You can't do this in D&D (which was the system being referenced) which was my point
it can be accomplished with fumble rules
why do you keep assuming we're speaking to D&D?
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the point was that a "fumble" does not have to equate with a stick through someone's eye... not that there shouldn't be a difference.
I'm having trouble following which system - actual, or hypothetical - you are referring to.
D&D, as part of its core system, has never had rules for specific damage via critical hit. Nor has it had rules for "fumbles" as anything distinct from its rules for determining whether or not a check succeeds.
There are plenty of RPG systems that
do have rules for specific damage at the heart of their combat system (RQ is the most famous, RM perhaps the most notorious, but obviously they're not the only ones). There are also RPG systems that have rules for consequences of failure that are more specific than simply "You don't get what you want" - the MERP fumble table is an example, and was posted upthread. Generally these "fumble" tables are designed to be used in resolving combat - I've personally never seen one designed for social interactions, for instance, though that's not to say that such a thing hasn't been published. In RQ and RM, the general effect of these tables is to penalise the fumbling character in respect of action economy, and/or to inflict damage. Part of the reason they mostly make sense in combat contexts is that most of these RPGs don't use any sort of tight action economy in non-combat resolution.
Having just had a look at the "Influence and Interaction" table for Rolemaster Classic, here is its result for -25 or down: "Your blatant attempt at coercion alienates your audience. They are influenced to do the opposite of what you were attempting to get them to do." Do you count that as a "fumble"? In the context of that system, it is just the most severe failure result on the table.
Where are the rules for severing limbs?
In D&D, there are only three I know of: the Sword of Sharpness can sever limbs as a special property of the weapon; and, in Gygax's DMG, the following two possibilities are put forward (pp 82, 110):
If any creature reaches a state of -6 or greater negative paints before being revived, this could indicate scarring or the loss of some member, if you [the GM] so choose. . . .
Now and then a player will die through no fault of his own. He or she will have done everything correctly, taken every reasonable precaution, but still the freakish roll of the dice will kill the character. . . . You [the GM] can rule that the player, instead of dying, is knocked unconscious, loses a limb, is blinded in one eye or invoke any reasonably severe penalty that still takes into account what the monster has done.
Only the second of these options can generate the "Luke's hand is chopped off" scenario, though, because (per p 82) if a character's hp are reduced below -3 with a single blow s/he dies immediately.
When it comes to severing limbs in other systems, there could be any range of mechanical possibilities: in RM severing limbs requires a hit that triggers a roll on a relatively severe crit table (not uncommon vs unarmoured foes, but rarer vs heavily armoured foes) and then a roll on the relevant table in the 80s or 90s (depending on the details of the particular table); in RQ it requires a successful attack that is not dodged or parried, and then rolling high enough damage to do more than double its hit points to a limb (a sword in RQ does similar damage to a sword in D&D, and severing a limb would normally require close to max damage - armour will prevent this, but critical successes in RQ can ignore armour damage prevention).
I've personally never seen a system where having your arm chopped off would be the result of a failed roll by the defender, but I can easily imagine such a system. But D&D has never been such a system - apart from anything else, it does not have "active defence" as part of the system.
What I don't understand is how you and others like [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] are dismissing examples of "fumbles" when there is no default game system we are discussing to determine whether they can or can't be modeled without fumble rules?
As I read this thread, the Han Solo and Luke Skywalker examples were raised to show that fumble mechanics are a good way, even perhaps the best way, to have these sorts of fictional events occur in a RPG.
When it comes to the combat-type results (like Luke's dismemberment), I think the key issue isn't one of crits/fumbles but rather - as I indicated already upthread- of how (if at all) the combat mechanics generate specific results rather than the sort of abstract result that is typical of D&D.
In RM, RQ and BW - to name the three non-D&D FRPGs I have most experience with - all combat results are specific, and so a "critical success" system has no work to do in this respect. (RM doesn't have critical success on attacks; nor does BW; and as I already indicated for RQ, critical success is primarily about overcoming armour.) In a system like Roger Musson's "How to Lose Hit Points and Survive", which nearly 20 years later was given official imprimatur by WotC as "Wounds and Vitality", then most successful attacks do "abstract" damage (wearing down hp) but some special successes could be modelled as doing specific damage. And of course you have Gygax's endorsement of using a "GM Intrusion" to introduce a specific consequence short of death when a skilled player, through bad luck rather than bad play, suffers PC "death" from hp loss.
Any of these systems might work - but saying that a system has "crits" or "special successes" doesn't tell us anything concrete about it (eg RM doesn't have "special successes" at all, but generates specific results; whereas 3E D&D does have "crits" but, in its official rules, does not generate specific combat results other than death).
Turning to non-combat resolution, a "fumble" or "intrusion" mechanic might be a helpful addition to a system which has, as its generic failure result, "nothing happens". But in a system like RM's interaction mechanics (that I mentioned above), there is no need for a "fumble" mechanic because some failure results already generate outcomes other than "nothing happens". The same thing is true of traditional D&D reaction mechanics - low reaction results lead to hostile or attacking NPCs, not simply "nothing happens", and so a "fumble" or "intrusion" mechanic may not add a great deal to those games.
Likewise with the Han Solo example. In classic D&D, for instance, a failed Move Silently roll means that the character was heard (eg DMG p 10, "Do NOT inform the thief that his or her dice score indicated a lack of success at this attempted stealth, if that is the case. He or she thinks the movement is silent, and the monster or other victim will inform the character of his or her misapprehension soon enough.) This will produce events like those of RotJ without needing to layer on any sort of "fumble" mechanic.
But in a different system, where a failed Move Silently roll didn't result in being heard unless the "monster or other victim" also makes a successful Perception check, then maybe you might want a "fumble" system where a very poor Move Silently roll means that the monster or victim's Perception check succeeds automatically. (This would be a system analogous to RQ combat, with Perception as the attack and Move Silently as the parry - a successful "parry" means that even a successful "attack" doesn't help the attacker - but with a tweak that a fumbled parry makes the attack automatically successful.)
The range of mechanical options is pretty broad. But it seems fairly clear to me that when Monte Cook talks about fumbles, he is talking about PC incompetence (eg trying to persaude but instead speaking insults). None of the mechanics I've mentioned above have to produce that sort of outcome. The RM Interaction mechanics come closest, but even then there might be ways of influencing the audience in the way opposite to intended without being incompetent - eg maybe there is another factor in play that the character is not aware of, but that his/her words inadvertently trigger. The MERP/RM combat fumble mechanics can also come close to it - especially given their comedic tone - but can also be seen as reflecting the back-and-forth of battle in a highly granular resolution system (and - speaking from experience with those systems - the comedy then becomes a grim comedy of brutal combat rather than a slapstick comedy of incompetent warriors).
As long as I'm defining things <snippage>
It seems I need to define 'fumble' as a technical term.
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Based on this definition - which I think a rather natural and good one - the GM Intrusion rule in Cypher is certainly a fumble mechanic.
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One of my problems with the original essay is that the author tries to argue that his fumble mechanic isn't really a fumble mechanic
I'm not sure that you get to criticise Monte Cook's blog on the basis of a definition that he is not using and that you are making up and then imputing to him.
Here is the passage where Monte characterises the sort of fumble mechanic that he rejects:
the GM actually incorporates some version of the joke into the actual narrative of the game—that is to say, that Bruce’s character said something foolish or untoward . . .
Generalising that, he is rejecting a fumble mechanic in which a fumble results in the character suffering a comically adverse consequence due to ineptitude or foolishness.
It's obvious that his "intrusion" mechanic is something different from that, and hence not a
fumble mechanic as Monte is using that term.
A mechanic where the GM always turns failures into partial successes is called "no whiff".
This seems to be another instance of you defining others' words in your own terms.
As used by those who coined the phrase (Ron Edwards et al), "no whiffing" means that the mechanical system does not produce outcomes that model incompetence. The paradigmatic example is that skilled warriors don't swing wild when trying to hit their foes. It has nothing to do with whether or not action declarations fail: in opposed contexts, such as (say) Glorfindel fighting the Witch-King, it is completely consistent with "no whiffing" for Glorfindel's player to suffer a complete failure (eg the Witch King cuts Glorfindel's head off). Because in this case Glorfindel has not manifested incompetence; it's just that he has been bested by one of the most powerful sorcerous warriors in Middle Earth.
Here's a
post where Edwards talks a bit more about his notion of "whiffing", and what a no-whiffing system might look like:
As far as I'm concerned, whiffing is not the same thing as failing an action or having something go wrong. The latter things are quite desirable in role-playing situations, as far as I'm concerned. Whiffing refers, I think, more to the sensation one has when playing through a series of failures, or failures that are handled descriptively and mechanically in a particular way.
One of the things that gives rise that sensation is a game in which a high score doesn't reflect much of a better chance than a low score except in the long run across many instances. Percentile systems like Rolemaster or Call of Cthulhu are very, very prone to this. . . .
Another situation that gives rise to the sensation is when failing the attempt doesn't make anything happen. So you either get something, or tread water. This is what leads to those horrible fights-that-never-end, weary, roll-miss-tune-out sessions.
Here's another, earlier comment by him on the same matter:
Fortune-in-the-Middle as the basis for resolving conflict facilitates Narrativist play in a number of ways. . . . It preserves the desired image of player-characters specific to the moment. Given a failed roll, they don't have to look like incompetent goofs; conversely, if you want your guy to suffer the effects of cruel fate, or just not be good enough, you can do that too.
In the context of AD&D combat, for instance, with its 1 minute rounds, a failed to hit roll might mean the PC sucks, or it might mean that there has been a titanic duel between two equally-matched opponents which still remains in the balance as attack and riposte are exchanged (like the Errol Flynn sword fights that Gygax has expressly mentioned as his vision for what D&D combat might look like). Of course, the six second rounds and more detailed positioning rules of contemporary D&D reduce this fortune-in-the-middle component and make this sort of abstract relationship between mechanics and narration harder to preserve, but certainly not impossible (as I can attest from my own experience GMing 4e).
In the context of Monte Cook's
intrusion mechanic, it is the GM who is given custody of the "desired image of the player character". But it is clear why he is distinguishing it from a fumble mechanic - the character fails to achieve his/her goal in performing the action, but the reason for that failure need not be incompetence.
