Shooting Into Combat

[Infiniti2000]

I think critical fumbles only work in a completely ad hoc, roleplaying method. In other words, the DM and/or the player makes up what happens on the spot based on what else is going on, how often critical fumbles have come up recently, and how important the current combat is to the whole plot.

From my experience, people want critical fumbles for the fun of it and the story aspects. That's fine, so make it like that and don't make up bizarre, complicated tables out of it.

 

[Thurbane]

Here's a rough draft of my house rule on firing into melee:

2.0 Firing Into Melee
When firing a missile weapon into melee, including ranged touch attacks, any attack which misses by enough to also miss the intended target’s touch AC, or on a natural 1 in any case, provokes a chance of accidentally hitting another, randomly determined target in melee with the missed creature. The attacker rolls randomly to determine which other creature is the unintended target, and then makes another attack roll against that target as normal (excluding the normal -4 penalty). If the roll succeeds, damage applies normally. If this roll also misses, the missile is assumed to have missed the melee altogether.

I have to work on the specific wording, though...

 

[Nightfall]

Infinit

To each their own. But for me, I think critical failures/fumbles are an acceptable thing at lower levels since a) I mean these aren't exactly the most experienced PCs (not the players themselves but their characters). Plus, generally speaking, their opponents generally are not either.