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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7694695" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm not even sure you guys in the sub-thread arguing over how fiction that wasn't produced by a gaming process maps to vague hypothetical rules of a game know what you are arguing about.  Because almost all games have a degree of DM fiat, and because we do not actually know the game state of a particular non-game fiction, we can't say for certain what is going on in game terms in any particular non-game fiction.  I hope that is obvious.  Take for example Vadar slashing off the arm of Luke.  This wasn't produced by a game mechanic.  It was written into a story by a writer not carrying about how it could be gamed.  But there are an almost infinite number of imaginable game mechanics that could have created that fiction.  It could have been a special effect of the weapon - maybe all lightsabers are defined has having the equivalent of the D&D 'sharpness' trait.  See for example the discussion of running a particular sharpness weapon in the 2e D&D module 'Axe of the Dwarven Lords'.  It could be that the system being used had critical hits and one possible critical hit was remove limb at wrist.It could be that the system in question had no hit points, but had hit locations and wound severity and that a wound of a certain severity to a the arm (however that severity was generated) indicated dismemberment.It could be that this is a narrativist system of some sort, and that however it was determined Luke lost the scene and now is losing an arm as part of some well defined fail forward mechanic that ensures that regardless of whether Luke wins or loses his scene with Vadar, the plot goes on.It could be a diceless system, and the players of Luke and Vadar negotiated this ending in some fashion before playing it out.We can't know what system is in play.  We can only speculate how in a particular system that scene might be generated, or if it indeed could be generated.As far as fumbles go, D&D by default doesn't have them and can't generate them with mechanical consequences (with very few exceptions, Use Magical Device skill checks being one example).  But any common failure can be colored as a fumble, and since we can't know the mechanics of the system used in the fiction in question (again people, it doesn't exist!), and we don't know the stakes because we don't know the counterfactuals the way we would in a game state, we can't know if for example a failure we see of a character in star wars represents color of a fumble or actual mechanical fumble consequences.  There is no point in arguing about the details of the game system being played in the movie Star Wars.  I only brought it up to serve as an illustration of true high action fantasy heroes bumbling through scenes and yet still being heroes.   All we can say for sure is that if you want to create a fiction like the movie Star Wars, your heroes will have to be able to fail and have the color of failure.  How we implement that is a very broad topic with a wide range of options.  Fumbles aren't essential to it, but aren't ruled out by the fiction either, because the heroes do have serious missteps - many more than people are remembering I think.</blockquote>

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