Do all RPGs have critical failures, and which was the first?

Question

In all the games I remember playing, critical failures have always, in every case triggered an event. This critical failure is due to exceptionally bad rolls on dice, either a 'natural one' in DnD or a 'tI'd Failure' in nWoD. This is committing a failure so catastrophic it makes something bad happen (some special enemy appearing, or some item breaking), sometimes so bad it's borderline nonsensical.

Does this necessarily have to be like this in every system or game? When we are playing, everyone assumes something is going to happen if they roll a 1 (or the equivalent in other systems), but I have been thinking about it and it doesn't make much sense. While I agree it's the worst possible roll and therefore it indicates the least successful or desirable outcome, I've never agreed on critical failures necessarily having to generate a special event.

Opinions aside, I've only been playing for a few years and I want to know: have roleplaying games always been like this? When did this critical failure trend start? I have casually asked some of the people I play with but no one has given it any thought and I'm really curious about it.

Answer 1

Not all role-playing game have fumbles. In fact, I suspect that were an intrepid soul to catalog every RPG—a daunting if not impossible task—, more RPGs would lack fumbles than possess them. However, many games have optional rules for fumbles for those players who like them, and many games will have specific elements that'll see a deeply flawed attempt yield consequences worse than mere failure despite lacking a general rule for fumbles. So, yeah, while the games you've played have had fumbles, fumbles are by no means a universal.

Possibly the original fumble mechanics

While I'm no role-playing game scholar, Chaosium's Runequest (1978) apparently included fumbles at least as early as 1980 (which is the version I extracted from my shelf, dusted off, and cracked the binding of when I flipped through it). Runequest (1980) has the following section:

Fumbles

An Adventurer using a weapon for which he has only a 5-20% chance of success has a 5% (a roll of 96-00 on D100) of fumbling. For every additional 20% capability an Adventurer has with a weapon, his chance of fumbling with it is reduced by 1%. However, an attack roll of 00 is always a fumble. Even an Adventurer with a 100% of hitting (actually 95% for dice rolls of 96-00 are always a miss) will fumble if a 00 is rolled. (20)

(It took a moment to find the page number: they're on the outside upper corner of each page. Pro Tip: If you're laying out a book, don't do that!)

A chart on which one is to roll if a fumble occurs appears soon after.

Jonn Rees apparently ran these numbers both for skill use and the chart. I'm looking at Steve Jackson Games' Murphy's Rules (1988), a collection of comic strips detailing amusing and incongruous game rules from the magazines Fantasy Gamer and Space Gamer (yes, there used to be several gaming magazines!), and John Rees submitted an oddity in 1984 that says

In a 30-minute Runequest battle involving 6,000 armored, experienced warriors using Great Axes, more than 150 men will decapitate themselves and another 600 will chop off their own arms or legs.

So, even then, while the sheer frequency of fumbles wasn't considered necessarily bad design, it was, at least, considered funny.

Speculation: Why fumbles exist

Fans of role-playing games may view the fictional reality the role-playing game creates as a heightened reality, which I'll call for convenience reality-plus. In actual reality—the one most of us are in, like it or not—, very little that happens matters in the grand scheme of things. In reality-plus, however, everything that happens during the game matters, and spectacle is expected for good or ill. And spectacle during even everyday tasks can lead to comedy or tragedy that is a hallmark of reality-plus.

For example, while training with his Great Axe [sic], Argath of Sartar chops off his own head. That's a thing that probably would not happen in actual reality—very few real-world highly trained axemen accidentally decapitate themselves—, but that sort of spectacle is expected in reality-plus because Argath of Sartar is important, and his training took place during the game.

A game with fumbles tends not to mirror reality because the random number generator that's used has so little granularity. A highly trained archer might shoot himself in the head with an arrow or some other absurdity, but that surely won't happen once every 100 arrows he fires in actual reality! Were there even a 1% chance of every attempt leading to catastrophe in our reality, archery ranges would be sad, sad places, littered with the dead, naked, and injured.

But in reality-plus if those 100 arrows are fired while they matter—during the actual game—, one of those hundred arrows is likely to cause the archer's armor strap to break or make him fall and twist his ankle (those are average results on the Runequest (1980) Fumble Table). That happens in reality-plus because that's spectacular.

That possibility of spectacle makes the game, for some, more interesting rather than more ridiculous. It turns the game from what some may view as a mere simulation into a drama, albeit, in this fan's opinion, in a really forced way.

Answer 2

No

There exist systems in which there is no “event” on a natural-1. It’s by no means a necessary component of an RPG.

And this is ignoring the existence of trivial answers like RPGs that don’t use dice, or don’t use any kind of randomization at all. Those may not even have a meaningful definition of “fumble.”

Dungeons & Dragons has never had a fumble result in any special event

A natural-1, which is called a fumble, results in an automatic miss but nothing further. Various editions have discussed variant or house rules to make fumbles result in events, but for example the 3.5 Dungeon Master’s Guide rejects this variant as problematic.

Legend doesn’t even have an automatic miss

In Rule of Cool’s Legend, rolling a natural-1 simply means you only get to add 1 to your bonus, and the result from that is whatever it is.

Answer 3

No, it's not universal for games to have some sort of fumble triggering an event. In some games, it's a good thing that idea has been removed, in some other games the fumble mechanic is what moves the game forward.

I'm going to show you why it's bad or good depending on the situation with examples of both.

---

I've been playing D&D 3.0 with an old critical fumbles table which I always thought came from some second edition game, where every 1 on the d20 risked triggering a self inflicted death, lasting injuries or hitting a nearby ally instead.

To us, fumble events were a way to introduce some effects that could happen, but never had a real trigger. You know, even the most expert warrior can slip on the ground (I later learned that is modelable with special terrain features) or break his arm with a bad swing. We wanted that sort of "realism" to be in our games - and we liked the tension that came from the "oh let's hope I roll under 85" - and we accepted it even if it happened way too frequently (1 in 20 chance).

Now I know better. Not hitting is a bad enough punishment for the crime of being simply unlucky.

On top of that, it is a punishment that increases the more attacks you roll in a single turn, which is a thing mundanes often do and spellcasters almost never do.

---

Dungeon World (and more generally any game inspired by Apocalypse World) has no turns as we know them from d20 games. Everyone acts when it makes more sense in the fiction, bar the GM. He is allowed to make very bad things happen when the players fail a roll, which means rolling 6 or less on 2d6+mod.
When you botch, you opened up your defenses and the enemies can act. Or a new enemy makes it to the place the party is at.

The game system is built around this idea and instead of feeling like some extra negative (in D&D-with-fumbles, for comparison, you hurt yourself with the fumble and the monsters still get their turn to act) you get the idea that the GM can only hurt you so much, when you let him. This makes it easy for him to do very bad things, and not pull his punches, without players feeling cheated.

---

There are of course lots of other games which you haven't played where fumbles do not provoke events, or where they provoke positive events. In the aforementioned Dungeon World you get experience points for failing rolls. So, you either learn from your errors (and improve) or you get what you wanted - or you get a partial success and something happens, but that's a completely different story.

Answer 4

Q: Have roleplaying games always been like this?

A: No.

When the "grandfather of RPGs" came out (Dungeons & Dragons, 1974), the roll of a 1 on a d20 had no added feature to it, and likewise a roll of 20 did not signify a critical hit. They were both simple measures of success or failure.

In the late 1970s, games like Runequest and Chivalry and Sorcery went into more granular levels of detail, as did the Arduin campaign rules that were a port from D&D. The Fantasy Trip: Melee (1977¹) included critical hits and fumbles, as did Iron Crown Enterprise's Arms Law (1980). (Thanks LAK.) I don't recall a critical/fumble in Traveller (1977), but @thedarkwanderer confirms my memory as "no."

Reasons to Include the Fumble: Humor and Excitement

The critical hit / critical fumble convention didn't fit with all game systems. Even though other game systems had used it for over a decade, as late as the 1989 AD&D 2nd edition had Critical Hits as an optional rule, and Critical Fumbles as well, but neither was a standard feature. By that time, most tables that I was familiar with had some system for critical or otherwise special hits, and a few applied the fumble, either as a pure home brew or imported as a neat feature from another game. Mixing and matching was very common.

The 2d Edition AD&D DMG edition entry on the Fumble (an optional rule):

Critical fumbles are less easily defined than critical hits. One system that works rules that a die roll of 1 results in some unfortunate event happening to the character who rolled it. {snip} A character could trip and sprawl to the floor, break his sword hitting a stone pillar, get his axe wedged in a wooden beam, or have one of his backpack straps slip off his shoulder, getting in the way. The normal result of a critical fumble is the loss of the next round's attack as the character gets up off the floor, digs out a new weapon, pulls his axe out of the beam, or struggles to get his pack where it belongs. Critical failures add a dose of excitement and humor to combat.

Some Early Experience

Having the die roll indicate something other than simple success or failure, in my first recollection, was critical hits yielding extra damage and more.

1. This feature went beyond the Blackmoor Hit Location option², the first example of a "critical" blow that could kill you when you still had most of, or all of, your hit points,
2. The flying combat rules from "The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures" had a critical hit location (p. 26-27) and result, but it didn't rely on rolling a result of a d20 roll of a 20 or a 1. It relied on a percentile die roll to ascertain the criticality, or not, of a given hit. And no fumble.

At the game I played most in 1977/78, our DM required a check for a critical if you (or a monster) rolled a 20. If the next (special) roll was a high enough score, he consulted a table and you either applied extra damage, or something happened like losing a limb, bleeding for x rounds at y damage per round, or even some worse calamity. No fumble at that point. My Druid lost an arm to a critical hit and bled to death two rounds later during one particularly gory fight scene. :(

I didn't have a DM in AD&D use fumble rules until the early 1980s.

Where did the Fumble/Critical Fumble come from?

The enhanced results came from a desire to add detail and granularity to combat, using dice that were already being used to resolve combat.

The crit / fumble was already in other game systems (like Runequest) when Karl Horak wrote an article for Dragon magazine (#39, July 1980), called "Good Hits and Bad Misses" that included tables for critical hits and critical damage and fumbles (using percentile dice to determine the out of ordinary event) as an option for AD&D.

Examples for Good Hits included:

01-31 double damage
32-62 triple damage
76 fingers removed; dexterity reduced 1-5 pts.
97 throat cut; immediate death (no effect if helmed)

Examples of Bad Misses (Fumbles) included:

40-44 off balance; roll dexterity or less on d20 or no action next round
50-54 lose grip; roll dexterity or less on d20 or drop weapon
83-84 hit friend; normal damage

Horak noted that such systems were controversial. In the 1e AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, Combat section, critical hits are explicitly argued against and provided reasons why they were not included (Gary Gygax, 1e AD&D DMG, TSR, 1979, p. 61, excerpted):

Combat is a common pursuit in the vast majority of adventures, and the participants in the campaign deserve a chance to exercise intelligent choice during such confrontations. As hit points dwindle they can opt to break off the encounter and attempt to flee. With complex combat systems which stress so-called realism and feature hit location, special damage, and so on, either this option is severely limited or the rules are highly slanted towards favoring the player characters at the expense of their opponents. Such rules as double damage and critical hits must cut both ways - in which case the life expectancy of player characters will be shortened considerably - or the monsters are being grossly misrepresented and unfairly treated by the system.

---

¹ In TFT for example, there are effects for high and low rolls, but they are just degrees of success with the attempt and don't cause events. An attack can do double or triple damage, or the attacker can drop or break their weapon. (@Dronz)

² Something like critical hits and their effects were put into melee combat (Blackmoor, 1975, OD&D supplement 2) with the optional rules for (pages 7-12) Hit Location to reflect damage details on a creature. (These are similar to the air-to-air combat hit location and critical hit tables in Underworld and Wilderness adventures p 26-27). For example, once enough hit points were done to your head, the creature died. A humanoid's head was rated at 15% your hit point total, the chest 80%, the abdomen 60%, etc. Unless you were a very high level creature, a blow to the head was likely fatal in one strike -- very much a "critical" hit. This system added extra rolls, tended to slow down combat, and was a pain to implement. Similar systems of Hit Location were more refined in Runequest and Chivalry and Sorcery, but were also time-consuming.

Answer 5

A statement along the lines of "X is always true" is easily proven false, but nearly impossible to prove true. Proving such a statement false merely requires a single counterexample, while proving it true requires examining every single element in the set that the statement covers.

In this case, it is false that a "critical" failure always produces a catastrophic result. Others have provided some counterexamples; here's another: D&D 4e.

A natural-1 on an attack in 4e simply means you're guaranteed to miss with the attack, nothing else. No catastrophic event, barring house rules. The skills system moves even further away: a natural-1 on a skill check isn't even necessarily a guaranteed failure, if your modifier is high enough!

Answer 6

No, RPGs have not always had fumbles (or critical hits), as the official original 1974 D&D books did not have them. But the first I know of were fan rules published in APA-L in May 1975, for use with OD&D. Jon Peterson has an article about this here - The First Critical Hits - though unfortunately he only reproduces the critical hit, and not the trip (i.e. fumble) table. So fumbles have been around for almost as long as the hobby itself, at least in unofficial form.

Other points of interest from the article:

• Gary Gygax, and so for a long time official versions of D&D resisted the idea of critical hits and fumbles (again proof that they are not 'inevitable')
• Like many roleplaying game rules, critical hits and fumbles have a history going back to wargames.