Do you prefer it when a game has critical failure rules, or none?To be clear, I mean "a failure that, as a consequence of being such a low roll, also induces some other negative fallout, whether this is couched as the character's incompetence or some cosmic stroke of bad luck." I am not talking about automatic failures.Some games have neither critical successes nor critical failures. Some games have critical successes, but no critical failures. For example, in the default rules of D&D 3.X, D&D 4e, D&D 5e, Path/Starfinder 1e, Draw Steel, and Fate Core/Accelerated/Condensed, no matter how low someone rolls, it will never be a critical failure. It might be an automatic failure in some cases, but even that will never induce some other negative fallout.Path/Starfinder 2e is weird and inconsistent about this. For example, when using Deception (Lie), there are neither critical successes nor critical failures. When using Diplomacy (Make an Impression) or Diplomacy (Request), there are critical successes and critical failures, but when using Diplomacy (Gather Information), there are critical failures but no critical successes. Recall Knowledge rolls are awkward, because the GM has to roll them in secret; on a critical failure, the GM has to lie to the player and feed false information.Chronicles of Darkness, a horror game, has semi-frequent critical successes, but rare critical failures. A critical failure happens only in two cases. One, the character's roll is so heavily penalized that they are down to a "chance die," with a 10% chance of critical failure, an 80% chance of regular failure, and a 10% chance of regular success. Two, the character earns a regular failure, but the player willingly degrades it to a critical failure, gaining XP as compensation.
Not too long ago, in one heroic fantasy game I was in, our party had arrived at a new town. This was not a hostile, suspicious, or unwelcoming town; in fact, the locals were dazzled by and positive towards our characters. I had my character ask around for the whereabouts of a musical troupe that our party needed the help of.For some reason, the GM decided that this innocuous, low-stakes task would require a roll. This seemed strange to me, as if the GM was fishing for a critical failure. Thanks to some lingering buffs, my character had quite literally 99% success odds on this roll, and 1% critical failure odds. Well, sure enough, I hit that 1 in 100 chance and garnered a critical failure: and *Fabula Ultima* specifically forbids rerolling a critical failure.The GM decided that this "Plot Twist" meant that my character not only failed to garner the desired information, but also stumbled head-first into a combat encounter. Even though it was couched as very bad luck and not as incompetence, this felt stilted and arbitrary to me, and I said as much to the GM. Another player backed me up, agreeing that it felt forced.Overall, I am not a fan of critical failure rules. To me, they feel too slapstick. Many RPGs work fine without critical failure rules, and I do not like it when a system feels the need to implement them by default.
>>96575234I like critical failures, but only when the chance of critical failure actually correlates with the chance of failure (e.g., you have to fail the check by 10 or more on a d20 to count as a critical failure). Making every Natural 1 a critical failure is just stupid.The critical failure results should also be things that can plausibly happen, and that the character can mitigate or recover from with the appropriate abilities or actions. Dropping your weapon or falling prone are plausible fumbles in melee combat and are not excessively disastrous. A firearms jam is a common "crit fail" result in games with guns, and can be made a non-issue with good Repair or Maintenance skills. I can accept a weapon suddenly breaking on a crit fail, but only if the weapon gets a check to resist first, based on its quality and durability. Even accidentally hurting yourself or an ally is possible, although such a result should be very rare, and still require an attack roll to hit your ally (at no modifier to hit, since it's totally accidental).The most retarded things I've seen are stuff like automatically decapitating yourself and all adjacent allies with no further rolls to avoid such an outcome. All the homebrew crit fumble charts I've seen are littered with results like this.
>>96575294>(e.g., you have to fail the check by 10 or more on a d20 to count as a critical failure)I can deal with critical failures that work this way. I am disappointed that Path/Starfinder 2e is only halfway to doing this; it declares that a natural 1 degrades the outcome by one step, so a natural 1 that fails by a margin of only 1 is still a critical failure.
The only critical failure rules I've implemented are the critical hit result of defense checks and the condition of many novice reaction skills that fail the reflex contest cause the received hit to count as critical.To elaborate, when a character is the target of an attack or is in the area of an attack, they may either make a defense check (on a range of critical > direct > block > avoid lowest to highest), or declare a valid reaction, using their reflex rating against their opponent's, after the attacker makes any check they need to determine hit location.The "critical hit" result of the defense check is an abstraction of the target guarding in an improper manner, so as to expose a weakpoint. If the feature isn't armored, it automatically goes to 0 HP and becomes injured. Now, before any queerbait screeches some buzzword like "rocket tag", injury isn't a death knell. It reduces attributes temporarily, prevents the use of special skills, and causes any further damage to it to reduce character health, but injury has many proactive and reactive options to account for it, and I stress that it is not permanent. Any primary, secondary, or tertiary character option with the "ranged utility" role has a special skill to heal injuries. Barring that, there are comsumable items that can remove injury too.So... if no members of a 3-9 hero party have absolutely zero healing skills or items, there's a little bit of a reading comprehension problem going on there.Besides, a critical hit on a feature with armor will just break the armor instead of injuring the feature (and armor is easily repaired with gold during downtime). Or having a ward will just pop the ward and do no damage to the character herself anyway.Seriously, my games account for their own challenges. If your adventurers take preventative measures that are available, a critical failure for defense isn't the end of the world.
>>96575234No, a game shouldn't discourage players from doing things.
>>96575336Let me put it this way. In Pathfinder 2e, I once saw a maxed-Athletics character roll a natural 1 and slapstick fumble a Trip action against a Tiny-sized, Strength −3 carbuncle. "You lose your balance, fall, and land prone."https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=578https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=2382
>>96575241Asking townsfolk for info should require a roll, but the critical fail should have been "the confident idiot" who tells your party the complete wrong information. GM was shit and/or fishing for a fight.
>>96575234I enjoy the extra injection of chaos on both sides.What I don't enjoy much is when the critical failure is a character suddenly being incredibly incompetent like letting their weapon slip or hitting an ally nearby because of a misstep, etc.
>>96575234Depends on how it's designed, but I'd rather have no critical failure system than a poorly designed one. Honestly critical failures should be quite rare, and impactful. If they're too common, the game will basically turn into a slapstick skit, and the GM will probably try to avoid doing actual severe consequences because it's expected to happen too much.What I can say is that it's always an absolute dogshit experience for the player when stupid rules consistently make their character look massively incompetent at things they are supposed to be good at.
>>96575234I'm fine with them, but I prefer the odds being relatively low. 2% instead of 5/10%, for example.
>>965811395/10% is definitely retarded especially for combat since there will be dozens of rolls in a single session, and, inevitably, a bunch of critical failures. That's the sort of thing that turns the game into a circus.
>>96581139>>96581202Depending on the system even 2% Is rather high and can easily result in a cumulative 6~8% per turn.
>>96575234Critical failures should be something that you have to opt into. You are taking a risk and you know it, if the critfail comes up you have no one to blame but yourself.As an extremely basic example: Lets say that you have the option to 'push yourself' on a roll, and if you do you roll an extra 1d6 and add it to your total. This is a strong option that you will break out in cases where success is either normally out of reach or too unreliable for how dire the circumstances are. BUT, on a roll where you Push Yourself, a natural roll of 1, 2, or 3, on the d20 results in a critical failure. You tried to do something risky and it went very poorly. On rolls where you do not Push Yourself, there is no chance of critical failure at all. This makes the critical failures only every come up organically, when risk and drama is at its highest, as opposed to purely randomly whenever you try any little thing which really just encourages players to try and roll the dice as few times as they can get away with.
>>96581237Even then, it should depend on circumstance. Tense diplomatic negotiations CAN be fumbled, but usually as part of a more involved chain of events, rather than just going full Basil Fawlty not mentioning the war.
tl;drI find critfails useful for specific circumstances where high value comes with commiserate risk, like WFRP magic or plasma weapons in 40k.
>>96575234Critical failure is fine and perfectly fun, and it happening as a consistent result of rolling the lowest thing possible on the die is a lot more exciting (in an admittedly silly way, but we're all playing pretend elf games at the end of the day, we can admit that people enjoy the nat 20 moments) than it being a dependant on the initial difficulty or whatever other technical circumstances or rules. The problem is an issue of frequency on a d20 system. 1 in 20 is too high a chance that it becomes dumb after a while, but if you're on a d100 system and it can be tuned to something like a 1 in 100 or 1 in 50 then it becomes a lot more reasonable.
>>96575234Personally, I treat every failure as a critical failure, and every critical failure is immediate death of a character.I lost many players to this, but that's good, I don't want whiny unlucky faggots in my game.
>>96575234I hate fumbles, especially since they're unfairly targeted towards martials and actually become more likely the higher level you are (and thus, the more often you attack and roll the dice every turn). You can't just make it an automatic miss, you need to punish my character for getting demonstrably better at his job?
>>96575241>but also stumbled head-first into a combat encounter.The npc was cucked by a bard and your pc offense, asking about musicians, was the last straw.
crit fail is less bad in 5e
>>96575234CF are retarded, and games that use them are retarded.Not for the idea itself of an harsher failure, but because they're implemented terribly, they're just "lolsorandum" epic fails without actual context.Not sure if exceptions exist.
