The rules and the story conflict only if the rules are ill-suited to whatever is going on or the story has been strictly planned. Avoid fragile pre-planned stories and rules not suited to creating stories and everything works out just fine.

All of these point are only relevant in story-based games. Dungeoncrawls work by different principles.

@LordVreeg – “This is the way the game is supposed to work.” I agree with you on that aspect, but I’ve more often than not seen it work in the opposite way. Often, as a player or observer of games, I’ve watched GMs run characters who crit fail into the ground, sometimes with comedic effects and sometimes with annoying ones. I’ve also seen plenty of examples where the crit fail turned out interesting and funny, or took the game in a new direction. Like your Gate Sergeant example.

@Sarlax – You’re right, this is definitely the sort of thing that can be done without any kind of extra rules thrown in, and its how my group usually plays. I know a lot of people who definitely feel that not making a fail or crit fail have definite consequences would make the game less mechanically sound. It’s all a matter of play style and preference for the group.

@Kurt “Telas” Schneider – Opportunity in chaos is definitely the way to put it.

@Rafe – Seconded! Kurt, this is the second time today that I’ve seconded you on something. Does that make it thirded?

I like examples of this coming off well– as a GM I try to encourage PCs to fail every once in a while, but it’s better if failure’s still a fun direction for the story. The filmmaker did a good job of making sure failure made for a memorable twist to the story, but didn’t derail it all.

Sometimes the story trumps the rules.

But every single time, the fun should trump both.—

Bingo.

Sometimes the story trumps the rules.

But every single time, the fun should trump both.

The catch here is the “the fun” is defined subjectively, which is why you should have a good Game Charter or Social Contract discussion before the dice hit the table. The other catch is that you need a group who can recognize opportunity in chaos.

We play a system with lots of social skills rolls (as many as combat rolls, some sessions a lot more), and the amount of failure to some degree dictates the level of failure. And a critical fail is an in-game complete flop.

The game is also story intensive, so all succeses and failures are supposed to be part of the descriptive story.

The pertinent piece of this for your post is that once the PCs are used to playing off the amount of success or failure, they are used to playing off critical fails. And again,k this is the pertinent piece. The PC’s have to be used to playing off the results of the dice for the in-game situation to make this work. If you just wheel this game mechanic out once in a while, you are likely to get a much worse effect.

(Once, my Igbarians crit-failed a social CC with a new gate sergeant at the north gate. He checked all of their baggage and tried to confiscate stuff, despite them saving a team of Bone Knights in an undead-overrun Boneyard. He also gave them a general bad time.
This led to the bards in the group writing songs about him, one of the KNights of the Armor of Trade speaking to his superiors ‘off-the-record’, and a PC from the Underworld paying a hefty bribe to have the sergeant re-assigned to stable-cleaning supervision. Role-Play the damn dice, it is worth it…)

It was in Shadowrun (1st or 2nd ed) and the party as usual was being lied too. The contact they were to “take out” was actually the person who had the info they needed to figure out who was really behind it. I was playing a mage and we had a few others in the group, including a suped up Troll (lots of cyber and bioware). At the last minute, something the contact said clicked with me and I realized that the guy we were about to kill was the key to our mission.. I used a spell to stop most of the party but I had NO chance to stop the Troll. At that point, the player of the Troll rolled some dice and announced he was having a siezure in the gutter. We all looked at him. He explained that he’d been rather maxed out on bioware and every time a combat started (or he used his enhancements) he rolled for bioshock… it had never affected play until now… but we looked at the dice and he’d rolled an 01 on percentiles…

Turns out that his well timed critical failure saved the day….