Natural 20
The climax of almost every "I did something awesome, guys!" story on /tg/. A natural 20 is when you roll 20 on a 20-sided die (most commonly used by Dungeons and Dragons). In almost every system this is a critical success, meaning that whatever you did happens without question, even if it should be impossible for you to do based on your skill scores or stats. As such, it's a convenient way for a GM (or an OP) who's completely telling the truth about how the story went to make it go the way he wants.
Crits in Other Games
The Natural 20 signifies the crit, as stated above, which causes inhuman unnatural levels of goofiness and awesome. However, not all systems use the D20, so this handy list will try to encompass all of the Crit or Auto-Pass rolls for each system:
- GURPS: a three or four on 3d6
- Warhammer Systems: A roll of 6 on a D6 will typically Auto-Hit or Auto-Wound, but not always.
- Dark Heresy: A roll of 1 on a D100, called a "Natural 1"
- Battletech: A ranged attack against a Battlemech that rolls a 12 with 2d6 on the hit location table yields a headshot, thus fucking up anyone with your Clan tech ER PPC.
- Pathfinder: Being based on the D20 system, a natural 20 is Pathfinder's Critical Hit indicator.
- Paranoia: Paranoia uses a d20 system where the objective is to roll low, so it's backwards from D&D; a 20 is a critical failure, and a 1 is a critical success. However, the true result of any roll in Paranoia will be either what Friend Computer considers to be just or what the GM considers to be funny.
- Iron Kingdoms: If you roll 2 or more d6's, the total is enough to hit, and you get two of the same number, you get a critical hit. This generates a feat point and may have other benefits depending on what you just did. In Warmachine and Hordes, critical hits don't do anything special unless the model attacking has rules which say so.
See Also