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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7694686" data-attributes="member: 4937">I agree that it is a wholly fallacious argument but I know where they are coming from, because I've seen it personally and heard of it second hand.Many oldbies experience with fumbles and critical hits comes almost entirely from the Dragon article 'Good misses and bad hits'.  A few might have experience with Warhammer Fantasy or Rolemaster, which have their own issues, but this being primarily a D&D forum it's mostly going to be those old unofficially fumble and critical tables.  That article had a lot of awesomeness to it, which is why it was so influential and popular, but it also had a lot of fail in it.  For the most part, the fumble and critical results on the tables weren't tested for reasonableness by the table itself.  Whatever the table said simply happened.  So for example, a non-magical sword was basically just as likely to break as a +6 holy avenger.   One of the good things about the rules though was that the chance of you fumbling decreased as you got more skilled.  The rules presented by the article said that the chance of a critical was a percentage equal to the difference in your modified to hit roll and the number you needed to hit.  So for example, if your character needed a modified 14 to hit, and you rolled a modified 22, then you'd have an 8% chance of a critical.  On the other hand if you rolled a modified 6, you'd have an 8% chance of a fumble.  That worked pretty well but it generated a ton of fumbles and criticals, and a lot of the results on the table were pretty extreme - critically hit self being an example.   D&D combat wasn't naturally very gritty, but if you threw in the fumble and critical rules from the article it would get pretty darn brutal in a hurry.  High level fighters - already arguably OP in 1e after Weapon Specialization was introduced - would generate critical hits on like 10-15% of their attacks, often ending the fight right then and there.To make matters worse though, quite a few tables house ruled the article to simply it so that you always fumbled on a 1 and always had a critical on a 20.  That common house rule is actually the direct ancestor of the 3e critical hit rules.   But unlike the 3e rules, this wasn't just a threat to critical, but an automatic critical or fumble.  So if you had 2 or 3 attacks per round, every attack you made was a chance to roll a 1 and critically hit yourself or your ally.  Naturally, things like that would happen all the time.If that is your whole experience with fumbles, then you probably automatically imagine those situations whenever you hear the word 'fumble'.</blockquote>

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