Monte Cook On Fumble Mechanics

pemerton said:

But Monte Cook's blog is not about whether or not it makes for good design to have systematic ways of injecting complications; or whether or not the players should sometimes not succeed. It is a criticism of one, particular, mechanic: the critical fumble in which a bad roll always results in the character performing incompetently.

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To precise, Monte Cook's blog is about his own system, which is a critical fumble system and is described as such. It is not a fail forward system, as his own discussion makes clear:

"In a combat situation, a GM intrusion can range from the opposing creature gaining an additional chance to attack for a round, to reinforcements for the opposition showing up. It could mean that the character accidentally shoots a friend, or drops her weapon, or slips and falls, but those should be rare. Far more often, it should be some external circumstance that arises, and not something “wrong” that the character did."

The open ended nature of a the GM intrusion system means that you could use it as a fail forward system simply because any time you insert GM fiat, you can do anything, but it would not in my opinion be a very good one. (Which opens up the question not just of what a good fumble system looks like, but also what a good fail forward mechanic looks like.) At the very least though, even if you start using the GM intrusion system to handle fail forward, it would still be in addition a fumble system, as again his own discussion makes clear.

Here's Jonathan Tweet expressing a broadly similar sentiment in his preface to the 20th anniversary edition of Over the Edge:

A simple but powerful improvement you can make to your game is to redefine failure as "things go wrong" instead of "the PC isn't up to the task." Ron Edwards, Luke Crane and other indie RPG designers have championed this idea, and they're exactly right. You can call it "fail forward" or "no whiffing."​

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To be blunt, I'm not sure Ron Edwards has been exactly right about anything. But in any event, it is not an improvement to a game to redefine failure as "things go wrong" instead of "the PC isn't up to the task" if we are to apply that idea universally or to all games*, nor is it in practice anything but a semantic difference in most cases. Things would not have gone wrong if the PC was up to the task is generally a fact of such systems. Moreover, I consider there to be a very big difference between "fail forward" mechanics and "no whiffing" mechanics. I likewise suggest that "fail forward" is best implemented as a scene based system to handle what you might call "scene failure" and not as a task based mechanic for handling "task failure". And in any event, even if you can have a "fail forward" mechanic on task resolution, it's abundantly and undeniably clear that the mechanic in question is not a "fail forward" mechanic but a "fumble" mechanic because GM Insertion DOES NOT occur on mere simple failure, but extra complications are inserted in the event of catastrophic failures. Likewise, the insertion of complications does not imply the story must go on in this system, however much you may want to kludge this into your pet theory. The facts don't fit your case.

You can assert that there is no significant difference between the RM/MERP-style fumble rules and the sort of system that Cook and Tweet (and their predecessors Edwards, Crane, et al) are advocating. But I don't think that would be the experience of many of those who have played both sorts of system.

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I assert that there is a significant difference between RM/MERP style fumble rules and a proper fail forward system, but that the system in question is not a proper fail forward system because it is not meant to address the problems that a fail forward system addresses. Again, if it did, why does it address tasks and not scenes, why is not geared to advancing the story, and why does it only advance the story in the event of catastrophic failure rather than simple failure of the task? "Opposing creature gains an additional chance to attack for the round" is not a fail forward style consequence, so stop acting like it is. You can hammer your square pegs into narrativist jargony round holes all you want according to your usual pattern, but no matter how much you try the mechanic in question is not the same as the one Jonathan Tweet is talking about in the 20th anniversary edition of Over the Edge, nor is it "no whiff", nor is it "fail forward".

All Monte Cook said was simply "catastrophic failure doesn't always have to make the character look inept". Even if I did agree with that, it's mainly his reasoning for getting there that undermines the argument. But in point of fact, catastrophic failure unavoidably makes a character look inept so the whole point is silly. And that's even before I get into the uses and misuses of "Fail Forward", which may well be informing Monte's thinking here, but which is utterly inapplicable to the actual rules system he's talking about.

*Let me just go ahead and prove that statement since I know it will get your britches in a wad:

a) If your task resolution system doesn't allow Han Solo to whiff, then your task resolution system doesn't allow you to recreate the fiction of Star Wars
b) If you can't recreate the fiction of Star Wars with the system, then its not well suited to being a system for a Star Wars inspired RPG.

ExploderWizard said:

Suppose all poker hands held equal ranking?

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It is common in modern fantasy to see supernatural or powerful creatures arise from the aggregate beliefs and actions of many normal humans. Do you wish to see the birth of a new "super" hero: Straw-man? Imagine his power and wrath!

The issue isn't "never fail" as so many have said. The question from the OP is whether, having drawn a poor poker hand, we should also have one of the cards slip from your fingers and gouge out the eye of someone else at the poker table.

pemerton said:

There are any number of ways this sort of event might occur in a RPG, depending on the mechanics of the system. For instance, maybe the player took a bonus die in return for staking a more severe failure.

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Side note. I consider "ante up" mechanics like that to be quite functional and elegant in certain systems, but that is not what he happening here. This is a GM insertion, not an opportunity for the player to narrate the stakes. This is not "fortune at the beginning". Again, I don't necessarily object to those mechanics depending on whether they fit what the system is trying to achieve in its gameplay. Indeed, if you want to have something like a "no whiff" mechanic, doing it in the context of an "ante up" system makes a lot of sense - the player can then choose when it is dramatically appropriate to fail (or at least risk failure) and otherwise never "whiff".

But you can't take my acceptance of a wholly different mechanic occurring in a wholly different game as evidence that this particular mechanic fits in to the narrow hole you try to hammer ever single system that you like regardless of its actual features.

Maxperson said:

Except when they do. Read some books. High fantasy heroes who save the world, rescue the sexy prince, and conquer the world do sometimes slip in blood, have weapons break, say the wrong thing, and so on.

If you don't want to play that way, you don't have to. Don't try to tell me that they "don't" fumble, though, because they do.

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I missed where Luke slipped and fell in a fight with random mooks. In fact, I'm kinda missing where the hero's weapon breaks in any situation other than a specific high tension one. Han fails to open the doors to the Power Generator and the blast doors fall. This has exactly zero consequence because two seconds later Chewie shows up to open the doors.

The problem with Fumble Mechanics in D&D is that they obviously disfavor the players. That's the long and the short of it. It doesn't matter how often the baddies roll fumbles because the DM has unlimited numbers of baddies. The baddies are supposed to fail. It's pretty rare to set up a scenario where the baddies are supposed to succeed because, typically, that means a TPK for the group and that's generally a bad thing. Even arguments about the number of die rolls miss the point. Sure, a PC might have more die rolls than any given monster, but, there's usually more monsters than PC's and, in the long run, since I have infinite monsters as the DM, I don't care if the baddies fumble. In the long run, fumble mechanics only hurt the PC's.

The 3e crit rules suffer from the same issue. Sure, everyone has the same chances of critting but, the results of those crits are different. I have infinite monsters that are supposed to die. That you kill them in 2 rounds instead of 3 doesn't really matter. But, killing your PC with a random die roll is pretty much guaranteed in the long run. All I've done is make the monsters stronger.

5e with its much less powerful crits removes the swinginess of crits. Adding in some sort of fumble doesn't add tension, it just penalizes the PC's for no good reason.

Umbran said:

The issue isn't "never fail" as so many have said. The question from the OP is whether, having drawn a poor poker hand, we should also have one of the cards slip from your fingers and gouge out the eye of someone else at the poker table.

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If that is the question, neither the essay nor the system it is describing gives us the answer.

If that is indeed the question, to the OP I would say, "Well, are you playing the Itchy and Scratchy RPG, and do you find that scene funny?"

But I was of the opinion that the question was, "What are your thoughts on fumble mechanics?"

The short version would probably be, "They are mostly unnecessary, as simple failure will create risks of catastrophic failure all on its own without any need to rig the system. However, you may want to define specific scenarios in which they occur where introducing them reduces tedium and increases the ability to imagine the scene less abstractly, and then provide some guidelines for handling those specific cases. Examples might be things like catastrophic spell failure, or the rare disastrous attack action. The extent to which things can horribly go wrong and the ways they go wrong will influence the atmosphere of your game. So for example, really gruesome and significant catastrophic spell failures might well be appropriate for a horror based occult investigators game, but probably wouldn't be all that appropriate very often for heroic fantasy. Silly, ridiculous results of combat actions might be appropriate for a slapstick comedy game, but not for a game of action heroes. Fumbles should be used judiciously to avoid bogging down play and becoming a distraction in their own right, and care should be made to make sure the consequences of failure aren't so extreme or unpredictable that players are rewarded for never testing actions at all or otherwise encouraged to evade the system."

Shouldn't the title be, "Monte says a 1 is not ALWAYS a fumble"? He doesn't rule them out entirely and this is a little misleading.

I love crit fumble charts as much as the next person, but I also think there are times when an even more obvious situation could arise (that won't be on the charts). For eg recently playing "Slave Pits of the Undercity" with fight above the cages. Obvious fumble there was falling into a cage.

I have also been playing Cypher for some time and have adopted the GM Intrusion rule. I really like it. Sometimes things come to you easily, sometimes I refer to the ideas given in the core books (for all creatures and PC focuses), and now and then I will still pull out my Fumble Charts and just roll. This system has just opened up more options for us and that has been good for our games.

I suggest people read a little further into the article (and the Cypher system) before lambasting "Monte's" view on fumbles.

Maxperson said:

Except when they do. Read some books. High fantasy heroes who save the world, rescue the sexy prince, and conquer the world do sometimes slip in blood, have weapons break, say the wrong thing, and so on.

If you don't want to play that way, you don't have to. Don't try to tell me that they "don't" fumble, though, because they do.

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provide quotes my good man, or off ye go.
Did Gandalf accidentally dropped his staff at the bridge of Kazad Dhum? Did Aragorn fumbled and dropped Narsil? Bah to the lot of ye and your silly fumble charts, I will take the heroic road.

chibi graz'zt wrote: Did Aragorn fumbled and dropped Narsil?

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Um, obviously 'someone' rolled a 1 when using Narsil

pemerton said:

In contrast, every edition of Rolemaster (and its spin-offs like MERP and HARP) has had a critical fumble rule as part of its core system - does that mean that D&D players are cry-baby namby-pamby types, and only Rolemaster players are real RPGers?

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In those dark, early days of RPGing. There were tribe of gamers who did indeed insist on a rite of passage that was to symbolically lose a PC's limb or eye to a Rolemaster crit fumble table.

Those days, we held our d20's high to light the way down darkened dormitory hallways and student apartment lairs.

Von Ether said:

In those dark, early days of RPGing. There were tribe of gamers who did indeed insist a rite of passage was to symbolically lose a PC's limb or eye to a Rolemaster crit fumble table.

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Sure (and I've been there, back in the day) - but no one would say it now with a straight face, would they! Except some posters in this thread?