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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7695177" data-attributes="member: 4937">Sure.  Obviously, "dragons out of the blue" was meant as a humorous stand in for some actual likely complication to draw attention to what I thought the problem was.  "Weapon breaks" is a pretty traditional fumble.   Is failing to maintain your equipment properly something you completely divorce from PC competence.  Tell a Marine drill sergeant about that theory.Well, unless you are fighting a fire elemental... and what exactly does "everything gets a little bit harder" mean?  If you slip and fall in the mud, is that something that is completely divorced from PC incompetence?Is that result something you completely divorce from PC incompetence?  Do you think that in general, tables will separate attacking an orc, rolling 1, and knocking an orc into your ally sending him sprawling from other "funny" results that a player could be teased over?  Also this particular complication is one that IMO, will likely create hard feelings in a way that rolling a 1 and tripping over your own feet or even rolling a 1 and accidently hitting an ally wouldn't, because the ultimate target of this failure didn't get a chance to 'save' versus the result.   Again, if the goal is to protect the image player's have of their PC from the imputation of incompetence, this fails both for the player that rolled a one and for the player whose character is now sprawled on the ground.Is this something you completely separate from PC incompetence?   Wasn't the whole point of the article that we should be sheltering the player's image of their PC's competence so that failures didn't seem to be owed to a lack of competence on their part?That's one category.  The other category is the disassociated mechanics where something happens because of metagame but is not theoretically the result of player action.  For example:Is that related to your action?  If it isn't, would it have happened anyway, or did it only happen the orc was an unusually keen tactician because you tried to do something and failed.  In that case, wouldn't a player be "punished" for trying to do something, something the original article said we didn't want to do?And yet half your examples struck me as example of some degree of character incompetence in that a more competent character would have avoided the situation.  The remainder strike me as example of disassociated mechanics, which I'm not sure are better for the game than accepting a small amount of 'your character isn't actually a Marty Stu/Mary Sue' and will occasionally screw up.  And if we weren't willing to accept that in the first place, perhaps we would have been better off in a system without a fumble mechanic.So while it might be somewhat limited, in that we have to forgo our lifelong wish to have players accidentally shoot passing dragons while aiming at orcs, I'm not sure it's actually a bad idea to keep the ideas associated even at the risk of occasional 'hurt feelings' (if that really is a serious risk at all, which in my experience, not so much).</blockquote>

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