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?

 

[Mortellan]

In *skill checks* a natural 20 has no particular significance. All that matter is whether you hit the DC, regardless of how the die rolls. I don't know why you'd introduce a fumble mechanic into that rule.

That's true! Monte doesn't make the distinction either though so I rolled with it.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

In *skill checks* a natural 20 has no particular significance. All that matter is whether you hit the DC, regardless of how the die rolls. I don't know why you'd introduce a fumble mechanic into that rule.

Because some DMs enjoy describing the PCs as bumbling idiots, and they think that occasionally describing some super cool thing that doesn't matter (on a roll of 20) balances it out.

These DMs have either never read the rules, or think that they can do better. (And if they implement this sort of thing, then they are clearly wrong on the second part.)

 

[Bedrockgames]

I love a lot of what Monte Cook is doing and think the mechanic they have here is a fine one, but I kind of disagree with an underlying point in the article: that laughing at a PC when the player fails the roll will make the player feel bad. For some this may be true. People can have all kinds of reactions to things that go on in the game. But at a table of mature players who understand that 1 in 20 comes up 5% of the time and who don't take what occurs in the game personally, having Bruce's character do something laugh-worthy for the 1 result can be great fun (including for Bruce). Personally, as a player, when I get a very bad result and it leads to hilarity involving my character, I love it.

Now I will agree with Cook that if you have a particularly sensitive player or the group just takes those kinds of moments too far (perhaps ribbing Bruce through the evening and actually making him feel bad) then by all means, working around it by having something else arise from the fumble would be a smart way to go.

 

[Nytmare]

I've had an on again off again relationship with fumbles since I started playing D&D. For the most part, when we used them, we preferred systems that weren't just friendly fire crit tables. I think my favorite to run with was akin to what Monte was describing, when a character fumbled, I'd flip and invert the top card of the Everway fortune/tarot deck and use that as a jumping point to describe the new problem they had to deal with.

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.

I think that's an oversimplification and exaggeration of what he was trying to say. He's not cautioning against letting players fail, he's cautioning against treating that 1 in 20 chance as an invitation to ridicule someone.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

The way I see it, if you want the joy of a natural 20 in combat, you have to take the disappointment of a natural 1.

The dice give and the dice take. As much as we love it when the dice love us, a game where someone succeeded at everything takes away from the spectacular, against the odds successes (also, that person would probably be cheating). Having those lows makes the highs that much more exciting.

One way to get around the "we're all laughing at you" perspective is to let the PC decide what happens to them when they roll a 1, so that they still have some control their narrative. But that's not perfect, either, with some people really getting into it and others just playing lip service.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The way I see it, if you want the joy of a natural 20 in combat, you have to take the disappointment of a natural 1.

A natural 1 is a failure, and that's bad enough already. If you want to get rid of critical hits, though, then that's no real loss.

One way to get around the "we're all laughing at you" perspective is to let the PC decide what happens to them when they roll a 1, so that they still have some control their narrative. But that's not perfect, either, with some people really getting into it and others just playing lip service.

This is a violation of the player's role as the character, and entirely inappropriate for any sort of serious Role-Playing Game. It would make more sense in one of those hippy story-telling games, like FATE.

 

[Oofta]

I've always hated the automatic fumble on a 1. Depending on the game and the build if your character has multiple attacks the odds are that a high level character will roll a 1 every 3-4 rounds (or more often depending on the system/type of attack). A warrior at the pinnacle of skill should not be dropping his sword or be accidentally stabbing his buddy several times per minute.
I like 5E's take on it. A 1 is a miss and a 20 is a good hit, but not a fantastic one.

 

[Pauper]

The big problem I have with this approach is that a 'complication' that only appears on a '1' and not on any other failure result still feels like bonus failure, rather than garden-variety failure. The mechanic relies on the DM being able to provide an interesting complication that doesn't feel like a tacked-on extra hurdle, and let's face it, if you were the sort of DM that could make up interesting yet non-burdening complications at a moment's notice, you wouldn't be running a Monte Cook game whose mechanics are all about making the players feel awesome without you having to do much other than set up the monsters and let the PCs knock them down. You'd be running one of those "hippy story-telling games" Saelorn is talking about.

In games like D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder, where an enterprising player can get his character's attack roll high enough so that a '1' might still hit, using the '1 is an auto-miss' rule seems appropriate and punishing enough. In D&D 4, I've come up with hazardous terrain that gets an extra 'oomph' in its ability to frustrate a PC if the player is unfortunate enough to roll a '1' on a skill check -- goblin alchemy labs and fungus-slicked tidal pools can be great vectors of unintentional comedy. In D&D 5, where bounded accuracy is largely going to enforce the '1' being a miss anyway and where skills and saves don't auto-fail on a '1', I'm OK just letting it be another number on the die.

--
Pauper

 

[JudgeMonroe]

I like 5E's take on it. A 1 is a miss and a 20 is a good hit, but not a fantastic one.

5E simplified the critical hit rules, but no version of D&D has had a fumble mechanic on a natural 1 in the core rules.

 

[Banesfinger]

All arguments about how often (%) a fumble comes up are somewhat moot if the DM makes the monsters suffer the same consequences of rolling a fumble. Tactically, both sides of the combat should suffer the same amount of "1's".