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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6315078" data-attributes="member: 5143">This discussion kind of goes back to critical failures.  I believe it was in the 2e Combat and Tactics book where there was a preface about "Why not critical fumble rules?" when the author says that they didn't include critical fumble rules because anything that favors randomness favors the enemies and because math makes critical fumbles REALLY bad for the players.I can't remember the entire page but basically it said this: Enemies are in play for about 2-3 rounds of combat and then they die.  So during that 2-3 rounds of combat, it is unlikely that they will roll a crit or a fumble.  Most of them will roll somewhere in the middle and then die.  So, it appears as if most enemies are fairly competent.  Every once in a while, one makes a great move or a really horrible move.However, when you apply that randomness to a PC who might make hundreds or thousands or rolls over a campaign you start seeing that a 5% chance happens WAY more than most people expect it to.  So, if something REALLY bad happens when you roll a natural 1, it'll happen over and over and over again.The actual discussion in the 2e book said, "As PCs go up in levels, they get more attacks per round.  They have a 5% chance of a critical failure each attack they make.  So as they go up in levels, they critically fail MORE often.  Which feels counter intuitive.  We should expect that as you get better, less and less bad things happen to you."I admit, people like when weird, cool things happen.  That's why they like things like the wild mage.  However, I played one for many months.  I can tell you that about the 10th time I rolled "Butterflies come out of everyone's ears" it was no longer funny or interesting.  Everyone just said "Yawn.  Again?  More butterflies?  We were hoping you could actually fireball the enemies this time."  And when I did roll that I hurt my party, we then had to roleplay YET AGAIN the fact that my party was angry at me and didn't want me to hurt them anymore.Most of these things are amusing when they happen once, maybe twice in a campaign.  But the numbers were so large that they happened once or twice a SESSION.  A d20 is simply not random enough to deal with things that should happen 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10000 times.</blockquote>

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