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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7694614" data-attributes="member: 4937">What I find most interesting about the article is that it appears to be another example of Monte being uncomfortable with what were apparently unforeseen consequences of his design that he wants to mitigate against.  Monte added critical fumbles to his system, and now that the system is out in the larger world he's getting some feedback on it that he didn't entirely expect or desire:1) Most GMs when asked to imagine an additional consequence of the failure of a character's action very naturally color it as being the result of that character's action.  He isn't comfortable with how that always plays out, so he encourages the GMs to start coloring the consequences of the failure of a character's action as being at least most of the time... unrelated to the action itself.  This strikes me as rather incoherent, not just because it creates a disassociated mechanic, because at the level of the metagame players themselves will inevitably still associate the consequences with the player action.  Because however you want to color it, as a point of fact, it still is.  If you didn't try to open the locked door, the guards wouldn't have come around to investigate.  Indeed, the gaurds might not have existed until you failed to open the door.   To me this creates the same sort of incentive you saw in 1e for the thief to avoid using his find/disarm traps ability whenever possible, because it was not reliable enough to depend on.   As a result, the skilled 1e thief found and disarmed traps as a player, and only fell back on character skill when he had no choice as a sort of saving throw.  If I thought there was a 1 in 20 chance of making matters significantly worse, I'd always treat my skills as unreliable.Worse, thinking up good ways for something to go catastrophically wrong that aren't the natural results of the action is probably a much larger mental burden to impose on the GM than asking the GM to imagine how the player might have screwed up the action.  Leaving the system that open ended is going to give GM's serious choice fatigue in rather short order.2) Most players when they fumble opt to buy out of the consequences because really, who wants to find themselves in a situation that is actually worse.  Monte seems to think this behavior is driven not by the player's reluctance to have the situation get worse, or by the player's reluctance to turn the situation over to capricious GM fiat, but by feelings of guilt or embarrassment or a desire to protect their character from the color of ineptitude.  I don't know a whole lot about human emotions, but I find that rather unlikely.  I think its just logical to want to buy out of any open ended long term consequence if you have the opportunity.  As such, rather than actually being a system that introduces new drama to the situation, in practice the penalty for rolling a 1 is deducting a metagame resource which greatly undermines his intention.Lessons here: Game design is hard, even for the professionals.There is no such thing as a free lunch.  Everything has a cost.If you make your process too burdensome, your participants will try to find ways to make a new process.DM fiat isn't actually a simple system.</blockquote>

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