D&D All. What's your take on Critical Faliures?

[F1zban]

Hi Forum,

So I just found out that a natural 1 only counts as an automatic miss, even though the group I play in and the GM I learned under always had specific rules for rolling a natural 1. I'm interested to see what others have done with it. Starting with how I run it:

A natural 1 on an un-opposed roll counts as an automatic faliure. When rolled with an attack/spell the natural 1 causes a critical faliure. You lose the remainder of your actions and suffer an attack of opportunity. Natural 1's or natural 20's don't affect an opposed roll.

Edit: On a side note, my players never have to confirm critical hits, and we have an 'understanding' regarding stacking crit chances. No keen, improved critical, bladed gauntlet (SaF) etc.

[Red Fel]

Short version? Crit failures hurt melees, make very little sense, and contribute nothing substantial to gameplay.

Long version in spoilers, because the short version says it all.

Spoiler

Show

1. Critical failures hurt melees. Think about it. Rolling a 1 on a skill check doesn't mean automatic failure. There are only two places where it really comes up - making a melee or ranged attack, and rolling a save. And let's face it, rolling a 1 on a save really only means "automatic failure," at most; you can't exactly "critically fail" your save. What happens - you drop your willpower? You sprain an ankle? That's a special flavor of ridiculous.

But back to melees. Here's what happens if you're using critical failure rules. Your level 20 Fighter, a swordsman who has trained all of his life in the art of the sword, has a 1/20 chance to drop that weapon. And since he has multiple attacks per round, he has multiple chances to drop it every round. Or worse, if you're using a critical fail table, perhaps he impales his foot, or an ally, or hands it deftly to an opponent. It's absurd and embarrassing. Know what happens to a caster who rolls a 1 when casting a spell? Generally, nothing. The reality-warping spellcaster suffers no ill effect, while the guy who lives his life by a weapon drops it. It hurts melees, and melees hurt enough.

2. Critical failures make no sense. Look back at the example above. This guy has trained his whole life with his weapon, and he randomly drops it in combat? I get that combat is crazy and accidents happen, but this is absurd. Really, patently absurd. By contrast, the spellcaster who wields phenomenal cosmic power - the kind which, by all rights, should explode violently if mishandled - suffers no mishap from failure. It makes no sense.

3. Critical failures contribute nothing. Critical failures, first and foremost, are a variant rule. They're not strict RAW; by strict RAW, if you roll a 1, you simply fail, full stop. Critical failures are an optional rule, and as such, they should contribute something. Consider, for example, optional rules regarding flaws (which let you take a penalty in exchange for extra feats), armor as DR instead of AC (which allows a change in mechanics), and various expanded systems. These are options which lend versatility and new options to gameplay. Critical failures add nothing; rather, they create a chance to increase the penalty for failure. Any optional rule should result in a net gain to gameplay - not necessarily more success, but more options, and certainly not greater punishments.

Tl;dr: Not a fan.

[tomandtish]

The problem with saying a one is a critical failure is that it actually punishes higher level (and presumably more skilled) characters more than lower level ones.

EX: Assuming no other factors a 1st level fighter has one attack. A 20th level fighter has four. That means the 20th level fighter has four times the chance to have a critical failure than a 1st level fighter even if fighting 4 orcs?

We therefore didn’t use critical failures. Of course, we also don’t allow critical hits if you can’t hit the monster on a non-critical roll.

Edit: Ninja'd

[sktarq]

I am a fan. Though I treat any natural 1 as a critical failure. Skills especially spellcraft and psycraft included.

[Vitruviansquid]

It pleases me to see the look of dismay on my players' faces when they roll a 1.

Then I turn the screws.

[NoldorForce]

The issue with critical failures/critical success is that PCs are (from a narrative standpoint) far less disposable than NPCs, and thus Really Bad Things are more debilitating than the same Really Bad Things happening to NPC #32. And given the Law of Large Numbers, Really Bad Things will (assuming they're implemented) eventually come up for the PCs. It's a bit like handling a game's lethality, in that you want to minimize the time in which a player can't do anything useful. If you must have critical effects, my recommendations are either that they can't be triggered by "mooks" on PCs (balancing their narrative importance) or that a critical effect allows you to "fail forward".

“Whenever a character fails, the consequences of that failure should drive the game forward, rather than bringing it to a halt.”

Also as implied above, critical failures punish those who make loads of rolls, and systems such as D&D will often grant more rolls to some character types than to others. If you're going to have critical failures then you also want to make sure that each member of the party has (via players-roll-all-the-dice or whatever) approximately the same chance to trigger them.

[Dire Moose]

I use critical failures, but the penalty is very light. If you roll a 1, you follow up with a confirmation roll. If you still miss the target's AC on that roll, you provoke an attack of opportunity from everything in melee range.

This applies to enemies as well, and is less of a problem for high-level characters because they have less chance of missing the confirmation roll and more ways of reducing the chance of AoOs hitting.

[Zavoniki]

I was a fan of them until one of players sat me down and explained why they were bad. A good example to think of is the following scenario.

You have a keep. Inside the keep are 7 invulnerable training dummies and 7 legendary fighters(20th level). They attack these dummies for an hour to train. Lets assume they only make 1 attack per round. You get 10 attacks per minute for a total of 600 attacks per fighter. 4200 attacks total. There's a good chance a 1 has come up.

It makes absolutely no sense for anyone of these legendary fighters to have fumbled during this practice training. There swords should not be broken, dropped, or worse. It barely makes sense for them to have missed the training dummy at all.

Personally I like the way Eclipse Phase handles Critical Failures in combat. Its like a normal Failure. Identical even. This is because failing is already bad for a character. In EP combat specifically it can be extremely bad(the Systems combat is quite lethal). Making your failures worse just feels wrong.

If the average for a character is that they should succeed on what they are doing, failures and critical successes make sense. They are both one step away from success. Critical failures are two steps from success without a corresponding 2 steps away from success on the more success side.

They still sometimes make sense, especially for certain skill checks, but especially in combat I am not a fan.

[Mr.Moron]

Conceptually I kind of like it. However in D&D context "On a Natural 1" is too frequent, at 5% of the time. If I was using a rule like that I'd probably do something like a confirmation roll (fail again) or something like a severity roll roll 3d10 (keep lowest) that's the severity of failure on 1-10 scale.

I'd also probably make something similar when 20 is rolled on a save (Critical Save).


1-4: Normal failure/save no "Critical" effects.

5-7: Minor critical failure, something slightly bad happens.(Next attack suffers -2 Penalty,enemy gets free 5' step; Crit Save: enemy takes no damage instead of half)

8-9: Moderate critical failure (fall prone; drop weapon, strike ally etc.. Crit Save: Enemy is partially petrified, before shaking off the spell throwing stone shards in a nearby allies face)

10: Horrible failure (weapon breaks, spell backfires as you cast it, etc..).

That said, it's probably not something I'd use often.

[Prince Raven]

I like them in certain systems, none of said systems are d&d.

[Rogan]

I would rather change the whole crit system.
A crit fail would need the result of your check be lower than the target number -5 (or any other value)
A crit suc would need the result of your check be higher than the target number +5 (again, you can use any other number, depending on how high/low you want the chances to be)

So there is no fixed chance of a crit, but rather a chance depending on your own competence.


This also means fighting weak chars, you will be more likely to win you were anyway, while your chances to win vs a stronger enemy are lower.

If you like it or not is up to you and the kind of campaign you want to play.

[ElenionAncalima]

I only played with one DM who used them...and I'm definitely not a fan.

As others have said, it screws over melee fighters and doesn't really made sense. It means that odds are a 20th level monk with five attacks will do something so embarassingly bad that it actually damages their sides chances...roughly every 24 seconds.

I can understand how a group playing a casual, low-stakes game could get amusement out them...but in general as a mechanic, it seems to unfair to classes that already get the short end of the stick. On a non-d20 system, where critical failures are less frequent, I think I would be more open to them.

[oxybe]

I've played D&D for about 16-17 years now.

I started with 2nd ed and played under various GMs.

Many of those had crit fumble rules.

None of which were any amount of ''fun" or "enjoyable".

"1 is an automatic miss on a attack roll or saving throw" is the absolute worst I would accept from a random pickup group.

My current group unfortunately uses them for our current game, but they are the exception since i've been playing with them for about 7 years. They've earned trust.

Random groups have not and it's one of the things I really don't tolerate in a group I'm thinking of playing with.

[F1zban]

I can see a lot of points here, though I disagree with many.

Critical faliures affecting characters with more rolls (especially with a 5% chance) is unarguably true, but those same fighters also critically hit anything up to 15% of the time (ignoring dice roll curves for sake of the argument) within reason. This more than makes up for the chance of failure.

Fumble tables are not as much fun, on this I agree. This is why in our (my usual group's) games we have critical faliures as in the OP. Anything else is just wasting rolls at best. The skilled fighter that has trained for years may not have a 5% chance of dropping his sword, but he still has a chance to mis-step or badly judge a manuvre. As a swordsman of 18 years I can quite confidently say that a melee is messy enough that if I misjudge my opponent, the result is typically a loss of the fight. Mis-stepping is also a possible occurance. Heck there are even times when a good distraction has caused myself and an opponent to completley fumble over eachother and provide ample bruises on both sides lol.

Casters don't suffer from fumbles as such, nor do they have more chances at failing due to less rolls. They do however never critically hit*, they also lose a spell slot when they critically fail. That's a big thing. The fighter with 4 attacks doesn't lose one attack from a critical faliure, he gets all his attacks again in the next turn.

*Players have brought this up in the past and we run a house rule where casters that critically hit (attack like spells only) resolve the spell at +2 caster level, +2 as a bonus agreed upon by all players/gms.

[TheCountAlucard]

I can see a lot of points here, though I disagree with many.

Critical faliures affecting characters with more rolls (especially with a 5% chance) is unarguably true, but those same fighters also critically hit anything up to 15% of the time (ignoring dice roll curves for sake of the argument) within reason. This more than makes up for the chance of failure.

It really doesn't. A crit just means one more dead enemy, maybe, but losing your turn and provoking an attack of opportunity from everyone around you really screws you over, assuming it doesn't kill you outright.

Generally speaking, the fact that you rolled a 1 at all is bad enough most of the time.

[Galen]

I don't like critical failures. They're basically the DM's way to stick a middle finger to the player.
Rolling a '1' when the entire table is watching, and knowing you missed, is punishing enough. No need to add any of this 'critical' or 'fumble' stuff on top.

[illyahr]

I do Crit-Fails and Crit-Hits the same.

Threaten critical, roll to confirm. Confirmed? Critical hit.
Not confirmed? Normal hit.
Nat 20? Something awesome happens (usually 1/400 chance, eg. double crit target and hit target behind them)

Nat 1, roll to confirm. Hit AC? No benefits/penalties, continue turn.
Missed AC? End turn, you blew it. Think up fluff for mishap. (eg. slipped in some mud so regain footing)
Nat 1 again? Something terrible happens (again, 1/400 chance, eg. wood weapon on high DR target breaks)

[Mr.Moron]

I don't like critical failures. They're basically the DM's way to stick a middle finger to the player.

This seems an extremely antagonistic view of the player/GM relationship. When you boil it down all adding "Critical Failure" does is change the spectrum of possibilities from

"Nothing happens (Miss/Failure)"-"Something good happens (Success/Critical Success) "
to
"Something goes horribly wrong(Critical Miss/Failure)" to "Something good happens (Success/Critical Success) ".

I don't see how this inherently giving the finger to anyone, when really all you're doing is increasing the possible range of outcomes.

Certainly like with any mechanic it can be poorly implemented, or used by jerks to try and spoil things for others. However I'm not really sure that speaks to anything outside those specific implementations or jerks.

[Dasgovernator]

I use critical failures, but the penalty is very light. If you roll a 1, you follow up with a confirmation roll. If you still miss the target's AC on that roll, you provoke an attack of opportunity from everything in melee range.

This applies to enemies as well, and is less of a problem for high-level characters because they have less chance of missing the confirmation roll and more ways of reducing the chance of AoOs hitting.

This is generally how I like to use it it, though I only make it provoke from the opponent being targeted. It also makes more sense conceptually, since it just represents the person in question missing by a lot/overextending his/her swing rather than turning into a 3 stooges routine.

[icefractal]

Critical faliures affecting characters with more rolls (especially with a 5% chance) is unarguably true, but those same fighters also critically hit anything up to 15% of the time (ignoring dice roll curves for sake of the argument) within reason. This more than makes up for the chance of failure.

This is a common misconception I see. People seem to think that a critical hit is some massive force of nature that demolishes the enemy side. It is effectively an extra attack. One.

I'm talking about the 20/x2 critical, because that's the default for weapons that aren't specialized to be more deadly. Nobody is going to specialize a weapon to backfire on the wielder more often, so the baseline is the appropriate thing to compare to. And that baseline is "5% to get +1 attack equivalent, and you have to confirm it".


So what would the equivalent for a crit fail be?
1) You have to confirm it. Except that it would happen if the confirm roll was a miss, not a hit, obviously.
2) The effect should be equivalent to -1 attack. Not "lose ALL your remaining attacks" or something worse, just lose a single attack.

So what I'd do is create a condition - "Off Balance". When you're Off Balance, your attacks automatically miss. The condition ends when you make an attack, or spend a standard action focusing (just so you don't have to swing at the floor if combat ends while you're Off Balance).


Balance wise, this works out decently. People with more attacks are more likely to fumble one, but the effect is less of a penalty for them. However, it's adding an extra confirmation roll and thing to track for not much effect in game. So I wouldn't use it personally. However, if you did want to, I thought of a variant that eliminates the need for a confirmation roll.

1) When you roll a nat 1 on an attack, you become Off Balance (no confirm roll).
2) If you attack while Off Balance, roll 2d20 and take the lower one. Which effectively includes the confirmation roll into the effect.

[OldTrees1]

My rule: Critical failures should be more enjoyable than rolling a 2 but should not be as beneficial as rolling a 2.
Any crit fail rule that is less enjoyable than rolling a 2 is discarded. Any crit fail rule where rolling a 1 is as/more beneficial that rolling a 2 is discarded.


I once tried crit fails/crit successes in the skill system. Within 5 minutes the system was tested by a character rolling two nat 1a on perception on their watch. The rest of the campaign the character had persistent hallucinations of 6 specific birds(they developed personalities). Next campaign the player asked if he could have the birds again. Later on in the second campaign another character rolled a nat 1 on a perception check. For a few minutes all their senses were crosswired "tasting" sights and "seeing" sounds. The group got a kick out of it and that is the important part. The nat 1 was worse than a failure but the group enjoyed the results.

I have not yet found a crit failure system for attacks that satisfied my rule for the entire play group. So I don't use it.

[Sartharina]

I was a fan of them until one of players sat me down and explained why they were bad. A good example to think of is the following scenario.

You have a keep. Inside the keep are 7 invulnerable training dummies and 7 legendary fighters(20th level). They attack these dummies for an hour to train. Lets assume they only make 1 attack per round. You get 10 attacks per minute for a total of 600 attacks per fighter. 4200 attacks total. There's a good chance a 1 has come up.

It makes absolutely no sense for anyone of these legendary fighters to have fumbled during this practice training. There swords should not be broken, dropped, or worse. It barely makes sense for them to have missed the training dummy at all.

Personally I like the way Eclipse Phase handles Critical Failures in combat. Its like a normal Failure. Identical even. This is because failing is already bad for a character. In EP combat specifically it can be extremely bad(the Systems combat is quite lethal). Making your failures worse just feels wrong.

If the average for a character is that they should succeed on what they are doing, failures and critical successes make sense. They are both one step away from success. Critical failures are two steps from success without a corresponding 2 steps away from success on the more success side.

They still sometimes make sense, especially for certain skill checks, but especially in combat I am not a fan.

I say applying critical failures to 'invulnerable training dummies' defeats the purpose.

It's possible to make crit failures affect spellcasters almost as equally as fighters. Don't think of a crit failure as a fighter severely messing up his attack - think of it instead as the opponent critically succeeding on his defense.

[Silus]

As a DM, if it's cinematically appropriate, something interesting will happen (mostly regarding skill checks).

As a player though, not a fan at all.

[The Hanged Man]

A one is a failure, regardless of positive modifiers. And that's all. The action being attempted does not succeed.

I don't like the way it distorts gameplay when, 5% of the time you try to do anything, you accidentally crap your pants. Overly punitive critical failure house rules, or overly generous critical success house rules, are very strong indicators to me that I'm not going to enjoy myself with a particular GM. When those rules are actually structured into the system as written, I'm more willing to give them a chance.

Come to think of it, when weird crit rules are part of a set of written house rules, I've generally been able to endure them, even if I'm not a fan. It just seems that a lot of GMs have weird crit rules as unspoken house rules, and I hate unspoken house rules.

[Sartharina]

I find a lot of tables/players invoke critical failures on themselves, due to the psychological effect of rolling a Natural 1 at a dramatic moment.

[Ettina]

I usually say it should be something entertaining but not devastating.

However, it only applies on attacks. If you have enough skill ranks in something, you can often make the DC even if you get a 1, so it makes no sense to have a 1 be an automatic failure. And it bugs me to have my character screw up something that should be easy for him/her/it.

[oxybe]

I can see a lot of points here, though I disagree with many.

Critical faliures affecting characters with more rolls (especially with a 5% chance) is unarguably true, but those same fighters also critically hit anything up to 15% of the time (ignoring dice roll curves for sake of the argument) within reason. This more than makes up for the chance of failure.

Fumble tables are not as much fun, on this I agree. This is why in our (my usual group's) games we have critical faliures as in the OP. Anything else is just wasting rolls at best. The skilled fighter that has trained for years may not have a 5% chance of dropping his sword, but he still has a chance to mis-step or badly judge a manuvre. As a swordsman of 18 years I can quite confidently say that a melee is messy enough that if I misjudge my opponent, the result is typically a loss of the fight. Mis-stepping is also a possible occurance. Heck there are even times when a good distraction has caused myself and an opponent to completley fumble over eachother and provide ample bruises on both sides lol.

Casters don't suffer from fumbles as such, nor do they have more chances at failing due to less rolls. They do however never critically hit*, they also lose a spell slot when they critically fail. That's a big thing. The fighter with 4 attacks doesn't lose one attack from a critical faliure, he gets all his attacks again in the next turn.

*Players have brought this up in the past and we run a house rule where casters that critically hit (attack like spells only) resolve the spell at +2 caster level, +2 as a bonus agreed upon by all players/gms.

Actually a 3.5/pathfinder caster can crit hit with a spell, like scorching ray.

3.5

A critical hit means that you roll your damage more than once, with all your usual bonuses, and add the rolls together. Unless otherwise specified, the threat range for a critical hit on an attack roll is 20, and the multiplier is ×2.

...

Spells and Critical Hits: A spell that requires an attack roll can score a critical hit. A spell attack that requires no attack roll cannot score a critical hit.

Pathfinder:
Spells and Critical Hits: A spell that requires an attack roll can score a critical hit. A spell attack that requires no attack roll cannot score a critical hit. If a spell causes ability damage or drain (see Special Abilities), the damage or drain is doubled on a critical hit.

with the caster stuff done with, while melee types do crit more often (due to simply rolling more attack rolls) their crits are often less important narratively speaking.

The game revolves around the player characters. It doesn't really matter if the story is about the greater war between two kingdoms, the game itself tends to focus on the goings on of these 4-5 murderhobos.

Goblin #78390-76b is, for the most part a creature who's entire backstory is "he's here for the players to fight". That him and gobbo 77b get axed in one round is, narratively speaking, rather unimportant and for the most part that's where all those fighter crits are going to be put towards: getting rid of narratively unimportant chaff.

When a monster crits a player, it tends to be more significant since it means that one of the important people might get axed (at least in the early game where a crit can knock you dead and done rather quickly).

Think of it like if you're watching an action movie: Stud Gunhaver might pull off a few cool shots every now and then in the middle of the gunfight, but unless something explodes rather violently we don't really talk about those. Brick Dastard, the villain then steps out from the shadows, walks over a mountain of mook corpses and gloats to Stud that he's got his girlfriend (who is now revealed to be the President of the Free World's daughter and #1 supermodel rocket surgeon) and will kill Stud.

Gunfight occurs and Stud pull off a one-liner and kills Brick with a single shot.

That is the crit we talk about for months to come.

Not when Stud killed off "sunglasses wearing mook with pistol" by shooting his brains out with a single quick shot.

Now if a mook ends up shooting Stud with a crit, taking him out of the fight for a while as he bandages himself up we tend to remember this also quite a bit.

This is because Stud is a narratively important character: he's a PC.

This is why Crit success and failure, and when they apply to PCs is generally more important then how often a mook gets crit upon or how often they crit fail. People don't mind seeing a mook's Gun jam and then getting mowed down. They do tend to care when the protagonist's (or one of the protagonists, if there is a group) gun jams and he's basically out of the fight as he tries to get his gun working again.

Stud mowing down an important NPC can be either narratively awesome or boring, depending on the circumstances around the death but I generally see them as rather uninteresting when the talked up enemy dies in one hit, or is so crippled that he's forced to run, turning the whispered Dark Lord into a joked about Dork Lord, though most higher level enemies tend to have enough of a HP soak that a single crit won't immediately murder them in a party of reasonably made PCs (though the murderiest of murderhobos might be a different story).

But again: Crit rules, especially those where incredible success and horrible failure are pillars of the concept, need to be balanced/made with the idea that they affect player characters more. Not just in the idea that any given PC fighter is expected to roll more attack dice then an enemy fighter, but that the effects of these rolls generally apply to the most narratively important characters.

And if those rules make the expert weapon user look like a fool once every few seconds or take our potentially important players in the early game like shooting buckshot at fish in a barrel then I can't be bothered with them.

They can work with some groups, but unless you're that one group I don't mind them with (7 years playing on a weekly/biweekly basis is a lot of trust building), it's a dealbreaker for me.

[Arbane]

I've seen a grand total of one game with a critical failure rule I like: Legends of the Wulin. When you get a roll that ends in a zero in that game, you can choose to take 'Interesting Times' - you gain a luck point, and something happens to make the situation even more complicated than a simple success or failure would. (You accidentally insult a passing magistrate while arguing; you cut through the ninja AND the support pillar behind them; you knocked over a candle and now the building's on fire; etc...)

It's possible to make crit failures affect spellcasters almost as equally as fighters. Don't think of a crit failure as a fighter severely messing up his attack - think of it instead as the opponent critically succeeding on his defense.

How? Most D&D spellcasters don't roll dice for casting at all.

[Jay R]

We always re-roll to confirm critical hits. If you fail to hit on the second roll, then it's a critical failure.

That means that 5% of all your failures, not 5% of all your attempts, are critical failures.

But also, we use the Critical Failure chart from The Dragon #39, and a significant number of them have a good chance of having no effect. For example, 01-19 slip; roll dexterity or less on d20 or fall and stunned for 1-4 rounds. If you make the DEX roll, the only effect is, "You slipped, and deftly recovered."

[Prince Raven]

I once had a D&D game where my character was going to be able to have something like 12 or 16 attacks in a full attack at higher levels, I was then informed (not by the GM, but by a fellow player) that if I rolled a natural 1 on any of those attacks I would not only damage myself, but also lose all my remaining attacks. I immediately reconsidered the direction of my character.

In Dark Heresy, on the other hand, I'm completely okay with "critical fumbles", as they've been accounted for in rules. You can mitigate the likelihood by using melee weapons or guns with the Reliable quality (both of which never jam), by removing the Unreliable quality via modifications (which would make the gun more likely to jam), or by devoting less energy to using a psychic power (making Perils of the Warp less likely, and reducing the potential penalty).
Generally, the more powerful your weapon is, the more likely it is to jam/perils, and the only other ways to make weapons more likely to jam is by damaging or dual-wielding, from rank 1 to rank 10 the likelihood of jamming does not increase as the likelihood of critical fumbles does for d&d.