House rule: Increasing crit damage for monsters

I find critical hits from monsters boring. They don't scare players, because they only max the damage, which is something that can happen with a lucky die roll even without a crit. Only very few elite monsters have extra effects or damage on a crit. Even worse: Minions. When they crit nothing happens!
I think this is a serious design flaw. Monster crits don't keep up with PC crits. They are being laughed at!
The higher the level, the worse it gets. Take a paragon tier PC: He probably has a high crit weapon, and adds at least 3d6 on top of it, and barbarians also get a free attack.

Solution: Minions double their damage on a crit. Other monsters add 1d6 per half-tier (1-5, 6-10 etc.) to their max damage. Solos add 1d8 instead.
What do you think?

As a house rule, I don't think it'd be unbalanced. It's less than a +0.2 DPR per monster (at least in heroic).

I don't think this was a design flaw at all; it fit in well 4e's design philosophy (less swingy combats). I remember that 3/4 of my PKs in 3e came as a result of something with a x3 or x4 crit multiplier, so I'm more inclined to limit monster criticals.

I find that, with the more tactical gameplay elements in 4th Edition, the Critical rate on creatures is lower due to what Chris has mentioned, which would be less "swingy" combat. Before D&D, I came from the land of tactical, grid-based skirmish games and I've seen first hand what a few criticals in a row can do. While the odds are always very small, we roll enough dice (as players and DMs) for it to eventually happen.

As a DM outside of the meetup group, I like to play with the DM screen up so that my rolls are hidden. This allows me to decide if I'm rolling the right amount of critical hits. Though that's obviously gauged by my personal preference of course.

I know mentally it seems lame when a creature crits because it is often compared to the previous round where a hero critted something and it does seem weak in comparison. But remember the DM rolls crits more than any other player at the table. They can't all be fantastic or the party would never survive.

4 minions is supposed to equal 1 creature. So those minions get 4 attack roles for every 1 attack roll a normal creature would take. That's 4 times the chance for a crit. Is it fair to give them extra crit damage? It's bad enough that a 20 is an auto hit.

You want crits make an all orc adventure. They all wield greataxes which are high crit. In the RPGA there was an adventure with all orcs CORE1-2 and they realized it was creating lots of TPKs so they had to tone it down.

Monster crits can't keep up with player crits because player HP don't keep up with monster HP. Monsters at higher levels have tons of hit points, they serve to be punching bags for max'd out players. Non power-gamers start complaining that combats take forever.

It's all true what you guys are saying, but it's a fact that monster crits are not scary, and that's bad, it reduces the fun. Scary is fun.

Yeah. That's probably not a good one-size-fits-all fix. But monsters with deadly crits would make an interesting module theme.

It might be interesting to fight skirmisher and brute monsters wielding vicious weapons with high crit properties, especially in higher levels, 6 and up, where monsters often don't do enough damage. Players would probably need to get a warning tho.

Tho it's weird that minion crits don't do anything, it's probably a fair trade off to the "missed attack never damage a minion" clause.

I think doubling a minion's damage on a crit would add some fun without much actual risk to the PCs.

A minion's crit feels like a dud right now.

Come to think of it, fact that the minion survived long enough to not only make an attack roll but also a crit is quite an achievement in and of itself. hahaha. It should probably get promoted to a regular monster when that happens!!!

Yes it's a great moment in a minion's life, and should be celebrated.
Re: James' argument "It's bad enough that a 20 is an auto hit." - when was the last time you saw a monster not naturally hitting on a 20? That's a rare case of total AC optimization on the PC side and low-level monster on the other side. Those monsters can as well position themselves for execution, or surrender right away.