“So uh, did you remember to sheath your weapon after the last fight? Well, you didn’t explicitly say that you did…”
“Awww man I just shot Marvin in the face”
Had a group that would play DnD 3.5, where you need to roll to confirm crits (20 auto hits, roll again against AC to crit). We ended up rolling to confirm fumbles as well because catastrophic failure doesn’t just happen 5% of the time. Imagine 5% of your army accidentally chopping their foot off or beheading their nearest kinsman every few seconds.
That’s the way I handle it. A 1 on the die is automatic failure, but roll again and on another 1, it’s catastrophic.
That’s a 0.25% chance. Seems too low. I’d just repeat the test and if it results in a failure, it’s a critical. That way the difficulty of the test would factor in.
1 catastrophic failure out of 400 attempts when you are trained in the task seems… Very high.
I teach sword, if a critical fumble happened 1 out of 400 strikes I would have given up practicing ages ago due to the fear of maiming myself.
My favorite MadTV sketch.
Crazy how Phil managed to talk them into doing a feature film length skit just to get his head blown off
I’ve always had beef with crit failures where it not only isn’t balanced the way crit successes are. In other words, they don’t really have a place outside of combat, and even there they should be not only rare, but realistic.
The worst a crit fail should be is giving the enemy an attack of opportunity. That’s it. Maybe you could stretch it into something like dropping the weapon, or hitting an unintended target that was realistically in line with the weapon’s movement, which still doesn’t mean it would do full damage.
I dunno how many of the DMs that use it have actually been in a real, life or death fight, but it can’t be a lot. I would say it’s near zero just because of the stories people tell about crit fails in combat.
Strangely, where it would apply more is in skill checks that wouldn’t normally be bothered with. But that would still be situational, like a carpenter hitting their thumb with the hammer. It wouldn’t typically end up with some kind of devastating effects 5% of the time, either. Even when it did end up catastrophic, the fail on that kind of skill still wouldn’t mean total failure often enough to merit it being a meme level thing. Even a drunk carpenter that hammers his thumb and needs to see a doctor can come back and finish the rest of the job. It might not sell, but the table would still be a table, if you see what I mean.
A nat 1 as a meme is awesome, I love the humor of it and play with it myself. But in game it not only isn’t RAW, it isn’t balanced out the way it sometimes gets implemented.
RIP Marvin.
