Hello, fellow pathfinders, how are you?
Today I come to ask your opinion about fumble rules. Do you use any in your game?
My group uses a few houserules about critical and fumble.
1- You don't need to confirm criticals for natural 20, except for a few critical special effects, such as vorpal weapons (but the multilied damage takes effect anyway).
2- A natural 1 is a Fumble, you may drop your weapon (usually described as an enemy disarming you, so your character doesn't seem incompetent) or something like that.
Well, my players said they like the fumble rules, as they make combat less predictable and more fun. So hey, if they are having fun, that's all that matters!
But I'm a little worried, as they reach higher levels, the chance of losing their weapons increases (due to making more attacks per turn) and the consequences become more dire (being disarmed against a dragon is a lot mroe dangerous than being disarmed against goblins.)
I'm particually worried about the Paladin, because between full BAB, TWFing and what seems to be a talent for rolling natural 1s, he's could be in real trouble.
So, I'd like to tell me your opinions and experience with fumble rules. Do you use them? Why?
I have an idea about "confirming" fumbles. When you roll a nat.1 you roll your attack again, if you hit, that means you just missed the enemy, but if you miss it again, then you suffer the fumble. What do you guys think?
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Reflex save or drop the weapon. DC 15.
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Fumble rules are a play style thing. There are some things to take into account if you want to use fumble rules.
1. Fumbles disproportionately affect player characters. Most NPCs or monsters will appear in one or a few encounters and they will have fairly small odds of fumbling. Player characters appear in every encounter, so they are virtually certain to have fumbles happen, and could have multiple fumbles in a play session.
2. The encounter results of a fumble are difficult to predict. While "you dropped your sword" can result in some exciting game play situations, "Your party was TPK'd because the archer's fumble killed the party wizard" is a different sort of deal.
3. As you note, the higher level your encounters are, the more devastating the results of a fumble can be.
4. Perhaps the least enjoyable aspect of the game is when something really bad happens due to the capricious nature of dice. I have never really understood the incentive to increase the impact of that part of the game.
I personally dislike fumbles and don't use them as a GM.
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Both the insta-kill 20-20-20, and fumble rules (if you do use them they need to be confirmed) result in PCs dying because of random chance rather than the decisions they took. Realistic? Perhaps, but not fun when it happens to you.
In RuneQuest, which used a percentile system, the lower the roll the better the attack; 20% or less meant an 'impale', 5% or less meant a 'crit', 5% of the failure chance meant a 'fumble'. A fumble could result in hitting yourself for full damage, and RuneQuest used a hit location system.
In a 'Murphy's Rules' column, someone did some calculations. I can't remember the exact numbers, but it posited two armies with 5000 soldiers in each, all armed with greatswords, all with the same stats, the same armour, the same skill.
The result was that after an hour of battle 600 soldiers had cut their own heads off!
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I used to in one form or another. Eventually I stopped and haven't looked back. When all is said and done, fumble in it's simplest form punishes weapon-wielding classes, but not spell-casters and a great many monsters. I devised a more complicated table once and used it for a campaign, such that it affected warriors and casters and monsters alike. It was amusing for a time, but ultimately it was just another way to slow down the game. I can say with all certainty that I would NEVER use Paizo's fumble deck.
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I use the Fumble and Crit cards thusly.
If a player rolls a 1 on an attack (or enemy rolls a 20 on a save) the player may CHOOSE to accept a fumble in doing so they draw from the Fumble Deck and play out the consequences. They then get to draw from the Critical Hit deck and they may use that card to EITHER confirm a critical hit OR use the ability on a card on a confirmed critical.
This makes fumbles and such a gameplay choice with both consequences AND rewards.
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Fumble rules are awful. They disproportionately punish PCs (and more specifically, weapon using PCs), because:
1) They roll many, many more dice than any given NPC will over the course of the campaign
2) The lives of PC's matter. If a PC dies because of a bad roll, that player (and probably the other players, too), care. If Goblin #5 dies because of a bad roll, everyone at the table can have a good laugh.
3) Fumbling and losing your turn/weapon does not affect the fun of the GM--he has many more NPCs to control and his fun is from leading the game anyway, not from acting as any specific character, whereas a PC who loses their weapon and turn is now not having fun for a turn, since they do nothing.
4) This is extra unfair towards weapon using characters because they roll more attacks--many spellcasters can go entire game sessions without making a single attack roll, for example. And it's actually even rougher on certain weapon users (archers, dual wielders, and monks), who make even more attack rolls than normal. And dual wielders and monks are already hurt by their lousy mechanics, so punishing them further with fumbles is just cruel.
To be honest, I'm not a fan of the crit deck, either. When I crit, I want to hit harder, not generate some random effect I probably don't care about. The GM in the group I'm PCing in now uses it and I've yet to see a crit card come up whose effect I would prefer to the extra damage.
Well, my players said they like the fumble rules, as they make combat less predictable and more fun.
This is a huge disconnect for me. Less predictability does not make for more fun in my mind. Predictable die rolls allow you to plan properly so that you win or lose on your own merits (how well you built your character, where you placed your spells/concentrated attacks, moved tactically, etc.) rather than having pure chance determine your success or failure. You need some level of uncertainty, but too much and your choices stop mattering.
RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32
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The biggest problem I have with fumbles is that in most cases, the better you are at fighting, the more likely you are to fumble each round (you have more attacks/chances to roll a 1) It doesn't make sense that Bob farmer (commoner 1) is less likely to fumble than Killicus, legendary warrior (fighter 20).
The biggest problem I have with fumbles is that in most cases, the better you are at fighting, the more likely you are to fumble each round (you have more attacks/chances to roll a 1) It doesn't make sense that Bob farmer (commoner 1) is less likely to fumble than Killicus, legendary warrior (fighter 20).
Math doesn't work that way.
A commoner has a 5% chance of threatening a fumble (rolling a 1) every time he attacks. Since he has a low attack modifier on his only attack, he stands a decent chance of confirming the miss.
A fighter with iterative attacks has a 5% chance of threatening a fumble (rolling a 1) every time he attacks. All but his last iterative attack are guaranteed to have a higher attack modifier, resulting in a (much) lower chance of confirming a critical. His last iterative may be as poor as a commoner, but not likely due to magic weapons and feats and higher strength modifiers.
A trained fighter stands less chance of fumbling than an untrained fighter. Yes, if the fighter makes three attacks in 6 seconds that gives him three opportunities to fumble, but understand: he's averaging 2 seconds per attack with more precision and impact than the commoner, who is taking 6 seconds.
Yes, critical fumbles will come up at the table more often as more dice are rolled, but then too so do critical hits. The math supports a trained fighter being better in every metric except fumbles-per-second - which doesn't matter.
The biggest problem I have with fumbles is that in most cases, the better you are at fighting, the more likely you are to fumble each round (you have more attacks/chances to roll a 1) It doesn't make sense that Bob farmer (commoner 1) is less likely to fumble than Killicus, legendary warrior (fighter 20).Math doesn't work that way.
A commoner has a 5% chance of threatening a fumble (rolling a 1) every time he attacks. Since he has a low attack modifier on his only attack, he stands a decent chance of confirming the miss.
A fighter with iterative attacks has a 5% chance of threatening a fumble (rolling a 1) every time he attacks. All but his last iterative attack are guaranteed to have a higher attack modifier, resulting in a (much) lower chance of confirming a critical. His last iterative may be as poor as a commoner, but not likely due to magic weapons and feats and higher strength modifiers.
A trained fighter stands less chance of fumbling than an untrained fighter. Yes, if the fighter makes three attacks in 6 seconds that gives him three opportunities to fumble, but understand: he's averaging 2 seconds per attack with more precision and impact than the commoner, who is taking 6 seconds.
Yes, critical fumbles will come up at the table more often as more dice are rolled, but then too so do critical hits. The math supports a trained fighter being better in every metric except fumbles-per-second - which doesn't matter.
That's assuming there is a confirmation mechanic, though. A lot of groups (Including every single one I've played with that uses fumble rules) don't do things that way.
My fumble rules are here.
For the tl;dr crowd, the main points are:
1) ONE ROLL per round. So your hasted flurrying monk 20 still gets only one chance to fumble per round
2) The better you are, the less likely you are to fumble. Unless you're on difficult ground, nonproficient or something, a 10th level fighter won't fumble.
3) There are different fumble effects, most of them fairly mild. In practice the effect might be that you drop your quiver or throw your +1 javelin into the river.
I've seen all the objections above (most of which are valid) so these rules are designed to cope with them.
The only thing it doesn't cope with is that casters are, by and large, much less affected. But that can be balanced in other ways.
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A hasted TWFer with a BAB of +16 gets 8 attacks per round. Your farmer gets 1/round.
Let's assume a generous 2+ is needed for the first attacks to hit.
• the first three attacks (the first pair plus haste) need 2+ to hit
• the second pair need 7+ to hit
• the third pair need 12+ to hit
• the last needs 17+ to hit
Let's assume 400 rounds of full attacks, where the d20 rolls each of the 20 possibilities equally, and any 1s that come up are spread equally among the different attacks.
In 400 rounds, the result of a natural 1 (indicating a fumble threat) will occur 160 times, 20 times for each of the 8 attacks.
Meanwhile, the farmer will roll a fumble threat 20 times in 400 rounds.
But the fumble still needs to be confirmed.
• the first three attacks will threaten a fumble 20 times each, with each confirming a fumble once, for a total of 3 actual fumbles
• the second pair will threaten a fumble 20 times each, with each confirming 6 times, for a total of 12 more fumbles
• the third pair will threaten a fumble 20 times each, with each confirming 11 times, for a total of 22 more actual fumbles
• the last attack will threaten a fumble 20 times, confirming 16 more times
• total number of confirmed fumbles over 400 rounds=53
For the farmer, he threatens a fumble 20 times. Even if every single fumble threat confirms, he only fumbles 20 times. But, we're using averages here. Worst case scenario for the farmer, even if he needs a 20 to hit, he will only have 19 confirmed fumbles in 400 rounds.
53 > 19
For the mathematically-challenged, fifty-three is greater than nineteen.
Conclusion? A fumble rule means that high level fighters are more likely to fumble than untrained farmers given any given duration of combat where full attacks are involved, and that is why a fumble rule makes no sense.
BTW, it's many times worse if you call any natural 1 a fumble without requiring a confirmation roll.
Q. E. and indeed, D.
A commoner has a 5% chance of threatening a fumble
While it makes sense to parallel crits by "threatening" and "confirming" a fumble, I have literally never seen someone using fumbles actually do this. To them, you threaten a crit on a 20, but a 1 is just a fumble straight out.
I still wouldn't like Fumble rules if you threatened a fumble and had to confirm a miss, but it'd be slightly less awful.
Use the Fumble deck. Confirm roll required - just have to beat the enemy's AC - successful confirm just turns it into a miss. Only one fumble per round; multiple 1s beyond the first are just misses.
Crits I allow as many draws from the deck as you roll.
My players enjoy them, so I haven't had reason not to use them, and they don't slow combat nearly as much as some of the players themselves do.
A commoner has a 5% chance of threatening a fumbleWhile it makes sense to parallel crits by "threatening" and "confirming" a fumble, I have literally never seen someone using fumbles actually do this. To them, you threaten a crit on a 20, but a 1 is just a fumble straight out.
I still wouldn't like Fumble rules if you threatened a fumble and had to confirm a miss, but it'd be slightly less awful.
If you use the Paizo Fumble deck, the rules in it say to ask for a confirmation roll after a 1.
If you use the Paizo Fumble deck, the rules in it say to ask for a confirmation roll after a 1.
The GM of the game I'm currently in uses the fumble deck and does no such confirmation roll.
I've also heard if the crit doesn't apply, you just deal extra damage as normal for the crit deck, but he doesn't--he draws a card until it applies, so we end up with worthless crits.
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Not only do I not use fumble rules, but a DM who does is on the short list of things that will instantly cause me to leave a game. Or at least make a spellcaster of some sort that never ever is subject to the fumble rules. But I can only stand playing spellcasters so often.
We use critical fumble rules.
They work much like our crit homerules, but in reverse and not as bad, usually.
Crits:
20 is a crit threat.
20 on the confirmation roll is a double crit (adds +1 to your crit modifier essentially).
If you roll a Double Crit and roll another 20 you just instantly kill your target.
Crit Fails:
1 is a miss and a Crit Fail threat.
1 on the confirmation roll means you lose your weapon (you don't have to hit the opponent, just roll a 1).
If you confirm your Crit Fail, roll again. A 1 on the Crit Fail Threat Confirmation Part Deux means you hit yourself.
If you manage to roll 4 1's in a row on the same attack roll you kill yourself. Why? Because obviously somewhere, some god hates you and wants you dead.
TL;DR:
Crits:
One 20 is an auto-hit, crit threat.
20 on the confirmation is double crit.
Triple 20 is an instakill.
Fails:
One 1 is an auto-miss, fail threat.
1 on confirmation is a fail, are disarmed if you do not:
Roll a 1 on the third roll after disarm you hit yourself, unless:
You roll a fourth 1 in a row and kill yourself
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Use the Fumble deck. Confirm roll required - just have to beat the enemy's AC - successful confirm just turns it into a miss. Only one fumble per round; multiple 1s beyond the first are just misses.
Can you see the problem here?
Even if you limit the maximum number of fumble threats per round to just one, our 8 attack high level fighter has 8 times the number of opportunities to roll a natural 1 than does the farmer!
It would only rectify if only the very first attack roll per round could possibly be a fumble threat; all subsequent attack rolls that come up 1 would just miss.
Why is the 8th level fighter full-attacking the farmer? And since the farmer probably has AC 10, confirming it and thusly not fumbling shouldn't be a problem.
:p
I'm not a big fan of Fumbles myself.
Generally speaking, I like the game to have the least possible amount of randomness. Of course, some things have to be random for the game to work (we are rolling dice, after all).
I presented the idea of removing fumble rules (or at the very least, making them more unlikely to happen, via "fumble confirmation"), but like I said, they say it's a fun mechanic (and fun is the ultimate goal of the game, right) so I kept them. VM Merc can confirm this.
I think this is because our game sessions tend to be very light hearted, even when the in-game situation is dire, we, (the players, not our characters), tend to make jokes and stuff. Of course, we'll get worried when our character are in big trouble, but we don't usually go for the take-it-way-too-seriously mood I've seen in other groups.
We actually had lots of laughs when the poor TWFing Paladin lost 3 or 4 daggers in two rounds. The Paladin's player was even more amused than most of us. The same player also went 5~6 session in another campign without taking significant damage from any enemy, but at least twice every session, the party's rogue would accidentally stab him.
We were joking about the mighty barbarian facing anciet dragons head-on but being scared of staying too close to the little girl with little knives.
That said, I still worry that as the BAB raises, Fumbling will become more and more frustrating, and it could be the difference between victory and unexpected TPK.
For more variety, on a fumble (confirmed or whatever mechanic you use to determine it), your opponent gets to use the Dirty Trick maneuver as a free action without provoking an attack of opportunity. The person targeted rolls, and it happens regardless of distance (you just describe it differently).
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Fumble rules are.....sigh.
The stronger the fighter gets the more likely he is to drop his weapon? (more attacks)
It has little effect on NPC's because they tend to have a one encounter life span.
It punishes the classes that already have a harder time past the low lvls (melee) and does nothing to the classes that already have a leg up. (casters)
Whats wrong with fumbling a ray? Or a touch attack?
Whats wrong with fumbling a ray? Or a touch attack?
Spellcasters who use rays or touch attacks might well be affected by a fumble. There aren't many builds that are focused on rays or touch attacks, so casters use them sparingly while the melee or ranged martial classes are pumping out six attacks per round, every round. Even if you cast a ray or touch attack, you typically get one attack per round.
So even with using rays or touch attacks, martial characters using full attack will fumble far more frequently than the caster.
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I prefer to impose fumbles only when a character is using a weapon with which they are not proficient.
I prefer to impose fumbles only when a character is using a weapon with which they are not proficient.
Now this is reasonable. I like it.
Back to fumble and spell casters though. As Adamantine Dragon pointed out even if said caster is silly enough to go blaster they still are not rolling attack rolls nearly as much. And "dropping" their weapon has no effect anyway... They don't have to somehow pick up their ray.....
No, not dropping the ray... something worse!
No, not dropping the ray... something worse!
And? Then the casters would just go control/save or die over blasting which is already far stronger anyway so it has no effect.
I tend not to use them because they harm the PCs. When I have tinkered with them I've made the effects non-damaging and usually at the bottom end of another 1d20
E.g.
1=Weapon is sundered/gains broken condition
2=Weapon is dropped
3=Weapon cannot be used next attack
4=Trips
5=Flat footed
6=Feinted
7-20 no effect
Yeah I also hate them and see it as one of the clearest signs of a bad DM. Its like not just "melee can't have nice things." but melee can't have nice things AND lets punish them for being melee even more!
> Fumble deck
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One thing that annoys me about this conversation is the assumption that a GM using the Fumble deck is automatically a bad GM. All of the issues that were named off are something that can be fixed. Assuming we're in a fight with that farmer, the only possible way to confirm a fumble is two consecutive 1s. I'm no mathematician, but aren't the odds for that pretty low?
A fighter gets more likely to hit as he grows in level. You can use your full BAB when doing a fumble roll. The other thing my group does(as we use both the crit deck and the fumble deck) is we allow the use of "banked" crit cards to negate a critical fumble. So if you are fighting goblin #5, and crit him, instead of wasting a crit, you kill the creature with normal damage, and bank the crit card to not fumble yourself later on.
Not liking crit/fumble rules is fine, but trashing those who do use them is frankly uncalled for. If you're going to be anal enough to walk away from the table just because I use the cards, you weren't worth being there in the first place.
On top of all the mechanical issues that have come up, I don't like fumble rules for roleplaying reasons as well. It just seems wrong that every high-level martial character runs around acting like a blithering idiot who can't go for half a minute of combat without dropping his sword, stabbing himself in the foot, etc. While the level seventeen casters are busy bending reality to their will, the level seventeen fighter is dropping his sword on his foot almost every battle.
Yeah I also hate them and see it as one of the clearest signs of a bad DM. Its like not just "melee can't have nice things." but melee can't have nice things AND lets punish them for being melee even more!
A game I joined last year, the DM did not advertise at all that his game used fumble rules, and due to us barely having combat the first few months I joined, it never came up. Then, we had a massive assault on an orc-occupied city we were trying to re-take. We were level 17, and my character was a reach weapon using tripper (this is 3E, so the bonus attack from tripping did not consume AoOs) and AoO machine. Her backstory involved being a warlord and conquering places and slaying armies. Long story short... between her full attack (or whirlwind attack...did I mention she had WWA?), her AoOs, her trips (which in 3E required a melee touch attack to initiate the trip, then a str check to trip, then the followup attack, so each trip = 2 attack rolls, basically)... she was literally making 20+ attack rolls each round. Or she would have, rather, if she hadn't been misfortunate enough to drop her weapon every single round. Even quickdrawing new weapons to not have to waste time picking up the dropped one didn't help. Indeed, it just kept the fumble train steaming ahead.
Needless to say, it's a bit hard to take my goddess of battle, veteran of countless mass combats, and complete master of the spear seriously when she couldn't even hold onto her weapon for 6 seconds straight. I was not happy. So I switched her out for a wizard PC at the first opportunity, who is 100x as powerful but only 1/10 as much fun to play. :(
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So to fix poor house rules you add more house rules and then some more on top of that so that it will at least effect casters some?
Lol so stacking loads of house rules to force something 100% unnecessary and unintended to be in the system shouldn't be a red flag to people? Yeah...
Ugh yeah that's the kind of stupid things fumble rules lead to.
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So to fix poor house rules you add more house rules and then some more on top of that so that it will at least effect casters some?
Lol so stacking loads of house rules to force something 100% unnecessary and unintended to be in the system shouldn't be a red flag to people? Yeah...
It's an accessory written by the company who makes the rules, it's as intended as the GM for a homebrew wants them to be. They make the game more fun for my group. If my group didn't want them, I wouldn't use them. You're arbitrarily deciding that the people who do use them are bad GMs, and that is flat-out wrong. You're sticking the people who are bad GMs in with people who use those decks, when in reality those people are bad GMs for several reasons, not the least of which listening to the players as a group who don't want the decks. And all I did was offer solutions to your problems with using the decks.
I will say that I have no problem with fumble rules as long as each player can "opt out" of being subjected to them. That way the people who think they're lulz-tastic have their fun w/o making those who feel....differently... suffer.
But that's never how it works out, is it? It's always a forced-upon you sort of deal. Or "it's not fair to the group if someone isn't subject to fumbles."
I have never seen "optional" fumble rules. It's always in the end the other players or the DM forcing the player(s) who don't like fumbles to be miserable.
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I will say that I have no problem with fumble rules as long as each player can "opt out" of being subjected to them. That way the people who think they're lulz-tastic have their fun w/o making those who feel....differently... suffer.
But that's never how it works out, is it? It's always a forced-upon you sort of deal. Or "it's not fair to the group if someone isn't subject to fumbles."
I have never seen "optional" fumble rules. It's always in the end the other players or the DM forcing the player(s) who don't like fumbles to be miserable.
If you're "miserable" with the rules then I would drop them all together. But if you sit at my table, see the decks, get up and walk away, to hell with you. At that point it boils down to disrespect. Talk to me, and if I come off as a jackass, I wasn't worth your time. Works both ways for me.
While Pazio does make fumble decks (why not? If there are people that will buy them then they should sell them. They are a business after all.) They are in no way official pathfinder as they do not show up in any rules book.
As for your opinion to what makes a bad DM you are welcome to it. But mine won't change. House rules that punish some players and not others (or some more then others.) will always mean a bad DM to me.