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.

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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?

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Okay, and what is the difference between that and tailoring your adventure to suit the player characters? Unless, you are meditating to choose one world from many? Sounds like "hippie storytelling" to me.

The difference is impartiality. One of the most important duties of the GM is to be fair, and that means not setting things up for or against the players.

If you set up a challenge (whether that's an adventure, or just a single encounter) that you think the party can overcome, then there's very little sense of accomplishment for the players, because the whole thing was set up in order for them to win. If you set up something that they can't win, then that's not usually very satisfying for the players either, for other reasons.

You might be able to put something together that isn't unbalanced one way or the other, where you actually have no idea what will happen, but that's a lot of guessing and feels equally contrived. If you simply ignore the PCs, then you can go ahead and design everything for what it is, and it's up to the players what they want to do about it; their choices have real meaning, because they know you're not just setting things up for them to knock down.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The GM looks at all of the possible worlds that could potentially exist, and selects one that will make for an interesting adventure. And while there are an infinite number of worlds to choose from, the one thing that they all have in common is that they exist independently of who the PCs are.

It's not hard to avoid meta-gaming, as long as you're aware of it.

Sounds a bit like Leibniz.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Impartiality to whom? And fairness to whom?

Fairness to the players. Setting up an adventure with the expectation that the PCs will triumph robs the players of their sense of accomplishment.

Likewise, the GM owes it to the players to treat the NPCs the same as the PCs, because to do otherwise would demonstrate bias and diminish meaning. I mean, the players are here to take on their roles as real people (albeit interesting and powerful ones) who actually exist within the bounds of this made-up game-world. Treating them like protagonists in some story would defeat the whole point!

 

[Celebrim]

As long as I'm defining things, let me take the conversation in a different direction regarding the Star Wars examples to illustrate a difference between Monte's open ended GM intrusion fumbles and typical fumble as process resolution you might see in say WFRP or RM.

In 'Empire Strikes Back' Chewbacka tries to use his repair skill to reassemble C3P0 after C3P0 botched earlier and got himself blasted by Storm Troopers. Chewie manages to get C3P0 working again, but humorously puts his head on backwards.

Now in normal process resolution we wouldn't think of this as a fumble. Chewie has succeeded in getting C3P0 working, but not fully succeeded. There is still a complication. Normally in a process resolution this wouldn't be the worst case result of a fortune mechanic. A fumble would normally be something like, "Not only did you fail, but botched the job and now C3P0 is ruined and retries won't work." In this case we had "success with complication", which is a possibility we haven't considered that seems to lie somewhere between failure and success rather than beyond failure or beyond success. One would normally think of this happening if the result of a fortune check was almost good enough to succeed or just barely good enough.

But since GM Intrusion is open ended, nothing prevents the GM from turning fumbles into partial successes. It might not be a good idea and it might not be an obvious thing to do, but the option is there.

A mechanic where the GM always turns failures into partial successes is called "no whiff". The stakes of a proposition then are not failure and success, but success and partial success. Cypher does not fully implement "no whiff" because a) GM Intrusion doesn't happen on ordinary failure and b) nothing commands the GM to turn fumbles into partial successes. Indeed, even in Monte's advice column, the notion of a partial success isn't one he strongly advocates for. He still frames all the fumbles as failures.

Just as it is not possible to know whether the failures in Star Wars are fumbles or regular failures, we can't actually tell whether they are failures or partial success for the same reason. Some of the failures don't naturally look like partial successes, but they could be shoe horned in as them with a bit of stretching. Thus, we could potentially generate Star Wars fiction using a "no whiff" system if we were happy to accept color of failure and ineptitude (which most people who advocate for "no whiff" do not like) along with our partial success. However, IMO, "no whiff" as a mechanic works best when paired with an "ante up" mechanic that allows the player to choose when he is willing to risk failure or even catastrophe in order to likewise risk incredible success. That is, the player can buy into changing the stakes from "success/partial success" to "critical success/fumble". If that were the case, then this hypothetical system would in my opinion also be well suited to producing Star Wars fiction.

 

[Hussar]

I don't think anything is this black and white. You can always blend things. You can design with an eye toward both, trying to keep them in balance, shifting from one to the other, etc. I love world building, and love designing believable worlds, but I don't ignore adventure potential and that is one of my top considerations as well. It isn't a matter of only being able to design toward one goal, it is more like you have a list of criteria you are weighing as you design.

Oh, of course. And I totally agree. But, that's not what [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] was arguing before. [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] was saying that the only consideration in scenario design is world building concepts and everything flows from that. Later Saelorn claimed that designing a fun adventure was also a consideration, meaning that world building is not the only consideration.

Which is the contradiction I was pointing out.

 

[Hussar]

Prove it? Otherwise your assertion of it being a critical is no more or less valid than my assertion that it's a fumble on Luke's part... and in D&D crits don't sever limbs... so basically we're bith just making up systems to cover something colored by our aesthetic preferences. Honestly my players would better take loosing a limb if they made a low roll than because an NPC made a high roll... but again that's the point it's preference.

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...Cook-On-Fumble-Mechanics/page19#ixzz40eucg6ft

cf. [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION]'s point of a Sword of Sharpness from AD&D. Which would probably make better sense in the setting since nothing else other than lightsabers seem to cause limb loss. Stormtroopers don't have their arms blown off by blasters after all. Leia doesn't lose her arm after being shot. But, we do see an awful lot of hand hacking in the movies.

But, I'm still curious what fumble system you would foresee which would cause another character to hack my own arm off when I roll a critical fumble.

 

[Arilyn]

The difference is impartiality. One of the most important duties of the GM is to be fair, and that means not setting things up for or against the players.

If you set up a challenge (whether that's an adventure, or just a single encounter) that you think the party can overcome, then there's very little sense of accomplishment for the players, because the whole thing was set up in order for them to win. If you set up something that they can't win, then that's not usually very satisfying for the players either, for other reasons.

You might be able to put something together that isn't unbalanced one way or the other, where you actually have no idea what will happen, but that's a lot of guessing and feels equally contrived. If you simply ignore the PCs, then you can go ahead and design everything for what it is, and it's up to the players what they want to do about it; their choices have real meaning, because they know you're not just setting things up for them to knock down.

Well, we obviously have very different styles of adventure design! I never ignore my players while designing adventures. The backgrounds of the characters come into play a lot, as well as the preferences of my players. However, I do like a very narrative approach to gaming, so maybe this is where we are diverging?

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Well, we obviously have very different styles of adventure design! I never ignore my players while designing adventures. The backgrounds of the characters come into play a lot, as well as the preferences of my players. However, I do like a very narrative approach to gaming, so maybe this is where we are diverging?

Probably. There has been a significant change, over the years, in games which bear the title of RPG. Back in the day, fairness was the highest duty of the arbiter. Nowadays, many games want the person running it to tell a story, along with the players.

It would be convenient if there was some way to distinguish between these two groups, but attempts to do so are met with controversy.

 

[Hussar]

Probably. There has been a significant change, over the years, in games which bear the title of RPG. Back in the day, fairness was the highest duty of the arbiter. Nowadays, many games want the person running it to tell a story, along with the players.

It would be convenient if there was some way to distinguish between these two groups, but attempts to do so are met with controversy.

Lol. Yes because no module ever stated a level range on the cover. Challenges in the dungeon were never tailored to dungeon level. Monsters were never given an xp value that was based on the level of the monster.

Oh wait...

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Lol. Yes because no module ever stated a level range on the cover. Challenges in the dungeon were never tailored to dungeon level. Monsters were never given an xp value that was based on the level of the monster.

As a said, descriptive rather than proscriptive. That Necromancer has exactly the same spells and minions, whether the PCs are level 1 or level 20.

If the party is between levels 5 and 8, the outcome will be less certain, and the players might have more fun. That's just a description, though. It has zero bearing on anything actually in the module.