Interpreting Fumbles

[Lisa Padol]

It's late enough at night that I'm forgetting which Sorcerer supplement had the useful suggestion that one not interpret failures / fumbles as failures on the particular action, but rather on the goal the action was directed towards. I think it was The Sorcerer's Soul. In any case, this has proved very useful advice indeed.

In Cthulhupunk: Twenty Years After, the sequel campaign to my original Cthulhupunk campaign, one of my players, Avram, had his PC, Eve, was hired by an unseelie sidhe, Victor, to try to find some information. Eve did this by tring to pick up gossip at a British Sidhe court. Now, she brought her Sidhe husband Christian, an NPC. I rolled quite well for him, and decided that this meant he'd learned what they'd been trying to find out for a Sidhe prince. Avram started to roll for Eve, on 3d6, using Over the Edge rules.

"Just don't fumble," I said, in view of how well I'd rolled for Eve's husband.

The dice rolled.

"I just rolled Martian Eyes," said Avram, as they came up all 1s.

Hm. Now, I didn't want to have that cancel out Eve's husband learning the information. Avram suggested that perhaps Eve had offended one of the Sidhe. I agreed, and the upshot was that Eve wound up owing the offended party a favor.

But this, it occurred to me, after the session was over, didn't quite relate to the goal of learning information useful to Eve's Sidhe employer.

Hm. Well, Victor, the employer, was trying to find out all he could about a sidhe who was a political enemy. Eve and Christian had just learned that this enemy actually had a  possibly valid claim to Victor's throne. As she was a woman, they suggested to Victor that he take the obvious solution of marrying her. He asked them to find out more about her, so they went to her last known location, Florida, took pictures, and sent them to Victor.

The rival claimant, Creiddylad, and her supporters saw Eve and Christian, but did not realize they'd been photographed. Now, I thought, what if the sidhe Eve offended was another of Creiddylad's supporters? And she guessed that something was up, given the fumble? And then, Eve and Christian show up in Florida?

So, the offended sidhe told Creiddylad's supporters, and sent them a letter authorizing them to call in the favor Eve owed. This favor was for Eve to stay incommunicado for a week. In that time, Creiddylad would try to make her move.

The request for the favor was backed up with implied force, and Eve agreed, after warning her captors that this might cause them problems if folks went looking for her. They thought they could handle this with a bit of illusion. As it turns out, things went very wrong for them for exactly the reason Eve warned them about.

I hadn't expected Avram to have Eve surrender, but it worked rather nicely, especially as Avram had 2 other PCs and didn't have nothing to do. One of the PCs was Eve's daughter, Laura, who led a party in to rescue her mother, after we all agreed that a) Eve had been out of communication long enough that Laura would worry and b) Laura and her friends had enough information to actually find Eve.

So, something that could have been interpreted as a rather lame fumble turned into a good plot point, and probably helped generate one of the related sub-plots that episode.

In the original campaign, something similar happened, more or less by accident. One of my players, Naomi, introduced her PC, Bittersmoke, an eagle shaman. Bittersmoke tried to summon an eagle. Alas, the roll was a botch or at least, a failure. My first call was that, well, no eagle showed up. Naomi said that this meant her PC hadn't been able to do anything so far that session, and as this was a valid point, I figured this was a time to ignore the dice. I have no problem with rolling and ignoring -- sometimes, you need the roll to see what you really want to do. (This happened when Matt had his PC try a cool James Bond move -- all of us agreed that the rolled failure should be ignored because the move -- grabbing on to a plane -- was just so cool.)

So, one eagle showed up. And, during the session, through no planning, the eagle got killed by the roll of the dice. This caused interesting long term consequences -- Bittersmoke decided that Eagle would be offended with her. She held back from contacted Eagle for a long time. This worked out well for me, as it meant that a time when Bittersmoke might find out about a long term plot arc fell during the window when Bittersmoke was, by the PC and player's own choice, not functioning at full capacity.

And I'd wondered how one could do that sort of thing, which happened by fortuitous accident, on purpose. I'm beginning to see how it might work.

In our most recent session,  again, using OTE, Matt missed his combat roll for his PC, Blake, by one, which I first ruled meant Blake got grazed by a bullet. Now, everyone was expecting this attack in character, and as soon as the shot was fired, another PC, Benjamin, was through the door. So, I decided on second thought, that the shot had missed -- heck, Blake would have been keeping a damned sharp eye on the gun carried by the woman who shot him -- and the damage came from the Benjamin slamming open the door into Blake as he enthusiastically rushed to the rescue.

-Lisa

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Lisa! Welcome!

Quickie reference: the text about this issue is found in Sorcerer & Sword, pp. 67-68, at the beginning of Chapter 6.

So, something that could have been interpreted as a rather lame fumble turned into a good plot point, and probably helped generate one of the related sub-plots that episode.

Solid gold, at least for satisfying one of the several possible creative agendas for role-playing.

Typically, I treat successful and unsuccessful rolls in this fashion, with the proviso that the task involved is usually also successful or unsuccessful by the dice. The key is that "usually" bit - the instant that mirroring in-game success at the task to the successful roll (or "failure/failed") would bring any kind of downer to the game, that's when I pull them apart mentally just as you describe.

There's a whole spectrum of extreme connect/disconnect between conflict and task.  At one end is a lot like what you describe with the Bittersmoke eagle - the task does fail, but you make sure that the goal fails too, perhaps with a nuance or two. At the other is something very much like what you describe with the door: we know something happens that hurts the character, and we know his goal (killing some guy) doesn't happen, but with those in place, narration takes over to provide the events.

Applying different judgments along this spectrum, for different parts of play, is a big deal in games like Dust Devils, Trollbabe, Sorcerer, and HeroQuest. Dust Devils resolution is typically more like the door example, and Sorcerer is typically a bit more like the Bittersmoke example; HeroQuest and Trollbabe permit the group to customize along that spectrum as they see fit at the moment.

[editing this in: a great recent thread about this stuff in HeroQuest is A question about Simple Contest stalemate - the Giant Tick.

The above discussion leaves out two other full types of play. (1) "Rolls are task only," which is what most RPGs to date have followed using a Fortune-at-the-End model. The BRP and GURPS systems are the main examples. (2) Rolls specifically and only generate who narrates, with no particular constraint in place regarding what happens in that narration, which is to say, a Drama system with a randomized "conch-passing" method. octaNe and a few Hosghead games are examples.

One of the biggest problems I have in writing rules and discussing play is dealing with people who are used to #1 interpreting all that stuff above as #2, which it isn't. "Sounds like free-form," they say, and I realize that a whole family of Techniques is right off their screen.

Best,
Ron

[Lisa Padol]

There's a whole spectrum of extreme connect/disconnect between conflict and task.  At one end is a lot like what you describe with the Bittersmoke eagle - the task does fail, but you make sure that the goal fails too, perhaps with a nuance or two.

Clarification: We retconned things so that Bittersmoke had -not- failed to summon an eagle.  It's just that later, at the climax of the adventure, the eagle was killed.

-Lisa