D&D General Tables for _skill_ crits and fumbles?

[Kariotis]

My current campaign embraces hijinx and chaos a bit more than usual, so I wanted nat 20s and 1s to have effects on skill use, too. I'm sure many people have done that before, so there must be cool tables for that out there to adapt. I'm running 4e, but tables for every edition are welcome, I'll sift through all of them for ideas

 

[aco175]

I do not think that skills can technically crit or fumble, only combat. I do think that you should get some good ideas from other posters though. The charts might also need to be broken down by skill. For example, if you are sneaking and fail, you would not break your lockpick or cause the meal you were cooking to become poisonous. There would also be caps on some things. An example that gets brought up is persuading the king to give you the crown or such.

 

[toucanbuzz]

The Level Up Advanced 5th Edition main book has "crit" and "fumble" charts for skill checks (so you'd have to get the book). We use them often, and they only can occur in "when it counts" situations. Jumping across a shallow creek with no real penalty or a climb check for a 10' fall wouldn't trigger a chance.

 

[Quickleaf]

My current campaign embraces hijinx and chaos a bit more than usual, so I wanted nat 20s and 1s to have effects on skill use, too. I'm sure many people have done that before, so there must be cool tables for that out there to adapt. I'm running 4e, but tables for every edition are welcome, I'll sift through all of them for ideas

You're running 4e, so you have lots of specific mechanics you can link into with a crit success/fail table, like "recharge a skill/utility power associated with the skill" or "use a skill power for free that you don't know" or "start with 1 success on the next skill challenge pertaining to the skill."

 

[iserith]

I'm also running some D&D 4e now, so for what you're talking about, I would use these as either Advantages or "Special" in skill challenges and not implement critical success or failure outside of them. These would apply to skill challenges of Complexity 3 or higher only.

As an example, you might say in a skill challenge that one of the Advantages (Rules Compendium, page 160) is that a natural 20 contributes 2 successes to the skill challenge instead of just 1, provided the DC is still hit (call it "Better Lucky Than Good"). Or a natural 20 removes a failure instead of accruing a success, at the player's option ("Skin of Your Teeth").

Under "Special" in a skill challenge, a natural 1 might increase the DC of the next check by a set amount or remove a primary or secondary skill as an option. ("With Friends Like These..." or "Shut the Door," respectively).

Also, consider putting this in ChatGPT: Create a critical success or failure chart for skill checks in D&D 4e. The results are pretty good for a starting place.