Which you're free to do, but you'd be wrong. I played with plenty of people who don't like fumble rules, but the feeling I'm getting from the posts here (and not just yours, but the aggregate) is that the people who are opposed to fumble rules have such strong feelings that I suspect some sort of mild trauma. I can't point to any single statement, it's just the overall feeling I have. I might be reading too much into the posts and would probably be better able to interpret people's feeling and reactions with the presence of non-verbal cues but the strong feelings I'm picking up on (maybe erroneously) make me wonder what kind of fumble rules people are using out there.
D&D 5E How fantastic are natural 1's?
- Thread starter rgoodbb
- Start date
Ancalagon
Dusty Dragon
I have played in such a game. My PC is a "high # of attacks per round" type of combatant. His BAB is also a bit lower. The fumbles are a huge impediment, as they affect me more than the other characters.
As both logic indicates and experience demonstrates, fumbles penalizes characters with multi attacks, in particular the monks and fighters.
Last edited:
Fixed your statement for you in bold.
We've had people relay stories about a fumble reducing someone to 1 HP from full. That, IMHO, is pretty horrendous. Fumble rules I've seen usually end the attacker's action, cause them to go prone, drop their weapon, break their weapon (even magical ones), automatically hit themselves or an ally to name a few. All "hilarious" penalties for playing a fighter.
A big issue as well is just the interruption of game flow. As DM if I or the player want to throw in some fun flavor text when things don't go as planned we do. I value free-flowing interactive descriptive play over rules that f*** over fighters far more than anyone else.
If people have ideas, suggestions and so on for how to run fun combat, I'm all for it. But I'll still hate fumble rules, or any rule that affects one build far more than any other.
Wow. Love how you accuse me of claiming I know what other people are thinking and then claim to know what I'm thinking.
Mod Note:
Arguments of the form, "Your disagreement indicates to me that you have some form of cognitive dysfunction*," are deeply insulting. It is common to try to tear down the person who is speaking against your point, but around here that tactic isn't acceptable.
*Also known as, "To disagree with me you must be crazy/stupid/etc".
I'm not trying to say that those who oppose fumble rules are crazy. I'm saying that the level of opposition I'm seeing makes me think they have been exposed to really bad fumble rules. I've seen systems out there before that are horrible. I don't think it's fair to lump all fumble systems into the same category. When I experienced really bad fumble systems I had already experienced good fumble systems, so I wasn't traumatized (and I'm using that term here as hyperbole; I hope no one thinks I'm implying a bad TTRP experience is the same thing as actual PTSD or the like) by them. A few of the examples people have related sound like really bad fumble rules.
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
No, because you're making the incorrect assumption that the fumbles would be evenly spread out. It's a similar mistake to the first one you made earlier in the thread and, to be perfectly fair, an incredibly easy one to make. Thinking about probability can be a challenge because it's not immediately intuitive at all.
So, what you've done here is used a sample of 400 trial with a 5% chance each for the event of interest. This does average out to 20 events over the trial. The problem comes when you use this answer for a different question, which is instead what is the probability at least one event of interest will occur in just 4 trials. This is not the same question as what is the average expected number of events over a larger sample. In fact, the probability you will have 20 fumbles exactly in 400 trials is just above 9%. The 95% margins, ie, where you'd expect 95% of all 400 trail samples to end, is between 13 events and 27 events. There's a 1% chance you have as few as 9 events or as many as 36 events. This all averages to 20 events, and statistics would build a model were you ran this over an infinite number of trials and get 20% as you answer, but that's not what the real world outputs.
So, why, again, is the odds of rolling a fumble in 4 attacks NOT 20%? To understand, you need to look at how it could work, and figure the probabilities for those.
First case is that you have no fumbles -- pretty easy. Then just one fumble in four, but you have to consider that fumble could occur in four places, and each is it's own probability. Then 2 fumbles, which can happen 6 different ways. Then three fumbles which can happen only four ways, then all fumbles, which can happen only 1 way. Each of these is it's own probability, and it found by multiplying the die probabilities for each position. Then you can sum the results. Here it is in a perhaps easier to follow chart, using 95 for not a fumble and 5 for a fumble:
| 1st Attack | 2nd Attack | 3rd Attack | 4th Attack | Combined Probability |
| 95 | 95 | 95 | 95 | 81.45% |
| 5 | 95 | 95 | 95 | 4.2869% |
| 95 | 5 | 95 | 95 | 4.2869% |
| 95 | 95 | 5 | 95 | 4.2869% |
| 95 | 95 | 95 | 5 | 4.2869% |
| 5 | 5 | 95 | 95 | 0.2256% |
| 5 | 95 | 5 | 95 | 0.2256% |
| 5 | 95 | 95 | 5 | 0.2256% |
| 95 | 5 | 5 | 95 | 0.2256% |
| 95 | 5 | 95 | 5 | 0.2256% |
| 95 | 95 | 5 | 5 | 0.2256% |
| 5 | 5 | 5 | 95 | 0.00119% |
| 5 | 5 | 95 | 5 | 0.00119% |
| 5 | 95 | 5 | 5 | 0.00119% |
| 95 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 0.00119% |
| 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 0.0000625% |
Now, if we don't count the first line (because no fumbles), then the probability of getting at least one fumble in 4 attacks is the sum of the others, or 18.55%. That's close to 20%, which makes some sense, but isn't, and even if you run 100 trials of 4 events each it won't change per event. This is because you're asking a different question from "what's the average expected number of fumbles in 400 rolls" to "what's the expects average chance of a fumble in 4 tries". The iteration doesn't matter to the second question -- it's always going to be 18.55% no matter how many times you do it, because you're asking a different question than the first one.
Probability is extremely sensitive to what question is being asked. Most people don't have the exposure to recognize this, and so think they're asking one question when the probability is answering a different one. Statistics is the same way (related, but not the same things). Both tend to hide assumptions, and those assumptions are critical to the answer received. Make sure that you understand what question you're asking and what the model assumptions of the tool your using (for stats) are or you will get an answer, but it might not be to the question you thought you were asking. This is the reason there are so many quotes about statistics being a used to lie in plain sight. Probability, on the other hand, is pretty clean, once you understand how to ask the questions.
Because you seem honestly confused, let me try one last time. I have had DMs that had horrendous crit and fumble rules. I stopped playing with them.
But even when I tried implementing my own watered down version it was just extra overhead. Several posters have explained why, pretty much it boils down to the fact that it affects fighters far more than any other class with monks coming in a close second. It has the added detriment of slowing down and interrupting the flow of play. I've never seen a fumble chart worth the cost.
Either fumble rules add some artificial penalty on top of missing or they don't. If they do you're penalizing fighters while many casters get off scott free. If they don't add some artificial penalty then they're not worth it. If there's some confirmation roll to balance it out, many caster types still get off scott free and fighter's turns get interrupted by extra overhead.
I don't need fumble rules to have streamlined interactive combats with myself or my players giving fun and evocative descriptions of critical hits and misses. It's not necessarily something that comes naturally, but it is something I encourage with my players and work on myself. No extra charts needed, just imagination.
Similar Threads
