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?

 

[Celebrim]

tl;dr version:

If your GM intrusion ever has a chance to cause a player to say "Oh #@$#" then its a fumble and you'd be well served not to pretend otherwise.

 

[Celebrim]

Nobody is suggesting removing "any mechanic that might result in losing".

No but someone has suggested we shouldn't punish players for bad rolls. How is that supposed to work? More humorously, this essay for me is a critical fumble because the author suggested we shouldn't punish players for bad rolls while discussing a system that does exactly that.

Reductio ad absurdum isn't helpful here.

That's what I'm saying, but I'm pointing at a different absurd claim.

 

[Celebrim]

tl;dr version 2:

Monte Cook writes an essay about fumbles. He rolls a '1'. Everyone laughs at him.

I'm just waiting for him to stop in and say, "It's not funny! Stop laughing, guys. It could happen to you too!"

 

[Barachiel]

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.

That's the feeling I got from this. This "pampering" to the players victories. As if failure is never a possibility. Even spectacular ones.

What we do is this, though. A 1 is a failure, but not a "critical failure." We have the player roll a "critical failure confirmation" roll. If that roll is also a failure (not just a 1, but say the to hit the AC required a 10 or more, than a confirmation crit failure would be anything 9 and below), then a critical failure occurs and we make a joke out of what is described afterwards.

That way it happens less often, but when it does it becomes memorable. Everyone suffers, the dice do not favor anyone.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Again, nobody is suggesting that. Unless you're going to contend that an RPG must have a critical fumble rule or it's not a game?

Nope. Neither crits nor fumbles are required. My issue is with the assertion that ANY reason a player might not like a mechanic is a good reason to scrap it.

Well I like the attack roll rule because I like hitting monsters lets keep it.

I don't like that PCs have AC scores because that means that they can be hit so lets scrap that.

The reasoning here is that the player doesn't like his character getting hit so he wants to remove a mechanic that makes this possible.

This is simply taking a player getting hurt feelings over rolling a 1 to its logical conclusion.

 

[Aldarc]

Irony.

Not sure how my post warranted snark in response.

And you are welcome to call fumbles complications if it makes you feel better, but it doesn't change fundamentally what is going on which is that the roll of a 1 just made the situation markedly worse in some fashion. The roll of the 1 in some fashion empowers the GM to inject something into the fiction which changes the stakes for the worse.

It makes the situation more complicated, but the responsibility for that is not necessarily on the player's character who may have either succeeded or failed at their task based on the roll. That is the critical difference, so to speak. It's not that failure will never be on the player's character - which is not what Monte is saying at all - but that it doesn't always have to be, because the GM Intrusion shifts the emphasis to an intrusive complication into the narrative scene rather than mandating a failure of the player character.

Now, if it makes 'Hans' player feel better to call his fumbles 'complications', that's fine I guess for marketing, but that's a nod to Han's player's immaturity who apparently wants to believe he only has shining moments of awesome and never bumbling stumbling steps along the way. It's also a bit of self-deception on the part of the GM, who is busy creating fumbles but avoiding all 'negative' language as if somehow failure could be sufficiently padded as to never sting a little.

You may not care what I think, but I can't say that I particularly like your condescending insinuation here that groups or players who prefer this style of play lack maturity.

Indeed, if it is the goal to avoid that sting of failure and that sense of bumbling hero in a story that we get when Han makes the problem dramatically worse, one wonders why you have a 'introduce complications on a 1 rule' in the first place. Far from shifting the tone away from a cultural norm surrounding the roll of 1 on a D20 roll, the system is in fact creating a cultural norm where none necessarily existed before. For example, in my D&D 3.X game, it's not even necessarily true that a roll of 1 is anything other than success, and indeed obtaining a degree of skill that provides for autosuccess on simple actions is a rather important part of the game - the player is empowered to propose actions, even stunts, that can't fail. And in many D20 games, rolling a 1 provides no special complication, as the GM is not empowered to intrude into fiction to turn that bad roll into a significant fiction altering event. The roll of a 1 in D&D by default implies no more serious bumbling of an action than throwing up an air ball in a game of basketball.

I fundamentally disagree with this unfounded assertion. You want to cite your experience in 3.X? Fine. In my experience with Cypher System games, there has been a noticeable cultural shift when players roll a natural one.

And yet this is the guy that says of his system:

This is nonsense, both as it pertains to Monte's system specifically, and as it pertains to his claim that the roll of a 1 in his system is not a fumble and to the idea of fumbles generally.

It's not a fundamentally fumble. In American football, for example, a fumble involves the player dropping the ball. That is a fumble. Monte Cook argues that the GM Intrusion represents an additional complication or externality. The player can still catch the ball with a natural 1, but he may find that other players are now catching up to him.

Even games without fumbles still punish players for rolling bad. You don't need to roll a 1 to fail a saving throw and die. You don't need a roll a 1 to miss an attack. My current campaign has a PC whose shtick is making magically enhanced attacks and then using True Strike to ensure that investment is not wasted. Not unsurprisingly, his rolls of a 1 stand out especially - not because they generally lead to fumble - but because those 'rare' rolls waste all the investment in resources and preparation he put into the attack. I don't know how many times he's muttered the mantra, "Not a 1... not a 1... not a 1...", only to throw that dreaded 1 and moan in agony.

That also includes Cypher System.

Overall, I can't help but get the feeling that a lot of the criticisms regarding this article come from people unfamiliar with or who haven't played the Cypher System.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Seriously? Why are we relying on random fortune to determine the outcome of actions in a story it all if we are really worried about whether Bruce's feelings might be hurt when he fails a dice roll, or that Bruce might feel a thrill of vicarious exhilaration when a mere dice roll determines he succeeds.

This is nothing more than the fallacy of the excluded middle. "We want some randomness in task resolution therefore any and all randomness is automatically fine" - which makes about as much sense as "You like a little pepper on your food so I'm serving raw scotch bonnet chillies. What's the problem?" Some days and in some games I want to play the keystone cops. And in others I want to play competent professionals against overwhelming odds.

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.

Wait... what? Do we also not want to run games that reward players for rolling well? How is that supposed to work anyway?

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"?

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.

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

But are we a bunch of babies that can't deal with that fact? I mean seriously, don't we all about age 5 outgrow the feeling that a game is unfair when it deals to us setbacks? How do you manage to play Monopoly or Settlers of Cataan, much less an RPG if you aren't capable of dealing with the inherent unfairness of a random dice roll?

I play D&D rather than Snakes and Ladders because I don't find snakes and ladders a fun game as there is no element of skill to it. What gives you @Celebrim the right to decide what is fun for everyone?

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?

 

[delericho]

Nope. Neither crits nor fumbles are required. My issue is with the assertion that ANY reason a player might not like a mechanic is a good reason to scrap it.

Ah, but I didn't say any reason a player might not like it, I said any reason your players don't like it. The difference in emphasis is important: in one case it's one guy who might be grousing; in the other it's an actual problem that has been identified.

 

[RotGrub]

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

 

[Celebrim]

Not sure how my post warranted snark in response.

I felt the same, which is why I said "Irony".

It makes the situation more complicated, but the responsibility for that is not necessarily on the player's character who may have either succeeded or failed at their task based on the roll. That is the critical difference, so to speak. It's not that failure will never be on the player's character - which is not what Monte is saying at all - but that it doesn't always have to be, because the GM Intrusion shifts the emphasis to an intrusive complication into the narrative scene rather than mandating a failure of the player character.

It's a "critical difference" which in context is lacking in substance.

To continue your football example, let's say a fumble is a normal failure resulting from testing the stakes, "Hang on to the ball or not". In Cypher System football, the roll of a 1 introduces a complication which is not necessarily the result of the player being particularly butter fingered or inept. The ball was stripped from the players hands legitimately through no especial fault of the player, and the GM inserted consequences could be anything from the ball bounces out and straight into the hands of an opposing player who begins to run back for a touchdown or the player crashes into a trombone player that has inexplicitly marched out onto the field for solo performance. As you say, the additional complication - in this case the trombonist or the alert opposing player - may not in fact be linked in the fiction to the character's special ineptitude or folly. That is to say, in the fiction, the character's ball handling skills aren't in fact the cause of the trombonist marching out onto the field, and the audience at the stadium knows this is the case.

But the situation at the gaming table is different. Regardless of the complication the GM introduces, the audience at the table knows the complication is resulting from the player having thrown a '1'. So now the other players do know that the complication - whatever it was - is in fact linked to the player's agency: the trombonist only marched out onto the field and created the collision that knocked the ball lose because the player rolled a '1'. And the player himself knows this happened only because he threw a '1'. The additional complication is inextricably linked to the player having rolled the '1'. This is inescapable.

And somehow this is supposed to protect the player from being the object of laughter generated by the situation or having hurt feelings?

You may not care what I think, but I can't say that I particularly like your condescending insinuation here that groups or players who prefer this style of play lack maturity.

Well, to be frank, I quite obviously don't usually care what people think of me and that's a correct assessment, but I think you are misreading me with regards to what I think shows a lack of maturity. I don't think that there is anything immature about liking critical fumbles or not.

I fundamentally disagree with this unfounded assertion. You want to cite your experience in 3.X? Fine. In my experience with Cypher System games, there has been a noticeable cultural shift when players roll a natural one.

You may disagree all you like, and you may call the assertion unfounded all you like, but you will find it inarguable that most D20 based systems don't by default have any special consequences on the roll of a natural 1 and that most D20 systems if you want critical fumbles you have to house rule them in. I can think of exceptions that do have fumbles built in, but they are far from common or well known. Yet, Cypher System does have fumbles built in. So I think it's quite fair to assert that it is Cypher System that is promoting a cultural shift toward thinking of a natural one as being not merely especially bad in color, but especially bad mechanically and hence in color. In fact, if that wasn't the case, I don't think that Monte would feel any especial need to address the issue.