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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6014434" data-attributes="member: 4937">- emphasis addedI'm really fighting a bunch of strawmen at this point, because everyone arguing against fumbles would seem to want to have the effects of fumbles be absolute and continues to color their descriptions with lots of extreme absolute adjectives.No, I can understand you don't like fumbles, but can we stop attempting to justify that dislike on the basis of absolutist language?Who said absolutely nothing is being done with casters?  Since casters aren't part of this conversation, we can perhaps assume that people who like fumbles also like dramatic spellmisfires that do things like suck the soul out of your body or turn you into hamburger meat.  Maybe running around with a sharp stick is supposed to be immensely safer than wielding the eldritch powers of darkness under these house rules despite the fumbles?  I mean, we can't really say what has happened with the casters.  Maybe in the particular game system with the fumbles, spellcasting was so weak that fumbles were introduced to level the playing field.  The point being that you can't use casters to prove absolutely that fumbles are bad.Yes, it's worth noting that fumbles can hamper people who use attacks more often than those that don't, but that hinderance need neither be absolute nor is it something that can't be compesated for.  I've had no problems balancing casters and non-casters so far, and when and if the balance falls apart it won't be because of the fumbles.But does the 6th level character have twice the chance of screwing up?  There are some big assumptions in that statement.  Because, even though the chances are low, it does come up and players still remember those events with the big successes and big failures and occasions were they preformed stunts and manuevers far more than they remember the normal give and take of combat.  The main thing that you want to avoid is clownish swinginess in your combat, where things are so random that they break suspension of disbelief, because that isn't actually gritty.  But, clownish swinginess in a system can occur completely without fumbles (as in some d% systems), or it can occur when the system has hidden fumble/critical mechanics in the form of exploding dice - Savage Worlds and similar systems for example annoy me to no end. - emphasis addedAgain, despite using me as an example, you have totally ignored me as a source of information.  I have just told you that it occurs.  I'm not 100 sessions into the game, and its occurred a countable number of times.  Clearly it is adding something to the game - the occasional stumble, the occasional scramble for a weapon, the occasional mishap, pulled muscle, clumsy attack - these are all things that happen in a game and will be familiar to anyone engaged in atheletic activity and/or combat.  That versimlitude is important, and is just as important as my gritty descriptions of medieval life, the consequences of villainy, and the tangible messy environments in which adventures occur.  I have a specific effect I'm trying to achieve, or I wouldn't have the rule.One important consequence of fumbles is that they can change the round to round state of the game.  That in my opinion is very important, because what you don't want is one round looking much the same as the last one or the next one.  You want reasons to be dynamic, even if they are simple as, "I'm going to take a defensive fighting stance this round.", or "My opponent dropped his guard; I'm totally doing an all out attack this round!"  Fumbles aren't the whole of that, but a part.  They aren't necessarily the most important part, but they have several important roles. The fumbles are designed to interact with my rules as a synergistic whole, where each round you can be greeted with new problems to solve, new oppurtunities to take advantage of, and new actions you can take to steer the combat.</blockquote>

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