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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7694487" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't find emotions to be irrelevant at all.  But what I would criticize the article for is seeming to validate a very immature emotional response.  Granted, it seems to want to do that in preference to some other equally immature emotional response - mocking your fellow players for failure - but going the other direction is probably no more functional, and in most cases the ribbing and teasing at the table tends to be rather good natured.  Failing to separate out good natured ribbing from ill-tempered or arrogant mockery fails to understand the problem, and more over attempting to fix a problem with the social contract by some mechanical in game artifice is just doomed to failure.  Problems in the game can be fixed with mechanics, but problems that are external to the game - like some player seeing the point of play being to express his superiority to the other people that are present and to abuse them emotionally - can't really be fixed by fiddling with the mechanics.   No end of problems at a table are owed to treating out of game problems with in game solutions, or in game problems with out of game solutions.That's not at all what I'm arguing.  What I'm arguing is that success and failure are two sides of the same coin, and have to be accepted together in any sort of mature game.  There is nothing inherently bad about the idea of fumbling.  Indeed, there is nothing inherently bad about the idea of bumbling.  My example of Hon Solo was not chosen at random, as one of the things that marks his character (at least in the original trilogy) is that he's all the time fumbling and all the time dealing with failure.  He basically fails every 'fast talking' roll he ever tries.  He comes across as extremely competent at times and yet at other times he fails a Stealth check and gets backhanded in the face.  The exact mechanics of how a system does this are irrelevant to the point.All of which is just semantic gloss for the practical effect that rolling a 1 is a fumble in the system.  The nature of this fumble may be very broadly defined to basically anything that the GM may wish to invent, but it is a fumble nonetheless.   Indeed, it could be said that in general a player might find this system to be the most extreme sorts of fumbles imaginable - worse in some fashion than a table of results.  For even more so than a table of results, the mechanic ensures that a roll of 1 carries with it some reality warping jinx that creates complications in the fiction even where no complications were previously present in the stakes.</blockquote>

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