I am going to do something that I think is fun for my next D&D game. The DM uses critical hit and fumble decks, but he lost one of them and it’s now out of print. I have been wanting to try making fortune cookies, so I am planning on making critical hit/fumble cookies. The only problems are that I both have no imagination and also have no idea what kind of stuff should go into the descriptions of the crits.
Does anyone have any good ideas? They have to be short enough that they can fit in a fortune cookie, but I can fold the papers in half to do it. Funny is better. Also, the DM uses these things both with the bad guys and with the party, so no instant death, please.
Critical fumbles as they are often used are unrealisticly common, hurt your ability to role-play a character that isn’t a bumbling retard, disproportionately affect the weaker classes (the ones that need to roll to hit), and make characters less competent as they level up. They also suffer the same problem as Wishes, in that a bad DM loves to make things far more damaging when they backfire than they ever could when used properly.
They are only funny if you like laughing at the misfortune of others, suffered through no fault of their own.
Critical fumbles should be only slightly annoying, not game changing. The rule I used when running D&D 3.5 was that a character who rolled a 1 when attacking missed, and couldn’t make any more attacks that round.
When I played AD&D with a group in HS the DM’s rule was that any roll of 1 on an attack meant that the weapon broke. Any weapon. We lost magic swords, bows, clubs, and one time a shield, all to 1s. We had to carry extra weapons, and only use our good ones when we really needed them. It sucked.
Recalling 25+ years ago, our modified rules went roughly something like this:
If Character Fumbles, player chooses on next turn to:
A) Pick weapon back up, lose this turn, and next attack by enemy will be adjusted to loss of agility (defense) bonus
B) Can attack with hands, no loss of turn but will still lose a turn to pick up weapon at a later point. (This why I liked having a Monk for a character)
C) Cast any spell that may slow, impede or stop an enemy to avoid a loss of turn when weapon is picked back up
If Character scores a Critical Hit, Enemy must roll 11 (50-50) or better to save against weapon drop AND on next turn, player chooses to:
A) Attack a second time without the enemy’s defense bonus (if any) regardless if weapon was dropped or not .
B) Use the extra turn to Kick away any weapons if enemy failed to save. A kick of 1 (fumble) will result in the character taking nominal damage from the weapon and the enemy will retrieve without loss of turn, and a kick of 20 (critical) means that the weapon is irretrievable for the remainder of the fight. Enemy can only attack with hands/claws/appendages only until weapon is retrieved at a loss of a turn unless it is irretrievable. The DM will roll to see if enemy retrieves weapon (based on Intelligence) during that turn or will attack with hands/claws/appendages. For some enemies (mostly monsters), this is a moot point.
Even for the critical hits, if you do anything fancy you’d want to make sure the way they’re implemented is balanced. In the 3.5 D&D rules, for instance, a longsword crits more often than a battleaxe (crit on a 19-20 instead of just 20), but a battleaxe does more damage on a crit than a longsword does (triple damage instead of just double). A scimitar crits even more often than a longsword (18-20), and a heavy pick has even better critical multiplier than a battleaxe (x4), but they both have less base damage (1d6, compared to 1d8 for the longsword or battleaxe). It works out that a longsword, on average, does as much damage as a battleaxe, and a scimitar, on average, does as much damage as a heavy pick, so which one you use basically comes down to personal preference (basically, how much you like risk).
But if you replace the extra damage with some other effect (say, stunning on a critical hit, or ability score damage, or whatever), then you have to figure out a way to make that other effect better on a battleaxe or heavy pick than it is on a longsword or scimitar, or there’s no incentive to use the pick or axe. And it’s not necessarily easy to figure out what’s a fair way to do that.
Except that a 20 always hits regardless of attacker’s attack bonus and defender’s AC. (And a follow-up 20 always confirms a critical threat, but that’s not relevant to the point I’m making.)
Anything less than 20 still has to bypass the AC of the opponent when the attack bonus is added to the die or the attack fails. So a 19-20 x2 weapon will only do as much damage on average as 20 x3 if that 19 is always enough to overcome the AC of the opponents. At high levels, that’s not always the case, particularly if you’re a fighter doing a full round attack and your last attack has a low BAB. That’s why gettting a keen-edge enhancement for a weapon and the feat that doubles your threat range are a bit overrated, particularly at higher levels of play.
Yes, but on the other hand, a high critical multiplier often just means overkill. If I hit an orc that has 10 HP and do 20 damage, it doesn’t do me any more good than if I’d done 11 damage. And consistency favors the PCs, and the sword is more consistent than the axe. In any event, the main point is that there are advantages and disadvantages to both, so it’s reasonable for someone to prefer either.
I’m still a 1st edition guy at heart. Looking around for some 3.5 books, but everything in local stores is 4.0 now. Anyway, what I did was any roll of a 1 or a 20 had to be followed by a special roll on a D6. If the D6 result was a 1, then the attack was either a critical or a fumble. All criticals did double total damage…including strength, magic, specialization, and ranger bonuses as applicable. Any fumble was no attack next round for non fighter/ranger/paladin classes. If the fighter/ranger/paladin would have been due a double attack the next round, they would be allowed a single attack, losing one swing for the fumble.
I hated and refused to use any of the various hit location/critical charts. A “sucking chest wound” type result could render someone’s character useless for the remainder of the night or longer, and wasn’t any fun for anybody.
Bah. Not too complicated. Set three levels of critical fumbles:
Minor. You need to spend a move action to recover, because [flavor text]. For example: “You overextend yourself during the attack. Lose your next move action as you regain your balance”, or, “A strap on your backpack, sheath, or bra comes loose. You’re at -2 on all d20 rolls until you spend a move action to readjust it.”
Serious. You need to spend a standard action to recover, because [flavor text]. For example, “Your weapon gets stuck in the floor/your spell interacts poorly with ambient magic. You lose your next standard action as you recover.”
Dangerous. You provoke an attack of opportunity, because [flavor text]. For example, “Your foot slips in the middle of the attack, throwing you wildly off-balance. You provoke an attack of opportunity from any enemy that threatens you.”
Make the latter the rarest, and the first the most common. Consider replacing the “lose an action” cards with cards that impose a -2 (for minor) or -4 (for serious) penalty that remains until the character loses the appropriate action; this partially alleviates the game suckiness of losing an action.
Heh. Everquest had a sexy (and buxom) demoness or some such as a raid target. There was more than a little discussion of her distracting players with her “boobie taunt” ability.
I played both Arduin Grimoire, which had “you kill yourself” critical misses, which sucked (but life was just hard in Arduin) and Iron Crown’s Rolemaster series, which had realistic-seeming effects like the above-mentioned “sucking chest wound.”
For a good part of my Rolemaster days, I was playing a character who specialized in using one of those spiked-ball-on-a-chain affairs* which, understandably, had a very high fumble rate. One persistent joke in the campaign was that the character’s barrel helm was always described as dished-in and missing paint on the right side (he swung the weapon right-handedly).
Generally I find that such systems inject an element of dark comedy or plain frustration.
*The game called it a morningstar; other games would call it a flail; this is a persisting terminological debate in the uneducated and semi-educated ranks of fantasy and medievalia. For example, the Wikimedia file photo above bears the file name “Klassischer-Flegel.jpg” (flegel=flail, I think) but the Wikipedia article it comes from calls it a “kettenmorgenstern type flail” (“morgenstern”=morningstar).
I’m no medieval scholar, but I always understood that morgenstern/morning star didn’t refer to a type of weapon in particular, but rather the design of the heads, whether they’re at the end of a club to make a mace, or a chain to make a flail. In other words, if it’s got spikes on it, it’s a 'stern, whereas regular mace and flail heads were either solid or flanged.
As to Rolemaster, god, that brings me back… that was my very first RPG, y’know. I was 13. Yes, I agree, I must have been a stupendous nerd indeed if that system didn’t turn me off roleplaying for good :).
And to be fair, while I still think a combat system involving different damage tables for each possible weapon/armour combination is absurdly awesome, the crits ruined it IMO. The fumbles, at least the combat ones, weren’t so bad and were sometimes quite funny (“You stumble on an imaginary turtle. Lose that round.”). The magical fumbles on the other hand… ouch. But then, they happened a lot less, so there’s that.
OTOH, even the lightest melee crits came with “stunned for X rounds” half the time, especially the smashing ones. And of course, a stunned opponent gets hit a lot more, so gets stunned longer, and dies without having rolled once. Which in turn meant that, while you were technically *supposed *to split your offensive bonus between attack (a bonus on your roll) and defense (substracted from opponent’s roll), it almost always paid more to just whack at the enemy full bore with the heaviest blunt instrument you could get your hands on. First one to crit, wins :dubious:.
Also, because the crits were localized in random fashion, you could very easily stab a guy in the back and end up gouging his eyes out. That was always good for a cheap laugh :p.
ETA : that being said, *Rolemaster *crit/fumble tables definitely have the kind of flavour the OP is looking for. *Warhammer *also had a similar half gory, half funny crit system IIRC
Check out the Pathfinder game, from Paizo. They got the license for 3.x when Wizards moved on to 4.0, and have been putting out some really good stuff. Last Summer, they came out with their own rulebook that’s essentially 3.75 - same basic rules as 3.5, but with some interesting tweaks. I’ve been running a campaign using these rules, and my group has really been enjoying it.
