Monte Cook On Fumble Mechanics

Fumble mechanics have been part of the tabletop RPG experience for decades. Even where games don't have a fumble mechanic, many players house rule them in. A fumble is the opposite of a critical hit (or critical success) - its most common manifestation is a roll of 1 in a d20-based game (with a roll of 20 being the critical). Veteran game designer Monte Cook has some thoughts on fumble mechanics, and talks about them and how his Numenera RPG (and all of the Cypher System line) use an "intrusion" instead.

​

It can be a divisive issue. If you're like me, you've experimented with fumble mechanics of various kinds over the years. When I was 12, I remember one character accidentally shooting a fellow character in the back of the head and killing him. Monte Cook's thoughts on the matter are that "we don’t want to run games that “punish” players for rolling bad. A GM intrusion isn’t meant to be “punishment”—it’s meant to make things more interesting. But a fumble, for many people, just seems like a moment for everyone to laugh at them, and that’s not always fun."

If you look around, you'll find dozens of fumble house rules for most games. They clearly provide a draw to those who like to tinker with their games. But many games deliberately do not include any such rule.

You can read the rest of Monte's article here. What are your thoughts on fumble mechanics?

 

[Celebrim]

This is nothing more than the fallacy of the excluded middle.

First of all, now I'm getting the feeling we aren't talking about the Cypher System.

And secondly, where do you get the fallacy of the excluded middle out of this? I'm talking about how the Cypher System actually works. In point of fact, since the Cypher System allows for GM intrusion, it's actually the Cypher System (and not me) that is advocating that any and all randomness is available as a result of any and all stakes. I for one would never design a system that relied on DM fiat for process resolution in such a high percentage of situations. That isn't to say that I think you are wrong for liking such a system, just that I find it rather amusing when Monte both rues and denies (at the same time!) the consequences of a system he himself designed.

In contrast to your rant about the 'excluded middle', if you look at what I said whether in context or cut out in your little snippet, nothing about what I said had anything to do with extremes. What I said was intended to hold true even in cases of simple failure and success without any references to 'critical hits and bad misses' at all. I'm not appealing to the edge cases at all.

And the shorter the game the more randomness is a nice rather than an overwhelming spice. There were a lot of reasons Gygax did not include critical hits or critical fumbles. On the other hand the Firefly RPG has a lot of fumbles built into the system - and is amazing fun for a two or three session game but I couldn't take a campaign of it.

Ok, sure. I agree with all of that. What the heck does it have to do with this discussion?

Fallacy of the excluded middle again. If we are playing a challenge based game should player skill be a factor at all? If what we are setting out to do is reward players for rolling well, why have character sheets at all? Why not just say "The higher you roll the better you do"?

Where are you getting any of that?

What we want is a game with some reward for rolling well and penalty for rolling badly. But we clearly don't want one where how you roll is the dominant factor in how well you do. This is why D&D as written by Gygax and Arneson had just the pass/fail metric. Because luck should matter but not be overwhelming.

I'm at a loss to know who you are having a discussion with here. What part of that do you think I disagree with?

And because the naive "Nat 1 fumbles" means that the fighter fumbles more often than the wizard.

Again, are we discussing the Cypher System or not? Fighters and wizards having radically different mechanics and wizards not needing to make a fortune roll to cast spells is a D&Dism.

And some days and with some groups I'm in the mood for Chess, which has precisely no luck. Others I'm in the mood for Cards Against Humanity which is approximately 90% luck (seriously, the blind draw wins ridiculously often). Why do you think that this is inherently wrong?

I have no idea what you are talking about. And I know you have no idea what I'm talking about.

 

[Umbran]

IMO, success and failure are equally fun to role play.

The issue under discussion in the original piece isn't generic failure. It is spectacular, disastrous failure, the archetype being a result imposed such that the player doesn't have any way to mitigate the impact. Not just, "I fail to hit the orc," but, "in failing to hit the orc, I accidentally chop my teammate's leg off."

 

[RafaelLVX]

The mechanic he describes is interesting.

But the rational: oh, poor baby roll a 1...I mean why roll dice at all, just win everything always, that would be a good game.

Agreed. In fact the underlying rationale mentioned (that the player could feel bad for the fumble) almost made me discard the article outright.

Interestingly, although in my group we love the laughs from fumble or critical misses, I ended up finding this article very useful. Several game situations just couldn't go that wrong, as expected in a fumble, a "natural 1" (or the equivalent in other systems). Just yesterday playing Old Dragon, I fumbled an easy bow and arrow shot against an immobile piece of furniture, and all other characters were behind me, but because of a second dice roll, the DM ruled that somehow I managed to hit one of them. What a stretch. That comes from the fact that fumble results table told the DM *I* had to hit some other character. But using the intrusion mechanics, the DM could have gone on with the same outcome, only coming up with a more plausible bad-luck fumble where my shot ended up moving an engine from a trap (that was really there the whole time by the way) that hurt one of the characters behind me. Yes I rolled the 1, no not always I need to cause the damage, yes the damage must happen, but if it's implausible, the DM can always intervene with an almost divine display of my bad luck.

I know my example wasn't ideal, just recollecting a situation from a real game here.

I won't use the intrusion mechanics every time (I favor character-caused fumbles), but I'll definitely have that in mind for when nothing could wrong with a character's plan... unless something else was coming and nobody knew.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Many people have claimed that critical success and critical failure are two sides of the same coin, and to accept one must be to accept the other, but it occurs to me that the opposite would make more sense. If you're good enough at something that you might do something super amazing, then that should also means that you're so good that you will never accidentally kill your teammate by failing so hard.

In practice, this is something like how the skill system works in D&D (moreso in 3.x and 4E than in 5E). If you're at +11 on the check, then you might occasionally succeed at a DC 30 stunt, but you'll never fail something that's DC 12 or lower. If you're at -1 to the check, then you could sometimes fail to hit DC 0, but you'll never accomplish anything that's DC 20 or higher.

And extending that out to combat, every PC is both talented and skilled in the usage of one or more weapons (to various degrees, and barring extreme corner cases). Given that, it would make more sense that they could sometimes critically hit and never fumble (where a weak commoner might sometimes fumble but never critically hit).

 

[Celebrim]

Just yesterday playing Old Dragon, I fumbled an easy bow and arrow shot against an immobile piece of furniture, and all other characters were behind me, but because of a second dice roll, the DM ruled that somehow I managed to hit one of them. What a stretch. That comes from the fact that fumble results table told the DM *I* had to hit some other character. But using the intrusion mechanics, the DM could have gone on with the same outcome, only coming up with a more plausible bad-luck fumble where my shot ended up moving an engine from a trap (that was really there the whole time by the way) that hurt one of the characters behind me. Yes I rolled the 1, no not always I need to cause the damage, yes the damage must happen, but if it's implausible, the DM can always intervene with an almost divine display of my bad luck.

First of all, everything is always up to GM judgment. A GM should never let a ridiculous result stand just because rules. I would like to think that GMs don't need to be especially empowered to do that or to at least reroll ridiculous results.

But more to the point, the result you achieved is a result of the naive simplicity and frankly poor design of the old 'Good Hits and Bad Misses' tables in Dragon. While the idea in the article is awesome, and obviously its one of the most influential and well known articles ever published in Dragon, as a first draft implementation it is somewhat lacking. Problems like you describe don't require GM insertion if you design the tables well. For example, a 'Hit Ally' result can be made to not require GM fiat, if it is written with a reasonableness caveat like: "Ignore this result if no ally is adjacent to or interposing the target." Indeed, virtually all fumbles of this sort require a reasonableness clause if you are using them without interpretation. Obviously a result like, "Drop weapon in adjacent space.", probably needs a reasonableness clause like, "Ignore this result if you are using a natural weapon." If it doesn't, you better be prepared for possibly unintended results like self-decapitation in the event of a head butt.

 

[Maxperson]

High fantasy heroes who save the world, rescue the sexy prince, and conquer the world do not fumble. Nuff said.

Except when they do. Read some books. High fantasy heroes who save the world, rescue the sexy prince, and conquer the world do sometimes slip in blood, have weapons break, say the wrong thing, and so on.

If you don't want to play that way, you don't have to. Don't try to tell me that they "don't" fumble, though, because they do.

 

[Maxperson]

Opening the box and finding something on fire when you expected to find gold is not the same as the whole table jeering at you when you roll a 1, and the DM gleefully unrolling his six page fumble table and demanding a d%. That's the difference the author is arguing, not some subtle point of definition.

I've seen this sentiment several time here, including in Cook's article. I don't like it, because they way it has been presented here is wrong. People jeering at you, shaming you, laughing at you, and so on doesn't have squat to do with rolling a 1 and fumbling. It just means that you play with jerks and should find a new game.

 

[RafaelLVX]

First of all, everything is always up to GM judgment. A GM should never let a ridiculous result stand just because rules. I would like to think that GMs don't need to be especially empowered to do that or to at least reroll ridiculous results.

But more to the point, the result you achieved is a result of the naive simplicity and frankly poor design of the old 'Good Hits and Bad Misses' tables in Dragon. While the idea in the article is awesome, and obviously its one of the most influential and well known articles ever published in Dragon, as a first draft implementation it is somewhat lacking. Problems like you describe don't require GM insertion if you design the tables well. For example, a 'Hit Ally' result can be made to not require GM fiat, if it is written with a reasonableness caveat like: "Ignore this result if no ally is adjacent to or interposing the target." Indeed, virtually all fumbles of this sort require a reasonableness clause if you are using them without interpretation. Obviously a result like, "Drop weapon in adjacent space.", probably needs a reasonableness clause like, "Ignore this result if you are using a natural weapon." If it doesn't, you better be prepared for possibly unintended results like self-decapitation in the event of a head butt.

I think you misunderstand some of my comment. First, I wasn't using anything "published in Dragon", we were playing the Old Dragon RPG, a d20 System variant.

More importantly, the poor design of the critical miss table wasn't supposed to be the point, and again I know this wasn't an ideal example. I just used the situation because it happened very recently and it would have had a much more plausible result should the DM have in mind the character rolling the natural 1 doesn't need to necessarily cause the bad outcome himself, with his own hands and his own lack of skill. As Cook's article suggests, the DM should be able to use just anything in the environment to cause a bad outcome if it's more plausible/interesting/fun.

As I tried to say, I like the idea that a natural 1 should cause some small catastrophe, but there are many situations where the catastrophe couldn't just possibly happen in that particular setup. That's when I think a DM intrusion is useful: the DM rules that you weren't as safe as you anticipated because... a hidden character was watching the whole time and now you're in trouble.

 

[RafaelLVX]

It just means that you play with jerks and should find a new game.

Or gaming group.

 

[Maxperson]

Or gaming group.

That's what I meant.