Criticals and Fumbles in TFT

[ecz]

Originally Posted by Skarg

Yes, we added some various random possible effects of critical success and failure of attacks and spells, and especially for magic items.

After my first TFT campaign had been running for 5 or 6 years and some surviving characters had accumulated magic items and powerful friends and foes with magic items, we started to dislike how many magic items were like built-in super-powers that always got used and rarely lost unless someone died due to lightning. So we added a whole Magic Item Breakdown system where each item had a Breakdown Number where using an item involved a roll against that number with an increasing modifier for using it on subsequent turns, and then a very long result table where if you exceeded that roll, you'd add more dice to how much you exceeded by, and then got a result which could be adding to the cumulative penalty, stopping working for a while, permanently reducing the item's breakdown number, or at the high end, more and more scary things you don't want to happen. And of course the GM would roll so it was often unclear what had happened or how risky it might be to keep using it. The intended and usual effect is that most people only use their magic items fairly cautiously, when they think they need to, rather than just always using them. I still tend to use similar tables.

to deal with this problem (too many magical items around) common also in our CGs I created an adventure that changed forever the Magic in Cidri... ehm well, in the part of Cidri I used :)

It happened that a lost civilization centuries ago created a very powerful one use spell that - once triggered by the incautus PCs - caused the un-expected collateral effect of a permanent change in the dynamic and rules of magic item creation.

The details of the history are not important here.

Basically, among other side effects like, for example, the fact that sun did not rise for a day, all magic items suddenly doubled their money cost, ST and time needed for the creation.

This, together with the low pays I have introduced to avoid a farmer buy a plate in a few months, as discussed in another thread, the high taxation (20% yearly and no way to hide income) plus several legal limitation imposed by the wizard's guild, helped to put in control the proliferation of magic items otherwise unavoidable according RAW.

But this is another story.