be a sword-master

>The DM always has final say, regardless of other rules.
The problem is this rule 0.

Rule 0 = The game should be fun for everyone.

DM's have to listen to their players.

I played in a one-shot run by a friend of a friend where he treated anything under a 5 as a fumble, meaning that people constantly fumbled their weapons, embedded their swords in furniture and so forth. It was really fucking stupid, but I guess he came from a tradition of lol silliness or something.

It's usually fun, just as having a 20 be a big success, as it makes for good roleplaying chances and drama. However it tends to be heavily overplayed into retardness.

Last time we played it took like an entire hour to kill two soldiers, because everything we did as a miss.

We did have a lot of bad rolls, but it's weird how characters who were supposed to be Elites were so inept.

Critical failures are utterly necessary.
If players can succeed through luck, they must be able to fail through it too, or the game ends up skewed towards the players' side, which in the end makes it sluggish and unfulfilling.
The worst thing is that especially players who're used to instant satisfaction and videogames can't grasp that - they're winning, so it must be someone else's fault that they're not having fun because winning is always fun.
The fun of a roleplaying game comes from the risks, the ups and downs and the heroic successes contrasted against the embarrassing failures.
If your PC can't fuck up embarrassingly ust as they can succeed heroically, they lose the human element and become harder to properly empathize with and engage in - you put effort into your character when there's a threat that they'll fail, and countless experiments have shown that no matter how much people think they aren't slacking off, they naturally focus less and pay less attention when there's less at stake, also leading to games where everyone's fucking around on their phones.
The problem here is that a lot of players are extremely defensive and strawman straight off the bat, because they self-insert on some level and take their character's losses as their own - and then you end up with things like the OP, which you expect to hear from a five-year-old throwing a tantrum.
The die roll is your success in applying your skill, not your effective skill. This means that under no circumstances should a critical failure be equated with an actual lack of skill, but an actual mistake or stroke of bad luck that could occur in the situation - something the GM has responsibility for thinking up. A GM who makes critical failures parodical ones like in the OP is at fault, but a player who mewls and burbles like a retarded child about critical failures being forbidden when they think a natural 20 or the equivalent should make them be able to do anything are at fault themselves.

I disagree. Rule 0 is fine how it is.

has the right of it. The DM is allowed to be the ultimate moron and the most annoying person ever if he wants to do it. He will end up without any players and that's also allowed. People don't have to play games they don't like. So you just dont play with asshole DMs, and DMs should kick asshole players off the group. And so the consequence to be an asshole, as DM or as player, is to be left gameless.

Yes, a game should be fun for everyone. Yes, DMs -SHOULD- listen to their players. But that doesn't overwrite rule 0 because nobody should be FORCED to run a game they don't like. And the guy running the game gets the ultimate say in how the game goes. If his players don't like it and leave, then well that sucks for that DM. But it sucks less than being stuck running a game you don't like.

There's a reason rule 0 has remained rule 0 for so long. You aren't about to reinvent the wheel by redefining things.

A 5% chance for supposedly trained fighters to go full fucking retard whenever you swing a sword is absurd and has no place outside of some kind of dedicated slapstick comedy campaign.

Could you cite a single game where this has happened

GMs don't "have" to listen to their players, because while some players are bright, some are also retards. The GM is the Game Master, and by far the most rules are written with this in mind - if the GM "has" to listen to the players, he loses the ability to balance the game and create fairness and tension.
Rule 0, the way that it has always been written, is "the rules are subordinate to fun". That's that. The GM, as the Game Master, is the only one who can change the rules to be more fun, but a good GM listens to the players and combines it with his own experience and knowledge of the rules to reach a conclusion, which he shares with the players and doesn't push on them.

This has happened in some of my personal games.

But those games were also played for camp. There was one session where our orc had a danceoff with the bandit leader and another where we killed some other bandits with waffles, so being silly is par for the course.

In more serious games it's just a bad screw-up.

yesterday when i was with bob jim and carl. Does that help you?

Rolled 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 = 25 (25d1)

>If a roll a 100, do I get to instant turn into spaghetti the enemy?
Let's see!

>the rules are subordinate to fun
I can get behind this.

That's what it always been thought...At least since DnD 2e, that's the idea behind rule 0.

Fart.

Occasionally I use something a bit like critical failures where when a combatant gets a 1 they roll a second dice and if the score on that is less than a 5, their opponent can try to shove, interact with an object, make a strength contest to disarm or something similar.

Of course it goes both ways and i try not use it as a stick to beat the players with, just an extra way to help them think more creatively about melee combat

Do you realise that this means no matter how good you are at something every 20th time you do anything results in you "stabbing yourself" "burning castle while trying to fry some eggs" etc. Which is damn stupid if you ask me.

This.

Which is exactly why your example only shows up on imageboards and with high-proof retard GMs.
It has never, ever been a part of a critical failure that "your fighter stabs himself". That is not what it means, and it's only used this way by sore losers and defensive self-inserters.
A trained fighter fighting an enemy and critically failing isn't "durr he stabs himself in ch3st", but among other examples:
>Your hands slick with sweat, your fingers slip as your sword hits your foe's armor, and the blade nicks his armor as it slides off the curve of his pauldron."
>"Victory seems within grasp as your foe staggers and hesitates, and you close the distance for a blow - but as he readjusts himself. the distance closes to the point where you only have five centimeters to wind up the blow."
"Your mind focused on the perfect blow lined up in your mind, you see and feel only your blade and your opponent - and just as you bring down your blade, you feel a hard kick in the shins, sending you skidding back and your blade missing your opponent's neck by a matter of inches."
All of these are potentially critical failures, because they leave you open to a world of hurt - but they don't necessarily have to include you hurting yourself, just you suffering worse consequences than just missing.
And keeping critical successes in also means that no matter how bad you are at something, every 20th time you "lop the head clean off the enemy with a rusty butter knife" or "leap twenty meters despite being a farm kid with a broken leg and a sword stuck through his lung".
Strawmen go both ways. Critical failures, like literally everything else ever in roleplaying games, have to obey internal logic or be a bad decision on someone's part.

A game I played some time ago.

I was a master swordsman and was standing on top of a wall. I was fighting a group of bandits. The wall was tight and I was standing right close to the enemy so I try a stab. Critical failure, you just stabbed yourself. Roll to see how much damage you suffered.

Perfect.

Now this guy. This guy knows whats up.

>that is not what it means, and it's only used this way by sore losers and defensive self-inserters
Then why do I keep saying actually happen at my LGS? For all of the talk of strawmans, that shit happens pretty often amongst retard GMs.

>This shit happens pretty often amongst posters who don't read posts they reply to.

>Then why do I keep saying actually happen at my LGS? For all of the talk of strawmans, that shit happens pretty often amongst retard GMs.
See
>Which is exactly why your example only shows up on imageboards and with high-proof retard GMs
>and with high-proof retard GMs

I play with a DM who uses critical fumbles, but they're within reason. To use your example, rather than burning the castle down while trying to fry eggs, you instead just happen to be out of eggs.

I think it adds a fun dynamic, I mean rolling a 1 should be something that sucks just like rolling a 20 should be something excellent.

But yeah, stabbing yourself in the chest is dumbtarded.

I ran a game in fallout pnp (which, as of when I ran it, was not a functional system). Critical Successes and Failures were a huge part of the game, as players had some degree of control over them because the chance was determined by their Luck stat. They could determine for themselves how important that was to them, and dump Luck at their own peril.

It actually worked out pretty well, barring a few notable exceptions.

>first fight of a brand new campagin, fighting scavangers after being shipwrecked, my character getting disarmed
>other player "i throw a dagger to anons character, for him to catch. *nat 1*
>dm "you throw it with a spin, causing it to slice off one of user's fingers"
>mfw
im not really salty about it, i agreed to have crit fail in the game, and since it didn't really have mechanical consequences so did it add some nice flavor to the character, who at the end of the campaign had gone from babyface mcgee to being covered from head to toe with battlescars.

I occaisonally do this, though not so much "You stabbed yourself" and rather play off the fact that in most systems, you're in a proper back and forth duel, and are rolling to see if you manage to get past the enemy's parrying.
As such, if you're up against a far more skilled enemy and roll a nat1, I sometimes do something like "You attempt a fancy move to distract your opponent, but he sees through your feint and takes this opportunity to strike! You deflect, but just barely! Take 1 (or depending on level/weapons 1d4/1d6/etc) point of damage."
I might also just give the enemy an attack of opportunity/whatever works in the system.

>since it didn't really have mechanical consequences

You are so luck. Every finger lost was like -1 DEX at my table.

If critical hit must be confirmed, wouldn't it make sense to confirm the critical failures too?

Yes, but you don't need to do it by making the PCs look like clowns.

>Wizard casts a spell
>>Hey user. Roll concentration to cast
>But i don't need to roll concentration for this
>>Yeah but if you roll a 1 I get to roll on the wild magic table to see what happens.
Better?

No that's terrible

But it seems fair. Ooo. Let's make it so if they roll a 1 the spell fizzles AND they have to roll wild magic.

As a level 1 generalist wizard in PF, I tried using my hand of the apprentice power to do a ranged melee attack with an axe and the DM made me roll just because I missed and I almost one-shot a party member.

Then again, it wasn't rolling a "1" per se, but the principle was still the same.

Why consider it a strawman if retard GMs are so common?

Because OP and a lot of people in this thread are blaming the idea of critical failures themselves, when the problem is with a bad GM.
If someone makes a mistake in applying a rule, the problem isn't with the rule but with the person. If you had to cut out all rules that people could possibly abuse and with that hurt poor thin-skinned players, games would be boiled down to "roll until you roll over 10, in which case you win forever; in case of a failure, immediately roll again and add 10 to the result".

>lucky
the player that threw the dagger was an "undead elf" that wanted to be a ranger/sorcerer/druid, inspired by sylvanas from WoW, and also player her as a constant bitch and also a lesbian with a blood fetish

it had been explained to him that both the system and the setting was a low fantasy osr system, where players couldn't even get their hand on magic, without the possibility of finding enchanted items in the way, way late game of it. the rest of the group was me with a longsword as a "longsword fencer's apprentice", a drunken veteran knight with a shield and flail and a kid orphan thief with a sling.

it was the dms first time (me and the orphan player had played once before, it was everyone elses first time playing) so while he did come down of it pretty hard, so did he still allow it, technically (the player had to hide his characters identity, and nobody know exactly what she was, but she was "one of the long lost high elves, risen again, for some reason" and, while not given magic, was given "trick arrows" to perform some faux-magic

the campaign didn't last super long since the grill that played the orphan and the DM had gotten into a relationship, and then she came out as transgender, which followed by her using manipulation and lies into guilting the dm into staying with her (she did not come out in a "do you still love me even if" but rather "if you don't, you're a fucking horrible shitlord of a human being, so you do, right?" which was followed by a breakup, lies about pregnancy, lies to the other member of the table and general shit to break us apart. the game was ruined, but we four remained friends (the sylvanas player is still a great guy, aslong as he's nowhere near a boardgame).

The OP never made the claim that it was crit failures themselves that are the problem though.
>why is this allowed
Could refer to any part of that. I took it as making the clearly retarded GM.

DMs only have to listen to their players insofar as they'll lose their players if they don't. That's the point.

>Veeky Forums complaint department
>Have you tried not playing D&D

>complaining about critical fails
Shut up. It's realistic.

No, because I actually want to be able to find people to play with
:^)

>Implying critical failures are unique to D&D
You need to play tabletop games before you get to play that card, user.

Refuse to acknowledge that silliness, just don't mark the hp damage on your sheet and carry on as if nothing happened. You don't have to follow the GM's rulings if they're retarded.

PbtA do in game failures pretty good.

It's realistic that Merlin shot a magic missile and frizzled his foot?

>lies about pregnancy
>had come out about being trans
How?!

FtM probably.

Or, given that they seem to be one of those attention-whoring control freak borderline personality disorder cunts, "I identify as non-binary that means I am trans, though I'm still going to dress pretty much the way I have before just with a shitty Kool Kweer Kids haircut."

Its not realistic that he could fire magic missile at all, you mong.

Critical fumble is a made up negative homerule. It has no place in serious games unless it is funny enough in the circumstances that all the players enjoy it.

>No-one ever slips, stumbles, gets out of position or loses grip on their weapon in a fight
The concept isn't bad, the GMs are bad

All of those exist in the game as something that is done to you, and you have saving throws against them.

People trip over shit in fights without someone explicitly trying to manuevre them into falling over it, for example. So why not have a mechanic to simulate that too?

Stop confusing Rule Zero with the Golden Rule!

People don't normally trip over shit unless it's slippery or otherwise similarly tricky terrain. Dexterity saving throws.

Because you chose to play with a retarded GM.

crit fails don't make sense to me outside of a bell curve system
if you want it i feel like you should just add flavor to a crit success/fail, not have the player "stab themselves," i mean unless they're REALLY fucking bad with a sword i guess

Because critical failures are explicitly NOT a mechanic. It's not a rule in the book. It's just the DM being an enormous faggot and making shit up because his penis gets hard thinking about how wacky and "fun" it will be to ignore the rules at the expense of the other people playing at the table.

Invalid complaint fucknut, that retarded Nat 1 Rule is not in any edition of D&D. It is a moronic houserule that is disturbingly common.

Dear lord no, even in olympic fencing the faggots are all over the place, and that's in a lovely warm sports hall. Uneven floortiles, puddles, whatever. Even just trying to back up over uneven ground while under pressure isn't going to be easy.

You talk like nothing should ever be houseruled ever. I personally think its an interesting mechanism to put in, you are by no means obliged to do the same.
Also you're immediately assuming 'crit-fail = wacky', which tells me you haven't read a word of what I've been saying.

>I personally think its an interesting mechanism to put in
>become level 20 Monkman, Demigod of Monks, best monk puncher to have ever existed
>32.66% chance of stupid shit happening every round while a level 1 Monk had a 9.75% chance of the same thing
Do you see the problem here?

>Not confirming your crits
This is the future you chose

That changes nothing about the part where you become more likely to fail retardedly when you become more skilled.

Do you not know how confirming crits works?

Its not a perfect solution, but we're playing an imperfect game and I personally much prefer it to just not doing anything.

You do you though, I'm not going to make you do anything.

>roll a nat 1
critical miss, roll again
>nat 20
ok, now you've hit yourself, roll dmg.

this guy know whats up

not really
no army would be able to function if there was 5% chance somebody shoots themselves in the head EVERY TIME they pull a trigger or to pick up their gun

Some earlier muskets would misfire about that often though. Again, I think we all agree that the wackiness is dumb, the debate is wether its a good idea wackiness aside

It really depends on what the actual fumble is. Something like cutting off your own head is dogshit.

Something like dropping your weapon, or pulling a muscle, or getting it stuck into a wall or a tree (or the enemy) is another matter.

I hate roll to walk bullshit.

Flat curves are cancer. Critical being as likely as the average is cancer. Don't play games that use a single die for resolution. This means no 1d20, no 1d10, no 1d100, none of that bullshit. Flat curves should not exist as the main resolution mechanic.

>roll 1
>your pants dropped and you slip
>the enemy is unbuttoning his pants
>fades to black

Isn't d100 technically the same as rolling 2d10 though?

The problem isn't 5% fail chance, the problem is your shit DM making it stupid bullshit.

The problem is a) it happens too often and b) shit DM's think that it's funny.

2d10 read as % has the same probabilities as a d100, so it doesn't help.

Not even remotely. You have an equal chance of any result on a d100.

I don't think anyone here is say Nat 1 = Failure is bad. It is the "lol u stab self" on a Nat 1.

Exactly.

If you're playing Stooge: The Hyukening, or Everybody is John, it's perfectly reasonable for every single action to have a large chance of painful and humiliating slapstick.

If you're supposed to be portraying a genuinely skilled swordsman swinging at a practice dummy twenty times, you should not have a 65% chance to decapitate yourself.

My house rule: a natural 1 is always a miss, and a natural 20 is always a hit.

One a natural 1, roll and add your attack modifier. If it would hit the enemy's AC, you just miss as usual. If it would miss, your opponent can make an attack against you as a reaction.

>couldn't do this normally so i threw more house ruled gambling in a gambling game lol
Fuck off.

Remember how 3.PF had you check for critical? I just make my players check for critical failure too. So it can happen but you have to roll two nat 1s in a row. Much more rare. Didn't roll a second nat 1? Then you just missed badly or miscalculated something about the opponent. Oops. Also this only applies to attacks; critical failure isn't a skill thing. Though I guess it could be because again, two nat 1s. That'd be up to the group though.

just make it a rule that you need to confirm critical failures through more rolls the more skilled/leveled you are. A skilled player has incompetence minimized

Nat 1 = Failure and Nat 20 = Success is bad. A critical failure, critical hit, and average roll should not all have the same chance of happening.

Why not? Explain your resoning

Criticals are supposed to be special, right? But on a d20, the 1 and the 20 are no more special than a 9, 10, or 17. They're all equally likely to occur.

So why would you have something special happen on a number that's just as likely to happen as any other number? Why not have it be natural 7's and natural 13's?

Of course this argument relies on you putting value on criticals being special. If you don't think they should be special, then that's that.

Because if each outcome has an equal chance of occurring, it means that there's no reason to ever improve any aspect of your character because the die is the sole determining factor of whether or not you succeed.

To put it simply, why should I play a game where I'm more likely to stab myself in the face the more levels and attacks I get?

Crits should go the way of the kebab and be removed.

Ok, so crit on a 13 then. No-one's stopping you. I don't see how you have a problem with this aspect of it.

This guy at least makes a valid argument.
Although he's still using the old 'crit misses means you're stabbing yourself in the balls' meme

How is wanting criticals to have a different chance of occurring from the average roll not a valid argument? If critials are supposed to mean something, they can't have the same chance as every other possibility. The meaning of a critical is that it's rare, and on a d20, or any flat curve, they aren't rare.

If the value on the die doesn't matter then then it raises the question, why is THIS particular value more important than any other value on the die?

I mean, at least when you roll a crit in a 3d6 system, rolling a [3] or an [18] is something that's generally rare enough that you can justify how significant the effect of the critical is when it occurs.