So you're roleplaying in Lemony Snicket: A Series of Unfortunate Events world...

You could passively respond by playing up the comedy and hunt for extra rolls so as to cascade into an exponential explosion of disaster. Haste and double wield and OA everything! Keep rolling d20s to nova misfortune!

Or you could passively counter by playing Halflings, with Great Weapon Style.

Or you could passively build casters that only choose Spell Save spells, not use Spell Attack spells.

Or you could have the nice, friendly chat of: "you've been around a lot of games where Critical Fumbles used the same old overly disastrous results, huh? Let's sit and generate a better Crit Fail table together, one where failure is as temporary as Crit Success."

I kinda want to say not have the talk, because a PC that never has to roll a d20 in combat (read: Clerics) have an enormous advantage. But yeah, we need to have The Talk with him. Have you talked about what sort of degree of failure he wants to pair up with critical hits? Knowing where he's from helps to get him where he needs to go.

Some, if not most of the most memorable combat scenes in RPGs I can remember were the result of well timed fumbles or critical misses. I don't consider any combet system to be complete with this extra layer of excitement provided by the chance of utterly humiliating oneself.
And yes, fumbles should occasionally have a debilitating effect, because that is a very simple and quick way to introduce uncertainty and drama to a fight - a fight should, after all, be a chaotic and often serious situation with high pressure - exactly the environment where people do make stupid mistakes. However, I think it helps to have a simple(!) table of random events for these mistakes to streamline the outcomes, because it adds even more randomness to the putcome while also makes them a bit more predictable. I would recommend doing the same for critical hits intead of just increasing the damage, for mostly the same reasons.

I often use a critical fumble as an opportunity to introduce new environmental or situational complications, sometimes unrelated to the character who messed up. Like "a lamp falls and the barn is now on fire", "the demonic idol begins to flow ominously", "a monster appears" or "wave of lava comes crashing down the hall".

Dungeon World called those GM Moves or Dungeon Moves. Works for me: as another poster (Beagle) suggested, I will pre-write a list of bad events for such occasions.

EDIT: Critical Injuries are awesome, and I'd let a player flip-flop the percentile result at the expenditure of a Fate/Hero/Inspiration point.

Quote from: Beagle;816048Some, if not most of the most memorable combat scenes in RPGs I can remember were the result of well timed fumbles or critical misses.

Unfortunately for me, as the DM, they all seem to happen to my monsters.

Most memorable was the now legendary "Thieves Guild" encounter. PCs walk into a nicely laid trap where the guild is armed with crossbows on the upper floor of an open chamber and firing through arrow slits down on the PCs. I have never rolled so many 1s before, nearly all promptly followed by an accidental hit on a comrade. (Id roll to see where the flubbed shot went.) The adventurers had no idea what was going on as they could not see them. All they heard were eeks and ooks and oops and ows! And an occasional bold actually by some miracle coming their way. They first thought some NPC was up there helping. Several criticals later and the last thief, yep, rolls a 1. Then rolls a 20. Criticals self. Dead. As the players guessed what must be happening they were laughing and laughing.

Thereafter, anytime a group of monsters or NPCs lands a hit on eachother the players joke that they must have trained at "The Thieves Guild"!

In a movie it would look way cooler as the PCs nimbly dodge and weave through a hail of bolts pausing just long enough to trick one thief into lining his crossbow up opposite another thief and pulling the trigger just as the player darts out of the way and lines up the next victim. At the end there should be a dramatic pause before all the thieves fall dead.

I like fumbles. Some of the most entertaining play in Honor+Intrigue occurs when the players have a Calamitous Failure. However Calamitous Failures are parallel the effects of Mighty Successes. Unless the player chooses to make it so, a getting a Calamitous failure of your own is not worse than getting hit by an opponent's Mighty Success.

One Calamitous Failure that the players remember is the assassin who was hunting one of the PCs. The players figured out who the assassin was and they set a trap for him. It went like this...

   The Trap
The party lays a trap for the would-be assassin, Abalardi. They put out the word that Gaston is celebrating his survival at an inn, then set up a dummy with Gaston's hat and clothes that can be seen from the opposite roof. Norbert sits by the dummy and pretends to interact with it to try to make it look real. He barely avoids knocking the dummies head clean off when he companionably slaps 'Gaston' on the back.

Meanwhile Gaston (mostly recovered from his wounds) and Father Signoret hide on the nearby roofs to lie in wait for the assassin. Guy, in disguise as a chimney sweep, keeps watch as well. The three fail to spot Abalardi's arrival only being alerted to his presence by the sound of the inn window breaking . The assassin shoots the pumpkin head off the dummy. Realizing from the falling head that this was a trap, Abalardi instantly flees, but in his hurry he slips on the roof and falls to his death before he can be caught or questioned. Guy, in disguise below, tells the people who rush out of the inn, "This is the assassin! I saw him shooting from the roof. He fell...Looks like he's dead."

The gathering crowd spots a second figure on the roof and points as that figure begins climbing down the side of the building. "Who is that?" "Is it another assassin?" the crowd asks.
Guy scratches at his scraggly beard, "It's a priest. Come to give the Last Rites." The climber is Father Signoret, who indeed begins administering the Last Rites.

Norbert looks for his cousin Gaston as the watch is summoned. Guy and Gaston slip away in the confusion. Meanwhile, Signoret and Norbert are taken into custody by the Paris Archers. Signoret uses his social rank to be released, but Norbert must stay in the jail overnight. Fortunately the Giant has money to pay for a meal and later his cousin Gaston has a second meal sent in to the always hungry Norbert.

Guy and Gaston hurry to Abalardi's apartment and search it. They find letters in Italian from Abalardi's father in Florence. They find money. They find pots, herbs, and other apothecary's apparatus including a book about herbs in Latin. But they find nothing indicating who employed Abalardi.
The really funny part is this is the second assassin who has stumbled while fleeing and fallen off a roof to his death. Apparently the roofs in Paris are slippery in the fall.

You can really tell the difference between those whose formative role-playing years were spent with D&D or Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay by topics like this.

That being said, I am interested to see where this is going.

One of my DMs was excessively fond of RoleMaster and plugged the critical/fumble system into his 2e sessions. It was... messy.

Quote from: ZWEIHÄNDER;816073You can really tell the difference between those whose formative role-playing years were spent with D&D or Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay by topics like this.

That being said, I am interested to see where this is going.

How so?

I started with OD&D and I've never played Warhammer. Which group do I fit into?

Assume an average encounter lasts 3 rounds, and the player gets to roll 6 times (total).

That's a 27% chance of a fumble. If the fumble's effects are long-term, that means in any given fight, there's almost a 1/3 chance of being significantly set back for a long time before you even consider damage.

Assuming roughly 3 encounters in a session, that means you have a 61% chance of getting some long-term impairment or loss per session. Again, not accounting for actual injury.

That's fucking stupid.

Agreed Will.

I use a lingering injury mechanic in 5e of my own design. When one of the bad guys scores a critical, they can (save vs. Con) sustain a long term injury. If they are reduced to 0 HP, they can (save vs. Con) sustain a long term injury. This is all the critical drama I need. Keeps them on their toes, combat is deadly but not adventure-ending, and they don't spend a lot of time looking like clowns. Unless the purposefully make bad decisions. But I leave that to the player's imaginations and choices. Not to a dice roll. :-)

I think players are accustomed to critical hits and would find the use fair for both sides. Critical fumbles just add too much suck to the game to be worth it.

So my answer to the OP: No, they shouldn't.

Yup. Why I added a second roll to see what happened of anything.

I think I'll be talking with the other players on Thursday (making sure we're in agreement, and smoothing out ruffled feathers of one in particular; he and the GM have clashed before), and bring it up early on Sunday (I typically am the first to arrive) to talk with the GM.

I'd like to joke, "If I can lose a 50gp bow on a critical fumble, in fairness, I should receive 50gp out of nowhere as well, just like a video game, with a critical hit..."

But that probably wouldn't go over well...

Another issue:
Having any attack possibly result in long-term problems, weirdly, puts pressure on strategies to minimize it. Like 'I'm going to get in the fight but do nothing but block, because chances are someone else can do more damage and I'm pretty safe from attacks, so I don't risk handicapping MYSELF.'

Quote from: Will;816089Assume an average encounter lasts 3 rounds, and the player gets to roll 6 times (total).

That's a 27% chance of a fumble. If the fumble's effects are long-term, that means in any given fight, there's almost a 1/3 chance of being significantly set back for a long time before you even consider damage.

Assuming roughly 3 encounters in a session, that means you have a 61% chance of getting some long-term impairment or loss per session. Again, not accounting for actual injury.

That's fucking stupid.

Agreed. Which is why, IMO, D&D (and the d20 system as a whole) makes a poor marriage with critical fumble mechanics. Too large of a percentage, compounded with flat die probability results. Unless you don't mind these 'fucking stupid' results.

Contrast that with many d100 systems that use either a 99 or 00 result as a fumble. Or with Gurps, that uses a bell curve and results in fumbles in less than 2% of task rolls. The risk is there, but it's less pronounced than with a d20 system.

Quote from: Will;816108Another issue:
Having any attack possibly result in long-term problems, weirdly, puts pressure on strategies to minimize it.

Oh, no doubt. It will likely result in a serious reevaluation of strategies and tactics used in combat, discouraging 'heroic abandon' and possibly emphasizing avoiding combat situations - when they can be avoided. Or just result in a bunch of maimed and disabled PCs for those that don't reevaluate.

Whether that's an 'issue' or a 'weird' result depends on playstyle, I think.