AbdulAlhazred
Legend
This is where I think @Maxperson has some assumption in mind as to what an implementation would look like, but isn't articulating it because it hasn't occurred to him that there are other implementations possible in different modes of RPGing.
I'm assuming he's thinking of some form of "critical failure" which imposes a penalty to hit and/or damage. How it would work in a non-D&D system I assume simply hasn't been thought about.
That it could be introduced into the fiction without any mechancial change (as @hawkeyefan suggested; and as you and I have both suggested by narrating a "miss" as the result of a dulled edge) seems not to have been thought about either.
That there is a difference between introducing a new mechancial subsystem and making something a part of the fiction also doesn't seem to have been thought about. I attribute this to the making of assumptions about how RPG systems must be.
I certainly have come (LONG before this thread TBH) that Max only focuses on and really has only internalized one very specific methodology of play. All discussion seems to be filtered through the lens of this one way of playing, and every commentary on play seems to be predicated on this specific game being some sort of universal baseline which need not even be referenced and is just understood to be the only relevant method of play, and one which everyone is automatically completely familiar with and which they are inherently referencing unless some explicit statement conflicts with it (at which point said statement and anything inferred from it must be 'wrong').
I find amusing, and then sometimes mildly irritating. Always I am puzzled. It is almost as if one stumbled upon someone living in the middle of Manhattan who has no idea what lies more than 2 blocks in any direction and refers to his surroundings as if they were the whole of the Earth!