D&D 5E How fantastic are natural 1's?

[Don Durito]

I have a hard time imagining what would make for good fumble rules.

Well other than using them, not as a regular element of play, but as something that happens as a way of emphasising unusual conditions - such as extreme exhaustion for example - or perhaps the effects of a lingering injury.

Edit: I guess the best way to use fumbles would be to put what exactly happens in the hands of the player.

You rolled a 1, narrate the bad circumstance that happens. Very quickly you'll then see how into fumbles the players really are.

 

[Oofta]

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.

Right. So I can use statistics to come up with whatever answer I want.

But I don't care about the odds of fumbling on any particular turn, I care how frequently my PC is going to fumble over the course of several turns and encounters. If I make 1000 attacks, 50 of them will on average be fumbles. That may take many, many turns but it doesn't change how many fumbles I will end up with over time. I understand that the odds of fumbling on any particular turn will be less than 20% (although your analysis doesn't seem to account for multiple 1s on a single turn, I wouldn't be surprised if I was wrong).

Or maybe you'll just have to accept that I don't view the world through the lense of statistical analysis.

 

[Charlaquin]

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.

You’re probably not that far off. Lots of people have very visceral negative reactions to certain house rules or rulings, which can frequently be traced back to one or more negative experiences they’ve had with DMs using such rules. Trauma is maybe an overstatement, but the basic relationship between a negative experience and an aversion to things which recall that experience is similar.

 

[Charlaquin]

You know, it’s interesting that despite natural 1s not doing anything special by RAW, the halfling Lucky feature lets you reroll natural 1s specifically. It’s almost like the designers recognized that, even in the absence of any fumble rules, a lot of DMs will still tend to make the results of natural 1s worse than ordinary failures.

 

[Charlaquin]

I have a hard time imagining what would make for good fumble rules.

Well other than using them, not as a regular element of play, but as something that happens as a way of emphasising unusual conditions - such as extreme exhaustion for example - or perhaps the effects of a lingering injury.

Yeah, Incan certainly imagine less bad fumble rules. But even at their “best” I find fumble rules to be an annoying but mostly inoffensive inconvenience.

 

[Garthanos]

I have a hard time imagining what would make for good fumble rules.

Well other than using them, not as a regular element of play, but as something that happens as a way of emphasising unusual conditions - such as extreme exhaustion for example - or perhaps the effects of a lingering injury.

Edit: I guess the best way to use fumbles would be to put what exactly happens in the hands of the player.

You rolled a 1, narrate the bad circumstance that happens. Very quickly you'll then see how into fumbles the players really are.

What if fumbles only occured on the first (or last roll of one subject to them turn)
What if fumbles were an effect created by a heroic or villainously intimidating adversaries presence.
IE a level limited effect perhaps on subjects in the the Apex Predators presence; The effect would be a fear based one.

 

[Oofta]

You’re probably not that far off. Lots of people have very visceral negative reactions to certain house rules or rulings, which can frequently be traced back to one or more negative experiences they’ve had with DMs using such rules. Trauma is maybe an overstatement, but the basic relationship between a negative experience and an aversion to things which recall that experience is similar.

You mean like this one? Where fumbling can be anything from falling down to being stunned or frightened for the rest of the encounter? Automatically hit yourself? Har-de-har-har, it was so funny when Bob the fighter rolled a 1 (again) and shattered their new flame tongue. Hoo boy.

Maybe this one? At least it includes things for ranged attackers. Along with the ever-favorite hit an ally you can pull a muscle and have disadvantage on attacks and checks until you've had 3 full rests. Along with the ever-favorite breaking your weapon for melee fighters of course.

Of course there's this one where you can fall over and knock yourself unconscious for a minute.

Different strokes for different folks and all, but the first 3 results from a google search are, IMHO universally awful. YMMV.

 

[Don Durito]

What if fumbles only occured on the first (or last roll of one subject to them turn)

Is it worth the bother of keeping track of that? That just sounds overly fiddly. In any case it still penalises people who actually make attack rolls. (Rather than forcing opponents to make saving throws).

What if fumbles were an effect created by a heroic or villainously intimidating adversaries presence.
IE a level limited effect perhaps on subjects in the the Apex Predators presence; The effect would be a fear based one.

You could do that. But 13th Age has a few things which create auras and the like with highly conditional effects. From my experience, I'm not convinced it's a good approach, because a lot of the time they do nothing.

But I guess I would ask, what, in general, are we trying to actually accomplish with Fumbles?

 

[DND_Reborn]

In reality... I rolled four of them on Saturday.

FWIW, if you rolled 29 times or more (likely IME in a session), getting 4 nat 1's is not significant statistically. It is pretty bad luck, obviously, but could easily happen just due to random chance.

Once, in 3E, we used "exploding" criticals and I rolled 7 nat 20's in a row. So, strange things happen once in a while.

 

[Charlaquin]

You mean like this one? Where fumbling can be anything from falling down to being stunned or frightened for the rest of the encounter? Automatically hit yourself? Har-de-har-har, it was so funny when Bob the fighter rolled a 1 (again) and shattered their new flame tongue. Hoo boy.

Maybe this one? At least it includes things for ranged attackers. Along with the ever-favorite hit an ally you can pull a muscle and have disadvantage on attacks and checks until you've had 3 full rests. Along with the ever-favorite breaking your weapon for melee fighters of course.

Of course there's this one where you can fall over and knock yourself unconscious for a minute.

Different strokes for different folks and all, but the first 3 results from a google search are, IMHO universally awful. YMMV.

Hey, I’m with you, I despise fumble rules. Just saying, it is one of those sorts of rules that people tend to get soured on by experiences where GMs use them poorly. (Of course, I’m of the opinion that even at their “best” fumble rules are an annoying inconvenience.)