Explain the appeal of critical fumbles to me

[Kahuna Burger]

Not a critical fumble person here either. As others have pointed out, the balance argument isn't compelling because crits are balanced already by enemy crits. Additionally, unless you are using special houserules for crits, there isn't that reasonable a comparison. If your crits can cause your enemy to be automaticly disarmed with no opposed check, tripped in the same way or sunder his weapon regardless of hardness (or magicly heal you the amount of your weapon damage), the critical misses are balanced. Otherwise, doing the thing you are trying to do very well is not balanced by failing at what you are trying to do and having a disaster on top of it.

And unless it's a very unusual game, I don't like slapstick comedy in my combat.

 

[Celebrim]

It seems to me that many of the opponents of critical fumbles are actually opponents of badly designed rules. I can perfectly sympathize with that, I hate badly designed rules too, but the fact that they've faced a particular implementation of critical fumbles that had obvious problems doesn't invalidate the entire concept. There are badly designed game resolution systems of all sorts, but that doesn't invalidate RPGs.

To pick on one particular poster among many.

1) They are far too frequent. I have fired hundreds of bullets and hundreds of arrows and never once broken a bowstring, jammed a rifle, or shot myself. Perhaps at 12 years old I was just that incredibly skilled?

No, the quality of your equipment was just that good. No doubt all the equipment you used was high quality modern equipment being used according to the manufactures intentions? No surprise then that modern materials held up under minimal stress. A decent fumble resolution system that includes 'weapon breaks' as a possible result is going to give the weapon some 'say' (based on it quality and the durability of whatever it is made of) in whether it actually breaks rather than it being a fiat event.

Besides, if your experience firing hundreds of bullets wasn't from a practice range or a deer stand and you'd never had a gun jam or misfire, I'd be inclined to disbelieve you based on how often it occurs according to surveys of serving soldiers/historical records. Incidently, this turns out to be the second point 'too severe' stated another way.

2) They are far too severe. Weapons break WAY too easily on most fumble charts I've seen, compared to how hard they are to break with attacks.

I quite agree that what you've experienced is far too severe. That would seem to be easily remedied.

3) At mid-to-high levels, the auto-miss on a 1 is ALREADY significant. In many cases, the only way the fighter can miss is if he screws up. Oh look, he rolled a 1 and missed. Guess he screwed up. No need to make him look stupid on top of that.

That's an interesting theory. I'm not sure it has literary merit, but I quite agree that some people can't bear looking stupid.

4) They make the characters look pathetic and incompetent. In my mind, a level-1 fighter is still a "veteran" as in BD&D -- a trained soldier. The only morons who hit themselves with their own weapons in a cinematic scene are the frickin' Ewoks in RotJ. I don't want to play an Ewok.

And the only soldiers that suffer friendly fire...? I've wielded practice weapons enough to be glad that they aren't razor sharp, but that is beside the point. Mass combat arguably is[/is] ~5% of the combatants hurting themselves and thier allies. Take a look at football injuries. Take a look at the causes of causalties in warfare. But the heart of this complaint is simply 'too severe' all over again.

5) Being disarmed or having your weapon broken should more often be the results of actions than accidents. Stick these on the fumble chart and you make Disarm and Sunder basically useless. Just go full defense and sooner or later your enemy will disarm himself.

That is another interesting theory. It rather conflicts with the first theory, but its still interesting. Other than the fact that I find the notion that combatants only miss on a one conflicts somewhat with the notion that you can go on full defence for the win, the big problem with this complaint is that it could be made against reality too. Much of a heavyweight boxing match consists of the two fighters waiting for the other one to fumble badly enough that they can attempt a knockout punch. Why shouldn't this be a reasonable strategy in D&D as wel?

The thing is that I agree with BM and everyone making similar complaints to this extent: most of the critical hit and fumble rules I've seen are very badly done. In fact, the out and out best of the published ones was the original 'good hits and bad misses' rules, and even it had some serious problems ('critical hit self' comes to mind). It's just that the ones after that have been for the most part worse, usually because they were attempting to simplify something without understanding why the complexity was needed (chiefly, to avoid punishing higher skill fighters and to make sure that criticals and fumbles were suitably rare). On this, 90% of all players have only themselves to blame, since 90% of the critical hit/fumble resolution systems I've seen are house rules.

 

[Delta]

D&D combat tends toward the repeatitive unless you have a DM that really works to keep it otherwise. Much like critical hits, critical fumbles make for good stories. They cause unexpected things to occur in the middle of what might otherwise be simple arithmatic...

Never used critical fumbles, but this post was the most compelling argument for them I've ever seen. Made me actually want to try them some time, which I've never felt before. Well put!

 

[JiffyPopTart]

Besides, if your experience firing hundreds of bullets wasn't from a practice range or a deer stand and you'd never had a gun jam or misfire, I'd be inclined to disbelieve you based on how often it occurs according to surveys of serving soldiers/historical records. Incidently, this turns out to be the second point 'too severe' stated another way.

You know....a gun misfire is perfectly explained by the following (all too common) scene that plays out in almost every game.

Player: I have a +89 to hit with my pistol
GM: OK, well thats pretty good, just don't roll a 1
Player: *rolls a 1*
Player: AAARGH.

There you go, you can simulate one out of every 20 bullets fired by a gun as being a dud WITHOUT a critical miss chart.

DS

 

[Henry]

I have never seen a critical fumble table that required that the PC be under attack. All that is required is that the PC be attacking a target.

Now those are some harsh DMs. In our experiences, crit fumbles were only used in combat, never in archery practice or fencing practice. I used to use one system which used a percentile table:

26 and higher: no effect other than a miss
01-02: damage to self (normal weapon damage) plus weapon breakage (save for magic weapons)
03-04: damage to self, damage to tip of weapon (some effect)
05-10: damage to weapon (haft or bottom area)
etc. etc.

We got it from some Dragon magazine, I can't recall where.

On to business...

DMs (and players) who like critical fumbles, what's the appeal? What type of games are you looking for in your games? This is obviously a mismatch of expectations here, so I'm wondering what my expectations should be.

Why do I like critical fumbles?

1: They introduce variety in combat. Just like we laugh when Indy lost his gun and has to fist-fight the cultist, or a fighter in a movie has his sword break and has to improvise, they introduce a bit of chaos into a regimented round-by-round combat, and change things up a bit.

2: They emphasize that combat is not always the first and best option. You could put down the enemy with a crit hit and get lucky, but you could also break your greataxe and have to fix the damn thing. Think before you fire the first salvo.

3: They introduce a reason to buy a new weapon other than, "my +1 is old and I can afford a +2 now." People bring up how unfun this is when using legacy weapons and the like, but legacy weapons isn't he only way to go in D&D; further, Narsil in Lord of the Rings is the epitome of a "Legacy Weapon", and even it was broken and reforged.

4:They're just plain fun! This last one is bit spurious, I know.

 

[Henry]

GM: OK, well thats pretty good, just don't roll a 1
Player: *rolls a 1*
Player: AAARGH.

We used to have one player in our group who got FURIOUS with you if you did that before he rolled. Really superstitious guy.

 

[Slander]

We've gone through a couple variations of crit fumble rules. Most either over-penalized the experienced characters (more attacks = more chances of it happening), or were more of a hassle to resolve than crit hits.

Sticking w/ the idea that HP are more than physical endurance, we've settled on our current method. A natural 1 triggers a BAB check vs DC 12. Success, nothing happens; fail and the attacked enemy regains 3 x Opponent's HD in hit points. Once characters get into the mid-to-high levels, crit failures just don't occur anymore 'cause they are that good.

We initially tried to justify it as an "opponent's surge of confidence", but at this point we just accept it for what it is: a game mechanic to penalize bad luck.

 

[Zurai]

It seems to me that "I always miss on a 1" is NOT the statistical opposite of "I always hit on a 20, and sometimes I do extra damage as well."

Maybe a math person can jump in here and explain (in layman's terms, of course, since I'm not a math person).

Actually, it is. Simple explanation: assume that the to-hit bonus is high enough to only miss on an auto-miss, and the damage is fixed at 1 damage per hit. You can construct a results chart that goes as follows:

roll	hit?	damage
1	N	0
2	Y	1
3	Y	1
4	Y	1
5	Y	1
6	Y	1
7	Y	1
8	Y	1
9	Y	1
10	Y	1
11	Y	1
12	Y	1
13	Y	1
14	Y	1
15	Y	1
16	Y	1
17	Y	1
18	Y	1
19	Y	1
20	Crit	2

Average Damage: 1.0000

Now, do the same chart with no auto-misses or crits:

roll	hit?	damage
1	Y	1
2	Y	1
3	Y	1
4	Y	1
5	Y	1
6	Y	1
7	Y	1
8	Y	1
9	Y	1
10	Y	1
11	Y	1
12	Y	1
13	Y	1
14	Y	1
15	Y	1
16	Y	1
17	Y	1
18	Y	1
19	Y	1
20	Y	1

Average Damage: 1.0000

In both cases, the average damage is the same.

Actually, if anything, "Always miss on a 1" is stronger than "Always hit and sometimes crit on a 20".

 

[Aus_Snow]

Oh, yeah. Regarding spellcasting, and other non-weapon-using occasions: yes, my rules - threat ranges, confirmation rolls and all - apply there too. Just for the record and all. I don't particularly care if people simply don't like Critical Fumbles and the like, but I may as well dispel some of the more common complaints, on my own behalf at least.


Just a note of interest (to me ) - Paizo is selling their Critical Fumble Deck soon, following their (presumably successful) Critical Hit Deck. If it's anything like the latter, which no doubt it will be, it'll be awesome.

Anyway, the point there is that Paizo (at least) must be pretty sure that lots of gamers like the idea.

 

[Kahuna Burger]

Originally Posted by Brother MacLaren
I have never seen a critical fumble table that required that the PC be under attack. All that is required is that the PC be attacking a target.

Now those are some harsh DMs. In our experiences, crit fumbles were only used in combat, never in archery practice or fencing practice.

I think you missed the actual distinction. An archer firing from unassailable high ground on melee only troops is definitely in combat, but not under attack. The person Brother Mac was responding to implied that weapon experience was irrelevant unless someone was "trying to kill you" in determining how likely it was for a traumatic weapon failure to occur. If your bow string breaks because someone is trying to kill you, that someone did a sunder on your bowstring. The idea that a competent archer would just randomly accidentally rip his weapon apart by his own action is what critical misses of that type have to explain, unless you only critically fumble when threatened by an opponent.

Which leads me to echo a prior poster who liked the idea of a critical fumble provoking an AoO. Maybe they'll use it to attempt a sunder. Of the systems I've heard of that (along with the "only on the first attack" idea to prevent them from hosing twf over charge monkeys) is the only one I would be interested in playing under.