Quote Originally Posted by Zanos View Post
D&D(and most RPGs, actually) is pretty explicitly a high magic land of epic heroes, where a single man can cut down 50 and live. That's been the "style" of most RPGs for decades. The vast majority of games are not about the playesr playing as the 5,000 starving peasants that die on the battlefield armed with pitchforks and dressed in rags. You can do something super low fantasy loaded with gritty realism, but it's actually not the norm in the genre because of the very conceits the setting needs to work. Specifically, that the PCs are generally more interesting and important than Joe the Mud Farmer.
Which is why the problem is really in the fluff of the fumble. People keep presenting it as some comedy slapstick routine featuring a bumbling hero when what it really means is either your character made a slight error in attacking or something happened. Maybe they swung their sword too hard and the enemy dodged, causing the blade to be embedded in the nearby table. Maybe they missed the swing and left a split second critical opening allowing the enemy a free attack. Maybe there was a circumstance which was entirely beyond the control of the PC such as when fighting in the middle of a collapsing flying castle the ground gave way under the fighters foot causing them to go crashing to the floor below. That is what a fumble means to me and I've seen situations similar to those in nearly all high fantasy unrealistic settings in fiction.

And just to remind people again, the fumble is not a rule in a most RPGs, including D&D. The fact that it has stuck around as much as it has should be enough to prove that people seem to really want it for some reason, which is why I re-implemented it in several games after removing it.