This is a headsplitter box full health + bonuses + spell and 1 pulse with no wounds. Something has changed with boxes that has caused them to be this deadly.

disarm careful

You carefully work at disarming the strongbox.
With a cautious hand, you attempt to undo the string tying the bladder to the locking mechanism only to be greeted with a loud "Poof" followed by a cloud of small particles that flow from the strongbox and drift through the air, gagging you!
You are diseased!
Roundtime: 17 sec.

R> heal

Your body feels at full strength.
Your spirit feels full of life.

Your body is covered in open oozing sores.

R> shrug
You shrug.

With a sense of deep foreboding, you notice a sudden spread of sickening greenish pustules forming on your neck.
Your iron strongbox falls to the ground.

Your sharpened senses subside.
You suddenly feel less confident about your skinning and locksmithing abilities.

Your death cry echoes in your brain as it quickly dawns on you that you have just died! Already, you feel the tug of eternity upon your soul and you struggle to remain tied to this world.

Sounds like they've been brought in line with Moon Mage spells. Nice.

--Sunny

>But I do agree with you, if one shot crit deaths in combat had to go... why is this stuff allowed to continue to exist?

Nobody uses boxes in pvp.

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>Forgive my snark, but welcome to the life of a warrior mage.

I want to try this.

>>Nobody uses boxes in pvp.

...
>Okay, that got me laughing.

Me too. But then it also got me drooling for more Engineering development.

This post was just riddled with misunderstandings.

>For more than dozen years we had been referring to these as "crits".

The crits from a dozen years ago, the zoha crits, were open rolls -- where critical success let the attacker roll another die, and another, and another.... These "Open Roll" zoha crits went away years ago. But nobody noticed because by then 30 was no longer end-game and everything scaled so badly past it. Which brings us to:

>Players have not ever been able to roll something comparable to these "crits".

Players used the same system, players and critters use the same combat code.

>On top of that, I personally feel that Head and Neck vitality is far too low which is causing the box traps that are not infinite damage to be 100% deadly anyway.

The one-hit body part kills were standard combat mechanics, which just didn't scale well. One-hit-kills were endemic to the combat system because Head and Neck (and chest, and back, and abdomen, and arm...) vitality IS too low, it's permanently fixed at around 100 hit points on chargen and never changes. This couldn't be changed without a game engine rewrite (which 3.0 was not, the game engine is still DR 2). The 3.0 changes were a clever hack solution to reduce the damage to body parts by a function of vitality, since body part vitality couldn't be fixed.

For boxes to stop instant-killing you like a player used to, someone needs to trash the box system and write a new version that calls central wound mechanics that didn't exist when it was last re-written ... seven years ago? About? I was just re-reading those posts but I don't recall off-hand. I expect this will kill at least one GM. They didn't even finish writing this iteration last time...

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>Forgive my snark, but welcome to the life of a warrior mage.