want to combine this with Ping's idea, Smashing Charge. It changes the flavor of both of them a little, so I can understand if either of you don't want it, but it would solve Smashing Charge's damage problem.

I'm sure it'd be terribly cool but I haven't the slightest idea what you're trying to achieve here.

I mean, crits are near-impossible to stop anyway, since they're neither attacks nor utilities. You mean pay 6hp for a momentum counter instead of just giving it outright? Or resistance piercing damage on blood baron?

I'm basically trying to use the life loss from Blood Baron to empower Crashing Charge to higher levels of damage.
Most monster reactions don't much care about whether an attack or a utility is used. Or at least mine don't, because it's simpler to just react to "a creature damages you" or "a creature targets an ally." This means that making a move unable to be reacted to/interrupted has a strategic value, which can be represented in damage (the value would be low, because it wouldn't matter in many places, but it would be there). Ignoring Resist is also worth some damage, as it's basically the equivalent to doing bonus damage to something equal to their resist value. I don't have a mathematical representation of either of those yet, but if I'm going to put these abilities into the system, they will have a mathematical value, and that value will be folded into any ability that uses them, including crits. As a result, the damage output of a crit that deals damage that cannot be reacted to and/or ignores resist is going to be lower than a crit that just dealt damage, making it less appealing. I think what would make an "unstoppable" crit like Crashing Charge more appealing and unique is if it was actually more powerful than a normal damaging crit, on top of being uncounterable, but that would require a cost. It morphs the feel into a "great power from great sacrifice" idea, but it still gives you unstoppable power. It would look like this:

Unstoppable Charge
Every time you activate a special move, pay 6 HP (sidebar reminding people that you can choose not to activate special moves)
8:Deal some damage to target creature #unstoppable.
10:Deal a bunch of damage to target creature #unstoppable.
12:Deal a bunch of a lot of damage to target creature #unstoppable.
Except instead of using the 8/12.5/18 damage setup, the HP you're paying makes the damage setup /12/16.5/22, so the moves would all be at least as powerful as a crit without the penalty, in addition to being "unstoppable."

Does that still fit with what you were thinking of? I can see how it might, and I can see how it might not, depending on who you expected to use this crit. This version is more of a beserker version, while I think yours was more intended for tanks, who want the hits they get to really count.

I think it works against what I was thinking of - the point is and always was to apply unstoppability to one of your normal attacks, not just an extra damaging crit.

It's less a tank ability and more an anti-tank ability. It can potentially be very powerful - a single crit can earn a lot of damage if applied to a nuke and fired at enemies with very tough defences - but its appeal comes from the ability to ensure that clinch attack goes through, even if it's not universally applicable.

I can understand if you want to run everything dealing damage based on your list, but folding it all into higher damage really just creates a sliding scale of 'Do I want to do X damage with my crits or X+n damage with my crits paying Y health'. It doesn't affect play at all, and the 'cool factor' comes entirely from power creep relative to existing raw damage crits like Buccaneer Blaze. Yes, everyone likes more damage but power creep is power creep, even when it comes with increasing tradeoffs.