My e-mail is available on the “More About Ludus Novus” page, found in the sidebar.

Also this post doesn’t seem too old and I wouldn’t mind chatting with someone who has the same career as me. That said if you feel like conversing you can hit me up at incarnum11@hotmail.com. I don’t expect any trade secrets about how your game works; I would rather like to chat about what we have found during our trials of getting these games in the right direction.

I’d actually argue that it’s fine for a player to BS a low-impact outcome. The purpose of critical failures, in my opinion, isn’t to screw over players; it’s to make the game more fun and the story more engaging. If a player doesn’t feel like narrating a particularly bad failure, and the others at the table are fine with that, then it’s perfectly okay, as long as it’s fun and the story is progressing as the GM and players desire.

Then again, maybe I’m over thinking it. If you’re game is going to wind up boring because a player doesn’t know how to fail interestingly, then there’s fault in more then your game system…

In some cases, there is a mechanical consequence, like a loss of hitpoints or a roll to recover. However, these consequences are determined *after* the player narrates the interesting failure. Hopefully, there won’t be a grudge when the GM says to mark off a health level, because the player decided that she accidentally shot herself in the foot. It’s the player’s choice what occurs, so she has some control over the mechanical outcome.

As it’s an intentionally lightweight system, I’m trying to keep the rules simple, so there are few rules that guarantee specific results of interesting failures.

Only question I have is about what the mechanical results of an interesting fail is. in games like D&D, if my warrior critically fails attacking a goblin, he could be disarmed and have to spend a turn running to pick up his axe, or he swings and hits his foot by mistake and looses some health, or it gets stuck in a nearby wall and he needs to strength check to get it back out, etc. How is this handled? Is there still a GM determining what the negative effects are, or is there some sort of standard “fumble” that happens? (perhaps even like a fumble roll, deciding what kind of negative effect happens.) I’d believe the later might be more effective, because then players wouldn’t have to think about what happens and would go for the why it happens that you mentioned. If I know that there’s a GM sitting there who just semi-arbitrarily decided how I messed up, I’d be too upset to make up some bits about the goblin back alley fighting league that this particular one spent his youth in which makes him a bit more agile then normal goblins. But if there’s a rule that says “when you fail hard enough, this / one of these things are what will happen” then I’d feel it’s more of an inevitability, and I wouldn’t bother holding a grudge over it.