Do you mean 'critical fumbles?' Because that should depend on how frequent they are (statistically) and how severe you envision your 'negative consequences.'
Yeh, a 1 shouldn't be some colossal destructive failure but it ought to be not just a miss but some more kind of frickup.
Using
No. Rolling dice is supposed to be fun. Making me afraid to roll dice is not enjoyable for anyone. "I think I'll just jump the river" "Alright roll me a..." "Never mind I don't jump the river."
>Jump the river and roll 1 = you fall in, now someone has to help you
dynamic storytelling hooray >Jump the river and roll a 1 = you drown nigguh
Adversarial DMing punishing dice rolling.
In the system I play, crit fail on opposed checks (it's an active defence system) means your opponent automatically crits if they hit. I like that because it's inherently not unbalanced (assume crit effects aren't unbalanced)
depends on the sistem and the degree of negative consequences
For example if you roll nat1 in D20 and you immediately die because of it life in that universe would have ceased to exist a long ago
This. Entirely system dependent.
In d20 it probably shouldn't have any severe consequences outside maybe combat but in something like genesys rolling despair is built into the system
critical failures are stupid
if there's a 1% chance that performing an action kills you, your character will last about 100 actions. sometimes they won't last 1.
You've clearly never played a game with critical failures. It's more like a 1-in-100 chance of something to go wrong, and a further 1-in-100 chance of that being something which would even have a chance of ending your character's life on the spot.
Critical failures can contribute to dying, but that's because of extenuating circumstances, like playing with swords.
the critical success and failure optional rule in 5e is on 1s, so a 5% chance. it literally just says "increase the impact of the success or failure" and gives breaking your lockpick as an example.
even with the crit fail table you're describing, someone will eventually trigger it. it can happen very fast too, depending on how often they're rolling. in general it punishes doing anything.
why give myself extra attacks when that's just extra chances of killing myself? why try a complicated plan when it has so much potential of catastrophic failure?
Anon you waste your breathe on feeling types, they can corncob themselves for the sake of making sure their sentiment aligns with what they see, but not with what is actual reality.
Anon you waste your breathe on feeling types, they can corncob themselves for the sake of making sure their sentiment aligns with what they see, but not with what is actual reality.
Are you both reptilians or something? Why are your brains so weird.
No. Rolling dice is supposed to be fun. Making me afraid to roll dice is not enjoyable for anyone. "I think I'll just jump the river" "Alright roll me a..." "Never mind I don't jump the river."
When well implemented fumble rolls can be interesting. >Roll to jump the river >Fumble >You slip hard trying to jump to the next rock in on your path and one of your belt pouches tears off. You can see glitters of coins float downstream just as you get your balance. Do you take a risk and get them or keep moving?
It can keep sequences that might otherwise be rote interesting and like all rules you don't always have to apply it and your GM shouldn't ask you to roll if it's not possible or meaningful for you to fail at that moment.
If you're rolling dice, it's because a) there is some uncertainty as to whether or not your action can succeed, and b) there is a meaningful difference between success and failure. The classic example is picking the lock on a locked door. Say it is not impossibly difficult, but not trivially easy, either; this means that rolling dice depend on there being consequences for success and failure. If the lock is on a lockbox, and you've brought it back to the safety of your room at the inn in town, there is no reason you can't keep trying it over and over until you succeed, so there is no roll required. If the lock is on a door in the dungeon, and there is no one on the other side, no random encounters, no wandering monsters, and the party is very well stocked on food, water, and torches, similarly there is no reason to require a roll. But if resources are not functionally infinite and/or wasting time invites danger, then there is a reason to roll. The consequence of failing the roll is now you have to either give up on picking the lock, or spend time trying to pick the lock until you succeed, in which case your torch has burned down a little bit more and maybe you invite a roll for wandering monsters or such. In my game each attempt at picking that lock would cost time, so each failed roll means another unpleasant choice between spending time picking the lock or giving up on seeing what's on the other side. Long story short, yes failing a roll must necessarily have negative consequences, because if there is no meaningful difference between success and failure you shouldn't be rolling in the first place.
When I was describing the scenario to you, I should have specified how wide, deep, and swift the river looks. If my description was insufficiently clear that you're not sure if you can clear it with a jump or not, that would be my bad, but there is nothing wrong with asking a clarifying question before deciding to act.
Dice rolling is only fun because of the possibility of failure and negative consequence. Otherwise, you can do diceless where you succeed at everything and nothing interesting ever happens and you're a giant Mary Sue. Whatever helps you sleep.
It depends on several factors >playing D&D 5e, 3.5 or PF
These systems where not built for it, flat out. Don't try and add "realism" by making the fighter stab himself every 20 times he swings his sword. >what does a system need to be a good candidate for crit fails?
First: all classes/roles should involve roughly the same number of dice rolls. If they don't it means some players will naturally get more fumbles
Second: the odds of fumbling should be affected by the skill of the character and the difficulty of the roll. A master Acrobat shouldn't snap their legs because they failed at jumping five feet.
Third: the consequences of a fumble should be inversely proportional to the odds of getting a fumble. Actions should not have a 5% chance of leaving you with a permanent injury or significant hp loss, a more appropriate outcome for those odds should be losing your footing in combat (penalty to further actions until you take time to regain your footing), causing someone to lose respect for you (in a social encounter), or breaking breaking the item you are working with (craft or lockpicking. Or setting it off if it's a trap)
>i jump the canyon >nat 1 >you jump and barely make it, your fingers grab onto the ledge, you drop all the gold you were holding. Do you drop your shield and pull yourself up or wait for your companions? you have 3 turns.
then i wouldn't roll in the first place. rolling is for things where the outcome is uncertain, there is some obvious consequence for failure, and there's something preventing you from just doing it over and over till you get it right.
but even if that, your foot slipped a little, or you accidentally thought about that time you said "you too" when the wench said enjoy your ale. idk does it matter? the dice tells you "did it happen?" not "can you do it?".
You get one dice dropped/fall off the table fault per night. After that it become a progressively worse result for your character. The second dropped roll, an automiss. The third, you hit yourself. The fourth, you crit yourself. The fifth, your character is dead.
Confirm them like you do for crits. If you get a 1 or 20, roll again. 1/20 again, roll on a 1d100 crit/fumble table which has a wide range of severity.
That said, I did lose a character in session 1, first combat encounter to one of these (chance of that exact roll was 0.00025%) but I wouldn't have had it any other way. Sometimes characters just have to die and it makes for a better story in the end.
I don't much like dealing with them or the fallout outside of the more immediate failure. I'm content to just let a miss be a miss regardless if it's a 1 or a 14.
We only do critical fumbles on double 1s (on roll20 you can set it so the macros always roll two dice, then if you dont have (dis)advantage, you just use the leftmost one).
World of darkness has a system like this, dramatic failures. If you fail a roll you can make it one for a beat (experience) and the ST gets to decide how you fail a roll. It has led to some funny moments like me accidentally blood bonding another PC. There's also chance dies which is one die you have to roll a 10 on or else you fail, and if it's a 1 it's an automatic dramatic fail with no beat
The Call of Cthulhu 7e system of pushed rolls is objectively the best way to handle this.
Fail a roll to pick a lock? You just kinda fail to pick it, but no real consequences to it. Push the roll and fail it again? A guard has now heard you.
It adds far more dynamism to everything, a risk reward system and makes more sense since, yeah, a person would just try again.
It's simply realism that 5% of the time you swing a sword you risk killing yourself. Black powder guns are the exception, they have a 15-20% chance of exploding every time you shoot them.
it depends on the action they're describing and the stakes of it succeeding. Trying to steal an apple from a vendors cart as a rogue is pretty low stakes, a nat 1 you might accidentally knock fruit off the cart making a scene and alert the vendor to your shenanigans. Rolling a nat 1 in a scenario where you're a character with low athletics and you need to quickly jump a dangerous gap to escape an enemy would have more severe consequences, you mistime your jump and have to make an athletics check to see if you catch yourself on a rock, maybe another player tries to quickly catch you as you begin to fall etc. Super severe consequences come about from extremely risky actions. Had players in a sleeping dragons den notice the dragon had something hidden under its talons. Rogue tried to get closer, passed the stealth checks and wanted to sleight of hand indiana jones it away from the dragon. He rolled a 1, the dragon snapped awake and swiped at the rogue horrendously damaging their arm. The party managed to escape but slowed down by treasure they were forced to abandon it. Though the rogue escaped as well his arm was now in danger of being lost if not treated by a powerful healer, in the end they didn't find one in time. Eventually leading to a new side mission to find a way to replace or regrow the missing limb. The nat 1 there had consequences for the rogue and added new roleplay options for how they'd replace that missing arm.
Have you ever once in your life mistimed a jump? Tried to jump something and failed? I haven't. We know our limits. Every jump I have made in my entire life, I succeeded in. That's why it makes zero sense to roll for it and have a 5% chance to crit fail.
>Have you ever once in your life mistimed a jump? Tried to jump something and failed?
Yeah lol, I used to skate all the time as a kid and have broken bones by fricking up jumps. The risk (injury) was worth the reward (feeling great/looking cool). There's literally an entire olympic event about correctly timing jumps and if everyone did that shit without risk there'd be no real competition.
Do you mean 'critical fumbles?' Because that should depend on how frequent they are (statistically) and how severe you envision your 'negative consequences.'
I guess its the difference between
>You rolled a 1, your attack does no damage
and
>You rolled a 1, you stab yourself in the nards
Yeh, a 1 shouldn't be some colossal destructive failure but it ought to be not just a miss but some more kind of frickup.
Using
>Jump the river and roll 1 = you fall in, now someone has to help you
dynamic storytelling hooray
>Jump the river and roll a 1 = you drown nigguh
Adversarial DMing punishing dice rolling.
In the system I play, crit fail on opposed checks (it's an active defence system) means your opponent automatically crits if they hit. I like that because it's inherently not unbalanced (assume crit effects aren't unbalanced)
depends on the sistem and the degree of negative consequences
For example if you roll nat1 in D20 and you immediately die because of it life in that universe would have ceased to exist a long ago
This. Entirely system dependent.
In d20 it probably shouldn't have any severe consequences outside maybe combat but in something like genesys rolling despair is built into the system
critical failures are stupid
if there's a 1% chance that performing an action kills you, your character will last about 100 actions. sometimes they won't last 1.
>only critical failure
In my games any failure kills your character. Git gud or git dead.
You don't play games.
Its a joke homie
It's actually the main mechanic in Dread
Playing game is not playing games.
You've clearly never played a game with critical failures. It's more like a 1-in-100 chance of something to go wrong, and a further 1-in-100 chance of that being something which would even have a chance of ending your character's life on the spot.
Critical failures can contribute to dying, but that's because of extenuating circumstances, like playing with swords.
the critical success and failure optional rule in 5e is on 1s, so a 5% chance. it literally just says "increase the impact of the success or failure" and gives breaking your lockpick as an example.
even with the crit fail table you're describing, someone will eventually trigger it. it can happen very fast too, depending on how often they're rolling. in general it punishes doing anything.
why give myself extra attacks when that's just extra chances of killing myself? why try a complicated plan when it has so much potential of catastrophic failure?
Anon you waste your breathe on feeling types, they can corncob themselves for the sake of making sure their sentiment aligns with what they see, but not with what is actual reality.
Are you both reptilians or something? Why are your brains so weird.
No. Rolling dice is supposed to be fun. Making me afraid to roll dice is not enjoyable for anyone. "I think I'll just jump the river" "Alright roll me a..." "Never mind I don't jump the river."
When well implemented fumble rolls can be interesting.
>Roll to jump the river
>Fumble
>You slip hard trying to jump to the next rock in on your path and one of your belt pouches tears off. You can see glitters of coins float downstream just as you get your balance. Do you take a risk and get them or keep moving?
It can keep sequences that might otherwise be rote interesting and like all rules you don't always have to apply it and your GM shouldn't ask you to roll if it's not possible or meaningful for you to fail at that moment.
>How dare my actions have a chance for a negative consequence
My actions and my rolls are different things. Punish my actions, not my luck.
failing is a negative consequence, exploding because you drank the orange juice wrong is stupid
If you're rolling dice, it's because a) there is some uncertainty as to whether or not your action can succeed, and b) there is a meaningful difference between success and failure. The classic example is picking the lock on a locked door. Say it is not impossibly difficult, but not trivially easy, either; this means that rolling dice depend on there being consequences for success and failure. If the lock is on a lockbox, and you've brought it back to the safety of your room at the inn in town, there is no reason you can't keep trying it over and over until you succeed, so there is no roll required. If the lock is on a door in the dungeon, and there is no one on the other side, no random encounters, no wandering monsters, and the party is very well stocked on food, water, and torches, similarly there is no reason to require a roll. But if resources are not functionally infinite and/or wasting time invites danger, then there is a reason to roll. The consequence of failing the roll is now you have to either give up on picking the lock, or spend time trying to pick the lock until you succeed, in which case your torch has burned down a little bit more and maybe you invite a roll for wandering monsters or such. In my game each attempt at picking that lock would cost time, so each failed roll means another unpleasant choice between spending time picking the lock or giving up on seeing what's on the other side. Long story short, yes failing a roll must necessarily have negative consequences, because if there is no meaningful difference between success and failure you shouldn't be rolling in the first place.
When I was describing the scenario to you, I should have specified how wide, deep, and swift the river looks. If my description was insufficiently clear that you're not sure if you can clear it with a jump or not, that would be my bad, but there is nothing wrong with asking a clarifying question before deciding to act.
Dice rolling is only fun because of the possibility of failure and negative consequence. Otherwise, you can do diceless where you succeed at everything and nothing interesting ever happens and you're a giant Mary Sue. Whatever helps you sleep.
It depends on several factors
>playing D&D 5e, 3.5 or PF
These systems where not built for it, flat out. Don't try and add "realism" by making the fighter stab himself every 20 times he swings his sword.
>what does a system need to be a good candidate for crit fails?
First: all classes/roles should involve roughly the same number of dice rolls. If they don't it means some players will naturally get more fumbles
Second: the odds of fumbling should be affected by the skill of the character and the difficulty of the roll. A master Acrobat shouldn't snap their legs because they failed at jumping five feet.
Third: the consequences of a fumble should be inversely proportional to the odds of getting a fumble. Actions should not have a 5% chance of leaving you with a permanent injury or significant hp loss, a more appropriate outcome for those odds should be losing your footing in combat (penalty to further actions until you take time to regain your footing), causing someone to lose respect for you (in a social encounter), or breaking breaking the item you are working with (craft or lockpicking. Or setting it off if it's a trap)
Should you be sodomised to death or beaten to death? In both cases with a yardstick
instant death is for uncreative referees.
>i jump the canyon
>nat 1
>you jump and barely make it, your fingers grab onto the ledge, you drop all the gold you were holding. Do you drop your shield and pull yourself up or wait for your companions? you have 3 turns.
what if even with a nat1 my jump distance far exceeds the needed?
Monks aren't allowed in my table
then i wouldn't roll in the first place. rolling is for things where the outcome is uncertain, there is some obvious consequence for failure, and there's something preventing you from just doing it over and over till you get it right.
then why are you rolling?
but even if that, your foot slipped a little, or you accidentally thought about that time you said "you too" when the wench said enjoy your ale. idk does it matter? the dice tells you "did it happen?" not "can you do it?".
Depends on what you rolled for.
You get one dice dropped/fall off the table fault per night. After that it become a progressively worse result for your character. The second dropped roll, an automiss. The third, you hit yourself. The fourth, you crit yourself. The fifth, your character is dead.
dexterity dump stat players in shambles
Confirm them like you do for crits. If you get a 1 or 20, roll again. 1/20 again, roll on a 1d100 crit/fumble table which has a wide range of severity.
That said, I did lose a character in session 1, first combat encounter to one of these (chance of that exact roll was 0.00025%) but I wouldn't have had it any other way. Sometimes characters just have to die and it makes for a better story in the end.
I don't much like dealing with them or the fallout outside of the more immediate failure. I'm content to just let a miss be a miss regardless if it's a 1 or a 14.
No, it's a game we're playing for fun and players shouldn't be punished just for daring to try to do something.
We only do critical fumbles on double 1s (on roll20 you can set it so the macros always roll two dice, then if you dont have (dis)advantage, you just use the leftmost one).
Yes but only if the roller attempts an action that will bring negative consequences if he's not succesful. Fumbles are unnecessary.
World of darkness has a system like this, dramatic failures. If you fail a roll you can make it one for a beat (experience) and the ST gets to decide how you fail a roll. It has led to some funny moments like me accidentally blood bonding another PC. There's also chance dies which is one die you have to roll a 10 on or else you fail, and if it's a 1 it's an automatic dramatic fail with no beat
The Call of Cthulhu 7e system of pushed rolls is objectively the best way to handle this.
Fail a roll to pick a lock? You just kinda fail to pick it, but no real consequences to it. Push the roll and fail it again? A guard has now heard you.
It adds far more dynamism to everything, a risk reward system and makes more sense since, yeah, a person would just try again.
It's simply realism that 5% of the time you swing a sword you risk killing yourself. Black powder guns are the exception, they have a 15-20% chance of exploding every time you shoot them.
Yes, that's why I play DCC.
So whats the story behind this guy?
He rolled a nat 1.
it depends on the action they're describing and the stakes of it succeeding. Trying to steal an apple from a vendors cart as a rogue is pretty low stakes, a nat 1 you might accidentally knock fruit off the cart making a scene and alert the vendor to your shenanigans. Rolling a nat 1 in a scenario where you're a character with low athletics and you need to quickly jump a dangerous gap to escape an enemy would have more severe consequences, you mistime your jump and have to make an athletics check to see if you catch yourself on a rock, maybe another player tries to quickly catch you as you begin to fall etc. Super severe consequences come about from extremely risky actions. Had players in a sleeping dragons den notice the dragon had something hidden under its talons. Rogue tried to get closer, passed the stealth checks and wanted to sleight of hand indiana jones it away from the dragon. He rolled a 1, the dragon snapped awake and swiped at the rogue horrendously damaging their arm. The party managed to escape but slowed down by treasure they were forced to abandon it. Though the rogue escaped as well his arm was now in danger of being lost if not treated by a powerful healer, in the end they didn't find one in time. Eventually leading to a new side mission to find a way to replace or regrow the missing limb. The nat 1 there had consequences for the rogue and added new roleplay options for how they'd replace that missing arm.
Have you ever once in your life mistimed a jump? Tried to jump something and failed? I haven't. We know our limits. Every jump I have made in my entire life, I succeeded in. That's why it makes zero sense to roll for it and have a 5% chance to crit fail.
>Have you ever once in your life mistimed a jump? Tried to jump something and failed?
Yeah lol, I used to skate all the time as a kid and have broken bones by fricking up jumps. The risk (injury) was worth the reward (feeling great/looking cool). There's literally an entire olympic event about correctly timing jumps and if everyone did that shit without risk there'd be no real competition.
I guess you're just a fricking idiot. My bad for assuming otherwise.
No, if the failure isn't a negative outcome on its own then don't bother rolling.
Misroll sounds like tossing the dice wrong, like it fell off the table, or didn't roll at all, or something.
Also banging art.