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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3976156" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.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.  I quite agree that what you've experienced is far too severe.  That would seem to be easily remedied.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.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.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.</blockquote>

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