How did the herd get panicked? Was it a result of a failed roll or because "DM says so"? For me only the failed result of a roll would have led to that chain of events.
I made a will save on the herd based on the declared plan to fly at only 50' above the herd in a hippogriff. I rolled a '2'. The "DM says" in this case, that's a low enough roll that it's reasonable that the herd, which had been established in the fiction as wary and prone to stampede, did in fact do so. I then flipped a coin as to whether they would panic away from where the PC's were hiding or toward them. It came up toward them.
Again, dice rolls, although there was really no way of handling this situation but an ad hoc ruling as I hadn't planned for this case and wasn't about to break out my Statics text book and spend hours figuring out the exact design of the support structure. I'd been rolling the whole way, but by the fourth application of 'Soften Earth and Stone' by the levitating Shaman, I set a fairly high probability that the structure would fall, rolled the dice, and it did. Since I'm the sole authority on the % chance that the support system fails, that's only color of anything but DM fiat though. However, before the plan began, the Shaman made an intelligence check to see if they could figure out the best way to bring the hut down by weakening the stone spire and rolled a natural 20. It didn't seem reasonable that the plan that I then outlined (which seemed reasonable to me based on my IRL mechanical engineering) wouldn't work if enough resources were put into it.
I'm not sure where you're getting all this planning from. When I'm talking about success or failure, I'm talking about the results of dice rolled to determine success or failure.
I am to.
I consider the normal process of resolution to look like this:
1) The player announces their intention to do something doubtful (the "plan" or "proposition").
2) A fortune is decided on and chanced. The stakes are generally either the PC's plan works or it doesn't.
3) The DM narrates the results depending on whether the fortune was successful.
4) Return to step #1.
Now, not every game works exactly like that, and we can talk about how different (usually newer) games have varied that structure, but for the general case its no a bad outline. Notably in the above structure, success is only that the player's proposition worked. Success doesn't guarantee the situation in the scene got better or easier. Failure doesn't guarantee things got worse.
For instance if the character flying the mount rolled a successful flying roll, then they succeeded.
Flying in this case required no roll whatsoever. He can successfully fly in ordinary flight without having to make any rolls at all. End of story. Now, if he wants to undertake some aerial maneuvers, like a wing-over or a power dive or even something simple like a swoop maneuver, that might require a roll for the mount assisted by the rider's ride check. And had he announced a plan with special caution to avoid spooking the herd, I probably wouldn't have even rolled. But since the player's primary concern was only avoiding getting into the herds threat zone and the primary declared intention was to 'scout the other side', I decided to chance whether the herd was spooked. Now, if the party had tried to walk past the herd, then that probably would have been tested with move silently and if the player's succeeded then the plan succeeded, end of story. Or if the party had implemented a plan to try to provoke a stampede, that probably would have been automatically successful (like 'taking 0'), end of story. Well not end of story, but back to step #1.
That's great. Not so much for me.
Sure. And I can see the down side of fumbles and criticals as well. I don't insist that a system have them. If D&D had a bit less abstract combat, I'd probably think it would be much better off without them.
I think you misunderstood what I wrote. I'm not talking about personal failure. I'm talking about the complication only affecting the character as a result of a fumble (in my game failure is failure, it doesn't matter if it's a 1 or not). Wicket made an attack roll, fumbled, and the sling wrapped around him and he fell down. Silly, but doesn't complicate the game in the slightest, except for Wicket, probably involving his next action in the scene. All your examples have nothing to do with what I'm talking about. They don't seem to be about fumbles at all, but rather dice roll failures that led to scene complications.
For instance in my game, a failure in combat may result in wounds to the character, which might knock him unconscious. Or it might attract new enemies. Or it might start a fire because the dragon was defending himself. All these complicate the scene for everyone. The character dropping his sword leads to no such result. It's just silly.
First, as long as we are talking 'not for me', that would be the last time I'd play at your table. I refuse to play in Bizarro world where the fiction is mutable to GM whim to that extent. In such world's, the players have no incentive to propose anything and in my experience it's all illusion of the worst sort.
Secondly, if failure in combat resulting in wounds to the character complicates the scene for everyone, then surely fumbles in combat resulting in wounds to the character complicate the scene for everyone. At the very minimum, if Wicket is an a D&D party, Wicket is losing actions the rest of the team is depending on to beat down the opponent quickly and conserve resources. But if Wicket's fumble results in Wicket being unable to adequately defend himself from attackers (say he's now stunned and prone), then this is surely a complication for everyone to at least the same extent that it would be if Wicket was wounded by a monster directly.
And thirdly, what you don't seem to fully grasp is that all the scenes I described involved SUCCESSFUL die roles that complicated the scene. No one was failing on their rolls. For that matter, many of the propositions that a player can make are not disputed. They have 0% chance of failure. They just happen because they are actions that are trivially easy for such formidable and skilled characters. To put it another way, I was just "saying Yes". The players were successfully implementing their plans. Yet the scene grew more complicated anyway simply as a result of the logical consequences of their successful actions. That's one of the several reasons your definition is not describing what is going on in my game.
A fumble, to use a classic example, of dropping one's weapon, doesn't complicate the scene, even if it endangers one character.
But surely to the same extent that being wounded can complicate the scene because it endangers the character, dropping one's weapon - say dropping one's magic bow over the side of a ship in the middle of the ocean while being attacked by a Sargasso spirit and a sea elf war party (something that actually happened and was an actual fumble) - complicates the scene as well.
It only demonstrates the incompetence of the character and for me, is silly. The same is true if a player gets a crit and slices off the head of the orc. Silly.
Ok. All I can say is my players enjoy occasionally doing extreme damage to their opponents, and don't seem to fear that occasionally their plans won't work out resulting in the appearance of incompetence for a moment.
I've never heard a critical narrated as "you stab him. he dies." It is most often described as an over-the-top death scene, which to me equals both silly and unnecessary.
Strange that you both recognize this is silly and unnecessary and yet criticize the mechanic and not the GM.
In my games, if the player succeeds in killing the orc, she can describe it any way she likes, including decapitating the orc, as long as it's genre appropriate and matches the feel of the game as decided by the table. I don't need criticals and fumbles to do what success and failure does just fine.
I keep seeing really narrow notions about what a critical or a fumble actually are that seem to be tied to very specific implementations. Far more 'orcs' have been decapitated by ordinary successes than by critical hits in my game.
