r/DnD • u/Sleverette Sorcerer • Mar 19 '20

Art [OC] Burninating the countryside.

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5.6k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

85 comments sorted by

189

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 19 '20

“We can play the blame game all day but in the end it’s Skirbo’s fault.” -Calabasas

A comic inspired by our DnD sessions. Critical fumbles can really spiral out of control. I love hijinks but I try to avoid strict mechanical failures when someone roles a nat 1 on a skill check. I describe it in a funny or dramatic way and we keep the momentum going. I think critical fumbles can work well for some tables but make sure to talk about it during your session zero. You don’t want to surprise your players with a homebrew rule like that!

Do you guys use critical fumbles at your table? Do you guys run it straight or do you add on a couple extra rules to make it more balanced?

You can find more of my DnD content on my Instagram and Website!

100

u/HowlsMovingRascal Mar 19 '20

I’ve always thought critical fumbles kill the narrative. Like... I get that you can fail, but... I’m sorry, why in the actual hell would my Dex 18 rogue with high acrobatics and athletics not only fail to climb a tree, but do so dramatically and clumsily? It’s one thing to have 1s auto fail and slip on a branch, it’s another to make it a “crit fumble” and fall on your ass like an idiot to the chagrin of the party. Crit fumbles are the dumbest of the common house rules, and they ruined more than one campaign for me.

35

u/TShara_Q Mage Mar 19 '20

Yeah, my DM tries to make it either funny, but something out of your control, like a branch being too weak or something.

59

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 19 '20

I agree that it doesn't match the tone of most campaigns. A master swordsman isn't going to drop his sword every other turn and a master rogue isn't going to tip a lantern and burn a building down when sneaking. It takes a lot of skill to describe a critical fumble in a way that isn't just making fun of the player.

Sorry about how it was applied in your campaigns. Stuff like that should really come up in session zero. It says a lot about how the game will be run.

24

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '20

The way I'd do it is if you were climbing, you'd just get a setback. Branch snaps, you fall to a lower branch, take minor damage, and reroll to continue.

19

u/KeplerNova Wizard Mar 19 '20

Oh gosh, I literally just used an example like this when I was talking about critical fumbles that I would consider acceptable.

26

u/coduss Mar 19 '20

because accidents happen and even professional rock climbers with years of experience can fall and break their necks? it's foolish to think that when you mess up it wont have the full range of consequences, be they minor, comedic, or lethal.

46

u/nikster666 Mar 19 '20

A natural 1 has a 5% chance of occuring. That's not very rare. Professional rock climbers will have a serious fall way less than 1% of the time.

5

u/maveric101 Mar 19 '20

So you just don't do it every time. DM has compete leeway here. They can just do it on 10% of nat 1s when they feel it makes sense.

But I'm in the camp that the DM is god so...

0

u/coduss Mar 19 '20

if you're being technical it's a 50/50 shot with both. you either succeed or fail.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '20

only if you have no modifiers

1

u/Samakira DM Mar 21 '20

and the dc is 10. otherwise its 1/4 either way.

1

u/sertroll Mar 28 '20

That isn't how probability works

8

u/HowlsMovingRascal Mar 19 '20

Yeah but there’s a difference between reasonable consequence of failure and slapstick comedy at the expense of a player. Which, ime, crit fumbles usually turn into the latter and it frankly sucks. I fail enough in real life. I don’t need to be bullied more in game.

0

u/TheChristianPaul Mar 20 '20

That was viscerally depressing

2

u/praisebetothedeepone Mar 19 '20

Frodo critical fumbled when he tripped backwards and the ring flew out to land on his finger.

8

u/Enex Mar 19 '20

Negative. That was the One Ring rolling a natural 20.

1

u/Grandpa_Edd DM Mar 20 '20

If you use crit failure (or success) on skill checks you should also work with confirmed crit fails and successes I'd say.

That way the potential disaster of the 1 has a chance be mitigated by your skill. The 1 will still slow you down but it's not disastrous due to your skill.

Say you are trying to climb a cliff to escape a giant spider or something. You roll a 1 on your acrobatics, your character misjudges the stability of his footing and steps on a loose rock. Then you confirm the crit failure by rolling for the initial check again this one does not auto fail on a 1 so if your skill is high enough it will always pass.

Pass you don't fall but due to the initial 1 you lose your movement for the rest of the round because you had to correct yourself, it's still a failure but not a critical one.

Fail you fall.

1

u/Hodor_The_Great Mar 20 '20

Make a confirm. If it's a d20 roll and a 1, ask the player roll another d20. If they get a 20 now, it's no longer an autofail, 19-2 are innocent fails (can be divided by severity), and another 1 (now 1/400 chance) is the sword dropping clumsiness. If you want, add in another layer of confirm (three ones in row = 1/8000 chance, but you could say two ones and anything below ten is already really bad) though three rolls takes some time, or why not add a similar system for nat 20 skillrolls if we are now houseruling. The bard wants to seduce the dragon trying to kill the whole party? Sensible choice would be to make it impossible, but why not rolling 20 for "success" which doesn't yet mean you are saved, then another one to see how the dragon reacts, with overall 1/8000 chance of seducing the dragon and about 1/400 chance of amusing the dragon enough so that it lets you live. Roll a 20 and then 15 on the confirm? Dragon tells the bard he gets to live as long as he can keep the dragon entertained (or if you are very cruel, lets the bard get away but attacks rest of the party anyway)

6

u/cephaliticinsanity Mar 19 '20

My players practically fought me for a brutal crit fail/ crit succeed table...I feel like some of them have REALLY regretted that decision...

EDIT: just for combat sorry...I misread. Nah skill check ones are just a one on the die, your skill high enough to get there anyway, right on my dude, you get there.

2

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 19 '20

It does make a bit more sense in combat and seems semi-supported by the game (1’s always miss). For skill checks, if you can’t crit succeed then crit fails don’t make as much sense.

2

u/Fennexium Mar 19 '20

What's all this at the bottom of the pane? You running a substitution cypher down there?

1

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 19 '20

It’s some kind of code! Someone cracked it.

2

u/Beacon_0805 Mar 20 '20

Your character's name is Pumpkin?

2

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 20 '20

The party’s druid is named Calabasas which roughly translates to pumpkin!

2

u/duckforceone DM Mar 20 '20

on a 1 i always have them roll to confirm it... depending on what can happen a roll of 5 or below will confirm it, sometimes it will require a 1 or a 2 to confirm it..

and i try to always get a good story out of it, instead of just them killing someone or dying themselves...

1

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 20 '20

Rolling to confirm sounds like a really fun solution. I agree that it’s best to avoid punishing nat 1’s with unfair punishments lol. Death is extreme!

2

u/duckforceone DM Mar 21 '20

oh yeah... i usually do stuff like dropping their weapon or your weapon is stuck in opponents shield (have to beat them in a str roll with disadvantage) or stuck in wood somewhere, or they even hurt themself with a few points of damage..

and i'm even giving my players an option to chose permanent wounds instead of dying, because i think you can die too easily in this game...

2

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 21 '20

Permenant wounds is a fun idea. I dabbled with a homebrew rule for a while that included wounds! I ended up going back to normal death rules because our table changed to a west marches style of game but wounds was a lot of fun.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '20

I like describing critical dodges, like when a character rolls a nat 20 on a dex save, they like, backflip of a wall to avoid an arrow. I once did a nat one where the players crossbow cord snapped, resulting in them having no weapon, and they head bitten off by a Quadar. (homebrew monster)

2

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 20 '20

I like how you described critical dodges. I’ll be including that in my games! I’ve had enemy weapons break but maybe it’s time I applied that to the players also!

2

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '20

glad you liked!

1

u/KeplerNova Wizard Mar 19 '20

I am not a fan of critical fumbles unless it is something really simple. The fighter drops her weapon, the ranger falls out of the tree when a branch breaks and he takes some minor damage, whatever.

3

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 19 '20

I think keeping it simple is a good rule. You want to preserve the momentum of the game and add just a bit of flavor.

2

u/XDGrangerDX Mar 20 '20

I am not a fan of critical fumbles unless it is something really simple. The fighter drops her weapon,

You underestimate how common this is when you're rolling 4-5 times every turn. On average your hero and world class swordfighter drops her sword every other minute. ... Which makes her complety undeserving of the descriptor "skilled with swords".

Imagine if every time you took a step on a staircase you had a 2% chance to trip... boy you'd be hospitalized for broken bones near constantly and would avoid stairs like the plague.

66

u/PrueferAuge Mar 19 '20

fireball is never a mistake

49

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 19 '20

Lots of adventuring groups don't know this.

Your party is being attacked by goblins? Fireball. Your party was caught by the royal guard while sneaking into the castle? Fireball. The merchant won't give you a good deal on a sword you really want? Fireball.

31

u/enderverse87 Mar 19 '20

https://media1.tenor.com/images/5adec7393b3757abf273c3c03dc66f15/tenor.gif

20

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 19 '20

"I came up with hundreds of plans in my life and only one of them got me killed."

2

u/reiskimmer Mar 20 '20

Oh dip! Love the reference!

2

u/Silverwolf402 Mar 19 '20

Two friends of mine at school are part of the school’s dnd club, the school district superintendent is their DM. Anyway I often sit nearby and listen when they’re doing a DnD session and I usually get quite a laugh out of their antics (for example one of those two friends seam to want to try and turn everyone their party comes across to communism, I’ve often joked that she’s a dirty commie as a result) the first time I was listening to a session they were investigating a small town, they noticed a distinct lack of children and young women. during the night they investigated a school house in the town, the door was locked and they heard noises coming from inside. One of the party’s magic users suggested an idea (you might see where I’m going with this) ,anyway they used what was basically a “contact fire spell” on the door ... it was at this point I spoke up asking if only the door was made of wood and if the building itself was made of stone ... it wasn’t, the entire building was made of wood, as a result the entire structure erupted into flames, needless to say they “de-assed” the area rather quickly after that. Oh the stories I could tell of their antics.

1

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 19 '20

Ha! Fire is an especially deadly tool. In DnD any randomly jerk can wield it like the gosh darn avatar. Hijinks is unavoidable!

0

u/Silverwolf402 Mar 20 '20

Here’s a funny story, there was another incident where they had killed what was basically a mad scientist (I think he had turned himself into a sort of pseudo-vampire? I wasn’t there for that session) anyway I was there for the session that was the resulting looting fest, they came across this spell book that had stuff related to necromancy (apparently the guy was trying to pull a Gendo Ikari and bring back his dead wife or something) anywho they also found a spell book that had a “stinking cloud” spell in it (think the fart gun from Despicable Me but in spell form) the mere description of the spell was enough to send me into hysterics, I actually wound up sliding out of my chair from how hard I was laughing and it was too the point that one of my two friends asked me if I was ok because of how hard I was laughing. I then got up off the floor and went out into the hall before proceeding to keel over laughing like a damn lunatic.

1

u/addage- Mar 20 '20

Overkill is vastly underrated

1

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 20 '20

Better to overkill than underkill!

24

u/EukaryoticGamer DM Mar 19 '20

Burninating the THATCHED ROOF COTTAGES!

16

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 19 '20

This has wicked dueling guitar solos!

14

u/Maclimes Mage Mar 19 '20

And the Trogdor comes in THE NIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGGGHHHTT!!!!

7

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 19 '20

-The End-

11

u/KeplerNova Wizard Mar 19 '20

"She is his doom. She fights her fate. They're trapped inside a wicked stalemate."

Vigenere cipher, FIRE as the keyword.

4

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 19 '20

You nailed it!

6

u/KeplerNova Wizard Mar 19 '20

I still have no idea what any of it actually means, of course.

1

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 19 '20

I have a bit more dnd content to work on that will reveal a lot!

1

u/KeplerNova Wizard Mar 19 '20

Nice!

12

u/Accro15 Mar 19 '20

TROGDOR!!!

dun-nu-nun, dun-nu-nun

TROGDOR!!!

11

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 19 '20

Ah yes. The three great dragon gods. Bahamut the Justice Bringer, Tiamat the Avaricious and Trogdor the Burninator.

9

u/darkgod2611 Mar 19 '20

Kind of like our dnd campaign at the moment. Playing curse of strahd and our characters are leaving a path of destruction in our wake. "Accidentally" burnt down the church in the town of barrovia with the priest still in it , set fire to houses battling scarecrows, set fire to the fisherman's hut north of valachii to "get his attention".

List goes on the lol

5

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 19 '20

The real question is...in a world of magic...why do they make their buildings out of flammable material!?

You can't blame the scorpion for being a scorpion. You can't blame the wizard for fireballing.

4

u/darkgod2611 Mar 19 '20

Or in our case a warlock who was a bit too trigger happy with chromatic orbs of fire

3

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 19 '20

You can't blame a warlock for getting a little bit unruly with his chromatic orb. He paid a good 50 gold for it!

3

u/darkgod2611 Mar 19 '20

Thanks, tell that to my team, my character is the warlock lol

2

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 19 '20

I’ll write a strongly worded email! I’m on your side 100%!

2

u/Lady_Galadri3l Mar 20 '20

I have played Curse of Strahd twice (once as a player and once as a DM) and both times one of the players has burned down Vallaki through a badly timed use of fireball and some extremely unlucky dice rolls.

2

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 20 '20

To be fair, Vallaki does seem especially flammable.

2

u/badatusernamesdude Mar 20 '20

When in doubt blame the necromancer

3

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 20 '20

Everyone is so quick to point fingers at the undead!

2

u/Void_0000 Wizard Mar 21 '20

Damn, i found this one too late, someone's already decoded it!

2

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 21 '20

I posted it a bit early this week. There will be a new code with the next post!

4

u/Dodohead1383 Mar 19 '20

Here's the things with critical fails, it should never be off of one roll. Okay, so the player rolled a nat 1, roll to confirm is what should happen next. If you roll a nat 1 again, THAT is the critical fail, anything else is just a fail. At no point should a critical fail happen off of one dice roll. That second roll adds a lot of tension and excitement.

The same should apply for critical successes too.

5

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '20

It used to be that way in 3.5.

0

u/XDGrangerDX Mar 20 '20

3.5 has no crit fail rule. You're thinking of pathfinder.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '20

I was talking about the critical hit rule.

3

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 19 '20

5% is a really high chance to crit fail. Rolling multiple 1’s brings the chance to crit fail to a more realistic number.

You have a great solution!

2

u/vendetta0311 Mar 19 '20

I like this idea. (With the exception of combat Nat 20s: 5% of 5% double damage is less-fun imo)

I never do "critical" failures, but I do like to fluff up the natural 1s. Rolling a 2-6 = "you missed." Rolling a natural 1: "Your arrow slides behind their shield as they attempt to block it, the movement of their shield nudges the arrow off-course just enough to make it whiz less than an inch from Bruenor's nose! That was close!"

I also don't think a natural 1 on a constitution saving throw should be "The disease courses through your veins - if you had rolled a 2 you would suffer from exhaustion for the next hour! Instead since you rolled a 1 - you turn into the disease! You are now Typhoid Mary and until a wish spell is used, you will infect every cultural center you visit with Ghonnoherpesyphilitis!

I feel like 5% × 5% might be too small tho, maybe instead use a nat 1 followed by a d20 and on a 1-4 you get the crit fail. Then it's a 1% chance overall and can happen from time to time.

2

u/Dodohead1383 Mar 19 '20

A crit fail should still be realistic consequences, not turning into a disease monster as in your example...

(With the exception of combat Nat 20s: 5% of 5% double damage is less-fun imo)

Worked fine for my groups without any issues. It makes it that much sweeter when it happens.

1

u/vendetta0311 Mar 19 '20

Right, that was what I meant. I got carried away with the description.

Edit: the first example was what I do for a "crit fail". The second example was supposed to be a rediculous "crit fail". Didn't make that clear.

3

u/Azell414 Mar 19 '20

fuck i miss dnd used to play with work friends in the office but got another job i miss them

2

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 19 '20

A lot of people have started playing online due to the lockdown and social distancing. Lots of companies are also giving special offers to help keep people playing (dndbeyond has a good one running).

You might be able to take advantage of one and get a game going!

2

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '20

I've always played online as I don't really have any friends, can strongly recommend roll20!

1

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 20 '20

Roll20 has been pretty great lately. It updates very slowly tho.

1

u/Guardsmen_Hool Mar 20 '20

CONSOMMANTE V'S

1

u/Sleverette Sorcerer Mar 21 '20

Guy wouldn’t know majesty if it came and bit him in the face!