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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7694523" data-attributes="member: 4937">I felt the same, which is why I said "Irony". 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?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.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.</blockquote>

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