Fearsome Foe
If Wizard is showing emotion, you know it’s got to be bad. My feelings on the other hand are a little more complicated.
There are undeniably some amazing stories that come out of botched rolls, and failure is by no means a bad thing in RPGs. Failure results in drama and tension, and those are things we like. The problem comes up when frequency and severity bump heads. You see, in the d20 system, any given die roll has a 1/20 chance to come up as a 1. In most versions of the system that’s just a missed attack or a failed save. However, if you happen to play at one of those wacky tables where any 1 on the die becomes the worst possible outcome for the situation, then you’ve got some bad times headed your way. Shall we do the math? Let’s shall.
Take your average level 1 monk fresh from the monastery. That sweet flurry of blows class feature means he gets two attacks, right? Bully for him. Now the formula for figuring out the odds of at least one of those dice coming up 1 is explained right here. For our purposes, it can be rendered as:
1−[(19^2)/(20^2)] = 39/400 = 9.75%
Our acolyte is going to botch on a little less than one in ten of his turns. Not bad for a young pup. Now let’s turn our attention to the legendary kung fu master Clown Shoes. Clown Shoes has studied for long years, survived countless hardships, and reached the pinnacle of his art. In other words, he’s a 20th level monk who can flurry for seven attacks. Legendary kung fu master indeed. But check out the probability that he will roll at least one botch on those 7 dice.
1−[(19^7)/(20^7)] = 386128261/1280000000 ≈ 30.2%
That means Clown Shoes is going to botch almost a third of time he makes his full complement of attacks. Remember the “frequency and severity” stuff I mentioned up top? Well there’s the frequency issue. Here’s the severity half of the equation: If you just say “it’s a miss” when Clown Shoes rolls his 1, then everything’s peachy. He keeps on with the rest of his 7 Petals Of the Immaculate Lotus Kata or whatever he’s choosing to call it this week. If, however, you declare that a 1 means he loses the rest of his attacks, punches his buddy in the head by mistake, or else falls down a flight of nearby stairs, then you begin to understand where Clown Shoes gets his name.
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That indeed has always been my issue with the botching idea. I mean, it’s great to do it when it’s going to make things more fun. Which typically means it’s better to let the player declare when the 1 means something went horribly wrong. Even if the GM thinks something is funny, it often can just aggravate the player.
Speaking of funny things… I saw what you did and… well done. Heh.
Also, yay linking of comics. Always nice in this way too large to find everything you might be interested in on your own interwebs. =)
But what if it’s your goal to aggravate the player? Bait them into losing their composure, watch as they begin making tactical errors, and then laugh triumphantly as you win the game of D&D.
If you really want to do that, please change your alignment to Chaotic Evil, Neutral Evil or Chaotic Neutral. If you’re a Good or Lawful character and/or you are connected with a god that disallows these alignments, make a Wisdom saving throw. If you fail, take 15d10 psychic damage and a permanent -2 to all attack rolls, saving throws and ability checks which can only be removed by a Wish spell. If you succeed… half damage and only -1.
Oh yeah, and with disadvantage.
…
Wait, you’re probably Chaotic Evil anyway.
https://media.tenor.com/images/729ac8eb03bba33058da6e5a129fb4c9/tenor.gif
Our current GM tends to deal with botched rolls on a case by case basis. We’ve had everything from the rogue falling out a tree when he tried to make a sneak atack, to asking a player to speak with her outside the room for a moment.
Botched climbing checks are generally hilarious. Ours involved going up a tree. Or rather, not going up a tree. The botch turned out to mean that our cleric was acrophobic, and we had to levitate the schmuck out of a 6′ apple tree.
(nods) If all natural 1’s are fumbles / botches, then the system punishes characters for making lots of attacks, which is bad design because characters *ought* to make as many attacks as possible.
I happen to like the idea of fumbles, so I didn’t want to get rid of them all together. So I use a confirmation roll, which is “how many wounds you have.” So, if you’re uninjured, you can fight all day long and never worry about fumbles / botches. But if you are wounded, and you choose to fight on anyway, despite your injuries, then you run the risk of hurting yourself.
Ooh… I like that a lot, actually. It gives credence to the idea that HP are abstract, and don’t necessarily represent literal wounds so much as a decrease in focus.
What system was this? And could you describe you fumble system in a bit more detail? I’m particularly curious to know if characters are more likely to fumble the more injured they become.
Pathfinder has that covered already. Pathfinder Unchained included the two following systems (themselves adapted from alternate 3.5 rule sets).
Wounds and Vigor: https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/wounds-and-vigor/
Wound Levels: https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/unchained-rules/wound-thresholds-optional-rules/
Wound levels could be a fun rule to implement for the “high level death” problems we’re talking about over here:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/habeas-corpus
Someone on the corresponding reddit thread had suggested days worth of 5e style fatigue levels after resurrection, giving death more weight even when you’re dealing with easy-access breath of life style effects. This seems like the way to implement that idea in Pathfinder.
Easiest way I’ve found to counteract “The Clownshoes Effect” (Which I’m stealing as an example now) is simply to make the player confirm the botch the same way one might confirm a crit, this way the better someone is at combat the less likely it will be that they botch consistently.
This means that the brawny-full-BAB types who can hit a 30 AC on a 2 come off as awesome warriors who have complete mastery of themselves and their environment.
That mitigation definitely helps! Still, it’s always stuck in my craw that the dude who makes half a dozen attacks with a full BAB is still more likely to screw up than the caster who never rolls a d20 to do his spell-slinging thing. I guess you could turn every mage into a 5e-style wild magic sorcerer, rolling a “random shenanigans” die for every spell cast. That rapidly descends into “inelegant design” territory though. (I’m still pondering this mess personally.)
Yeah, I have to agree with you there. Though I feel like sometime when a wizard casts a spell and EVERY enemy makes the save or it fizzles against Spell Resistance it’s sort of the same effect of “I spend my action and resources for jack-all effect”.
I’m sure we’ve all seen an example of a magic user blowing three or more spells on a single enemy who just won’t fail a save. Often to hilarious (for everyone else anyway) effect.
About wild magic? I’m on a fence. On one hand it can have some really cool effects and be a cool awesome effect. On the other turning your 20d6 Lightning Bolt into a frog that splats harmlessly against the boss because you flubbed a d% roll is not a lot of fun. Though the Old 2e Wild-Magic had a spell that specifically set off a Wild Magic surge (Nahal’s Reckless Dweomer: http://worldofmor.us/rules/TM/DD04169.htm) which as a last ditch or as a Hail-Mary has interesting implications.
There’s a Wild Magic sorcerer in my Out of the Abyss group who loves wild surges. I may suggest Nahal’s Reckless Dweomer get adapted a 5e homebrew.
My house rule for fumbles (in pathfinder) started with a 100% roll. you get 5% per BAB bonus to make the nat 1 roll be just a miss. my idea was that the better you are at hitting things the less fumbles you make.
that mean a level 1 fighter would fumble 95% of the times he roll a nat 1 (which is 5% per roll) while a level 20 fighter (or flurrying monk) has to roll 1 on a 100% to fumble (again if he rolled a nat one on attacking).
.
..
then i had a fumble sheet that from just a miss straight down to critical self injury, but again with less and less chances the worst it went.
I dig it! I mean OK sure, it’s still tougher on fightin’ types than casters on account of the raw number of attacks vs. the option of casting a save vs. spell, but tying into BAB helps to tilt the balance a bit. I appreciate that impulse. 🙂
I have a gaming tale of a reverse botch.
Background: Two of the players were playing an ettin, and we were running through Storm King’s Thunder, infiltrating a frost giant fortress. The group was arguing about how to best enter the main keep, when one of the ettin players (on the assumption that this would all end in combat anyways) cut the knot by leveraging the ettins’ established foolishness to have him go in the front door and pretend that they were supposed to be there (I forget the exact cover story). To paraphrase what happened next:
“Roll Deception.”
“Natural 20.”
“…with disadvantage.”
“Natural 20!”
So two fewer players were arguing about how to safely get into the keep. One of them tried something obviously stupid* (which the last two characters allowed because he was a new character whose first notable action was shooting a surrendering sailor), then there were only two. And the ettin was tied up at the first sign of trouble, but one of its heads was a warlock so that didn’t end too badly.
*I’ll share this one too.
At the fortress, we had seen a few humans and signs that many more lived there. We players assumed they were probably slaves. Galaxy-brain decides that he should disguise himself as a slave to sneak in. But he needs slave clothes to do that. And since we don’t want to hunt down slaves to steal their clothes…he decides to improvise slave garb from the loincloth of a giant we killed.
The giants didn’t keep any slaves, so this guy walking into the hall claiming to be one clued them in instantly that something was wrong beyond “Why is this idiot wearing a loincloth?” And that’s part of why the ettin was restrained when the giants noticed what me and the other player were doing.
Galaxy-brain went through a lot of characters that campaign, mostly due to stupicide. (Other memorable deaths include the one who died from fall damage after missing one of those dive attacks and the one who wandered through the wilderness alone for weeks to recover a magic item he had to leave behind for complicated reasons, even though the person he tried to drop it on was trying to recover it.) The only other players who didn’t keep the same characters through the whole campaign were the ettin players (who ditched their initial characters at the start for RP reasons I won’t get into and found homebrew rules for an ettin), a player who could only play on school breaks and brought a new character each time, and the one who joined the group after the giants but kept the same character for the brief time he was there.
I like botches to be alittle more severe, but not too bad.
firstly, I’m just gonna mention that I like percentile more than d 20, because 1/100 chance of auto fail and horrid things is a bit more reasonable than 1/20.
For me, megafumbles are always a go for mooks. The kobold rolls a nat 1? He hits himself of one of his buddies.
with players, though. I prefer to have autofail, but not auto bad stuff. Either doll out the bad stuff only in low stakes encounters, or confirm the crit fail. if you roll another one, that takes the odds to 1/400, and you really do deserve to shoot Barbarian Mc Frontliner, or accidentally throw your sword across the room.
This is one of the things I think PF2’s crit success/critfail system does a good job of addressing. Basically, you roll a d20 and add modifiers as normal. If you beat the DC it’s a success, beat it by 10 and it’s a critical success. If you don’t beat the DC it’s a failure, get 10 or more below the DC and it’s a critfail. And if you roll a natural 20/1, you shift your result one step up or down the chart. So most of the time, a nautural 1 is indeed a botch, but for Clown Shoes the Enlightened, who’s rocking a +25 attack against these AC 20 ninjas, even a natural 1 only shifts his result from a success down to a failure.