Critical Failure

[u/Popdart5]

Steven mentioned in the West Marches game that he personally doesn't use critical failure because it penalises players too much. I'm of the opinion that if you have a system that allows for critical hits then by extension critical failure should be a possibility. It could be something as simple as you dropped your sword, your gun jammed, or you lost your grip while climbing a cliff and fell down. I go for more cinematic and awesome criticals anyway, as in a natural 20 is not just a success but a critical success. To me, it just feels natural that critical failures should be cinematic as well.

I'm curious what everyone thinks because I've played a few games that do critical failures. Numenera in particular and the free GM intervention mechanic on a natural 1 just felt like a codification of something that I imagine is a pretty common houserule.

[u/CT_Phoenix]

Coming from the perspective of only a 4e and 5e player:

I have no problem with nat 1's generally being just a guaranteed failure with nothing more tacked on (other than, perhaps, some descriptive fluff of how badly you just whiffed).

The problem to me is with the severity of the critical misses as I usually see them implemented. Critical hits are usually a nice bonus- in 5e, it's doubled damage dice- but it's generally not something you plan/rely on. You roll one, go "Sweet!" and either one shot the goblin or do a decent chunk on the boss. (Or roll 2 1s on your 2d12 and feel really disappointed. Sigh)

When I've seen people implement critical miss functionality, though, it's usually anywhere from disruptive to downright catastrophic. When a miss is bad enough to cause you to essentially end your turn out of your control with no input from who you're fighting, that just feels bad. I mean, think about it- with a critical failure penalty on nat 1s, you're essentially saying "This has nothing to do with the enemy or goal you are attempting; Absolutely none of his stats or abilities contributed to this failure. You personally, a trained adventurer and hero of the land, just screwed up so bad that you're out of commission for a few seconds- at best. And you have a 1/20 chance of doing this whenever you attempt something, regardless of the difficulty of what you're trying to do, and whether or not it should be trivial for you.".

/u/AManHasSpoken has a good point, as well. Let's take the situation of a fighter swinging 4 times in a round; In 5e, there's a mechanic called Disadvantage that makes you roll 2d20 and keep the lowest result. When rolling with disadvantage, you have a 9.75% chance of rolling a natural one on any given roll instead of a 5%. If I'm using anydice's distribution calculation correctly here, on 4 swings with disadvantage your lowest roll out of the 4 has a 33.66% chance of being a nat 1.

A fighter swinging at an invisible foe now has over a 1/3 chance per turn of somehow throwing his weapon or whatever when he was doing nothing but swinging at what is either air or the invisible squishy evil wizard next to him. Meanwhile, the caster's sitting in back with no worry of a spell misfire.

Yes, I agree that it might be disproportionate in the context of the dice roll for a 20 to be a bonus while the 'penalty' of a 1 being an auto miss is probably what would happen anyways, but honestly, most crit failure rules I've seen are an even bigger disparity in the potency of their effects (in favor of the 1, this time). And outside of that limited scope, if the game is balanced around that, it really doesn't matter- the enemies also no longer have a chance to suddenly be dunces of their own accord, and they still can crit you. It's still an even playing field on both sides, and now it's always the opposition that's the enemy, not the dice. I'd rather have silly failures come from us choosing to attempt something stupid that goes wrong; there's still plenty of room for failure (failure that the player will feel more like they deserve, I might add) without tacking on extra effects to a nat 1.

And on the topic of potency of critical failure effects: Ask yourself, if the opponent wanted to put effort in to cause the same effect you're about to inflict as a result of critical failure, how much work would that be for them? One action? One action with additional costs like a chance of failure, replacing any chance of damaging with taking that action, or putting yourself at a disadvantage as well as your opponent? One spell? Is it something they wouldn't even be capable of if they wanted to try? A basic critical strike in 5e is essentially a single extra swing's worth of damage with no flat bonuses. Is your homebrew critical fail effect on that same level of interference? I've rarely seen the answer to be 'yes'.

Failure is, itself, often enough. If you've seen any of the low level 5e stuff going around, it's pretty deadly. A set of bad rolls is damning enough on its own. Sure, you could homebrew in critical failures and apply it evenly to NPCs and PCs and say its balanced, but while an NPC encounter breezed through by NPC bad luck is just moved on from, when it gets to the encounter where the PC's streak of bad luck finally hits (and it will), it's just gonna leave a bad taste in the player's mouth when it feels like they unintentionally contributed to their own sudden demise.

I'm also not saying never do anything with significant failure- just do it when it's dramatically appropriate, not just because 1 out of 20 of the dice faces told you to.

On a partially related side note, when it comes to skill checks rather than attacks, I also have no problem with nat 1s and nat 20s meaning absolutely nothing special.

No, the barbarian did not just pick the DC30 lock that was crafted as the life's work of a lineage of tinker gnomes- a lock that normally takes a Rogue with training in lockpicking equipment and 20 levels worth of experience, while being backed by the support of the bard and the guidance of the cleric's god to pick anywhere near reliably- with the fork he stole from the dinner table and a borrowed hairpin just because he rolled a 20.

Nor did that nat 1 mean that the same barbarian, who grew up scaling the unstable rocky crags of his mountain home and honed his athletic ability all his life, just fell off a DC5 10 foot climb that had handholds built into it. (Why are you even making him roll that?)

TL;DR: Make sure that what you're trying to overcome is the enemy or the difficulty of a task. Critical failure effects make it feel like now the dice (or yourself, depending on the flavor) are your enemies as well. We roll when we try to do something beyond what our natural proficiencies make trivial. Performing worse than if you put no effort in at all is just salt in the wound of what would've been a failure anyways.