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Natural One - Funny Times

   
Natural One - Funny Times

Okay. Nobody enjoys rolling a natural one. But sometimes, the results can be quite amusing.

For example, I'm GMing a campaign where the players were nearly torn apart by a horde of fast zombies. As I'm rilling for one of their attacks, I get a natural one. It confirms a critical failure, and since the players were against the ropes, I decided to throw them a bone and inflict self-damage on the zombie.

Said zombie...wound up ripping its own head off.

I had a player's thief roll a natural one while attempting to backstab. He decided she'd tripped and stabbed herself with her own dagger. I wasn't going to gainsay him!

Way back in the day when 2E was all the rage, I was GMing a group through some homebrew adventure where they had to infiltrate a castle, kill the bad guys, save the princess, get the kewl lewt, etc. They get to the final boss battle, taking place in a large dining hall. It's your standard group - fighter, mage, thief, cleric, with a bard thrown in for good measure because Jeff had the rolls for it and he liked bards and even though I hate them he HAD to play one - and they aren't doing all that bad. The bad guys start to get the upper hand, with the BBEG - a high level mage - and his 2 warrior assistants starting to pummel the group. It's a back and forth affair to this point, and everyone is having fun.

But the dice gods had other plans for this fun time. I will state up front that I could have fudged this, but the outcome was so insane that as a group we decided to let it stand. And yes, it ended up in the player's favor. But it was pretty darned cool.

The BBEG is in the back, with a warrior on either side diagonally so they are standing in a 5 ft triangle. The mage casts fireball at the players, and they take some serious damage. The bard is nearly unconscious, the mage is unconscious, and the cleric is about out of healing spells. So one of the BBEG's warrior bodyguards goes, stepping forth and swinging his sword at the PC thief. Natural 1. This is at the time where the random critical fail tables were all the rage, and we were using them. So a natural 1....roll the d100...and the sword goes flying out of his hand. So I check direction...and it's aiming right for the rope that happens to hold the chandelier the bad guys are standing under.

I'm sure you can all guess what happens next.

I roll an attack for the sword, and thwick! The rope gets cut and the chandelier comes crashing down. So I'm off to check DEX checks...and all 3 of the enemies fail. In fact, the BBEG mage rolls a natural 20 on that DEX check, which is a critical failure. They all get trapped under the chandelier, with the BBEG mage actually getting killed by crushing damage from it. The enemy warriors were rather injured, one knocked cold. Our thief, who happens to not be good, performs the coup de grace on the warriors, and it's game over.

The party, watchmen, are in the watchhouse. The recently-escaped drow cleric is running off down the street, carrying half of a magic item that'll allow her to kill any elf she likes with a thought. The detective and the sergeant have just finished off the thief who was working with the cleric in the hallway upstairs. The constables have busted the drow's invisibility on the street, but she's still getting away.

The detective's player asks if she can lean out of the window and fire her crossbow at the escapee. I respond "She'll have cover, but you can try it. There's not much risk of falling out, the window's in a reasonable position. Unless you roll a nat one, of course." She decides to have him take the shot.

And rolls a nat one, of course.

The detective's on 12 HP, and falling 20 feet. 2d6 damage comes up as 11. The detective's player decides it would be far more amusing to let it knock him out and so he falls unconscious on the street below.

I tend to avoid d20 system because of the NatOne effect, but EVERY system I've ever played in had some form of critical failure rule, regardless of the dice.

Shadowrun, 4e. The party, a troll gun bunny/tank, human get away driver, elven hacker/backup gunner, and a dwarven street sam who couldn't shoot a gun if his life depended on it. Great with his custom katana though. Just finished a job, and they're on extraction, with not just local law enforcement on their tails, but a couple truck-loads of VERY pissed off Lone Star Security, who had been guarding the facility they hit.

Party has a nicely customized cliché windowless white van, armour plated, with a disguised gun hatch on the roof, two disguised gun ports on either side (fore and aft configuration they called it), and a mounted weapon system on the back for the troll to use if things got dicey. Which they did.

Shoot up a couple of the LLE, and one of the Lone Star trucks, things are looking pretty good. The driver is keeping the van just ahead of the tail, but can't quite manage to get enough successes to manage to lose them. The rear doors are long gone, blown away by incoming fire from the pursuit vehicles. Then it happens. The dwarf, who only has a pool of 8 dice to use grenades decides they've been sitting for too long (about 45 minutes real time, can't blame 'em for wanting to do SOMETHING) and "chucks" a grenade out the top hatch. The roll has 6 dice come up as ones. And zero successes.

"Use a Fate point," I said. "I'm out," he said back.

I then proceeded to pull out my calculator and a piece of paper to calculate the MULTIPLE reflections of the blast of a fragmentation grenade in a 1.5m by 3m van. Filled with a dozen MORE frag grenades. And over 500 rounds of EX ammo for the mini-gun. Suffice it to say, there was nothing left of the van itself, and while the troll survived, she was rather easily captured in the field nearby.

We went to L5R at that point.

I thought this was going to be the Dead Gentlemen's movie "The Natural One" which was paired with "Humans and Households". Ah well.

The stories I could tell about complications with the Wild/D'Oh/(bleep)you die in the Star Wars D6 system... Like the Deffel who threw a grenade down a Ranat hole, only to have it land under his crotch (the city built him a statue)... Or the time my swordsman used a jet-pack & flew into the Rancor's mouth looking for a weak spot... Or the time we hijacked a communications satellite equipped with a hyperdrive and sent it to rebel headquarters, but botched the astrogation roll (it went somewhere... we just don't know where!)... all the drained blasters, the broken tools, the coitus interrupts... And of course the bounty hunter I spend half an hour building who died from the first shot fired at him by the person with the lowest blaster skill and a weak hold-out blaster...

We were playing an adventure path in Pathfinder, and either I was doing something wrong that night or Paizo really F'ed up their encounter design. I can only imagine how unbalanced it would be for those whose players did not roll god tier stats (One character had only one stat below a 16, and that was only because of a -2 to CHA from being a dwarf)
Lemme set the cast real quick
Agna-Dwarven Ranger
Zilyana Morzana-Half-elf Paladin
Zondro Morzana-Half-elf Ninja (Brother of Paladin)
Ze professor Wolfgang von Jurgenstein- Human Alchemist/Wizard
The group was fighting this big ass crab, with a golden giant helmet to provide additional protection. The group had pretty much got their asses handed to them, the crab taking out Zandro, grappling Zilyana, and knocking Agna into the water. Ze professor cast grease on the claw grappling Zilyanna and he dropped her. Zilyana grabbed Zondro and Agna climbed out of the water. Everyone else's movement was enough to get them out of the room, except for Agna, the dwarf. The group said goodbye to Agna and closed the door holding it shut. Agna used her wild empathy on the Hermit crab (Who had climbed out of the water and moved towards her), *dice rolling* natural 20. I roll a wisdom saving throw to see how effective it is *dice rolling* crit fail.
This is the story of how Henry the Hermit crab became the guardian of Sandpoint.

Well, there's this one game that's theoretically going on right now; in practice, I'm being horribly lazy. Sowwy.

But anyway...one PC, having been transformed into a hummingbird, is exposed to pepper. Nat 1 on the Fortitude save, she proceeds to sneeze repeatedly...blasting her light body every which way, ultimately zooming tail-feathers-first into the beak of a toucan and getting stuck.

When attempting to dislodge said hummingbird from the toucan's beak, the rest of the party (a hedgehog, a chameleon, a weasel and a pig) all attempt Strength checks (or in the weasel's case, a 'tickle' check). All natural 1s and 2s.

I decided that the hummingbird was dislodged...the wrong way, leading to her controlling the toucan (a wizard's familiar, by the way) Ratatouille style. Said PC promptly used the toucan's wing to bop the pig.





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