The Fumble Number - A Move Die Hotfix

See, this is what I love about hacking together your own rules. You come up with a finely-tuned machine of a system that does exactly what you need it to, you release it to the world... and then you realise that there is a glaring fatal flaw. One so glaring and fatal that you have no idea how you missed it in the first place. So what do you do? Do you throw it away and start again? No! This is a BLOG,  there are no take-backsies. You come up with another tangentially related system to plug the hole. Which will probably need fixing tomorrow.

And the cycle continues.

Because in an incoherent game, every problem is actually an opportunity to invent new tools. I love incoherent games.

But this isn't a post about coherent vs. incoherent games. This is a post about a problem with the Move Die, and its solution... the Fumble Number.

Oops.

THE PROBLEM

But before we can get to the Fumble Number, we need to talk about the problem with the Move Die. And the problem is that once you hit a new Move Die, suddenly piling on a few more things doesn't matter any more. And at the lower levels of encumbrance that's good - it's a relief, "I may have dropped down a die size but at least now I can carry a couple more things without feeling guilty."

But once you hit that dreaded d4? Suddenly you have like ten "free" slots. There's no difference between carrying ten +1 broadswords of hyperbole and twenty. Or, more to the point, once you're carrying fifteen sacks of gold piling on another one isn't going to hurt. And it should hurt.

Because hurt = interesting choices.

Pictured: interesting choices.

THE FUMBLE NUMBER

1. Your Fumble Number (or FN, for effin' aitch I rolled a nat 1) starts at zero. Every slot filled over your Encumbrance Limit increases your FN by one.
2. Whenever you roll a d20 and the result before modifiers is less than or equal to your FN, something worse happens. You mess up. Your swing goes wide and your sword gets jarred out of your hand, or you stumble directly into the blades of that gore-encrusted trap you were trying to avoid.

That's it.

Obviously the sort of fumble is up to the referee, but my suggestion would be to go hard. Don't just settle for double damage, go straight to "you die". Just make sure to tell your player this before they roll.

To make it more exciting.

POST-MECHANIC DESIGN RAMBLINGS

I want to make one thing clear - I'm not a fan of the critical fail. I think it's not good form to make your players' characters, and by extension your players, look stupid just because they rolled one particular number on a unusually large die. It's a totally random idiot ball. But the Fumble Number avoids this problem because the player chose to carry too many chalices out of the dungeon. Every fumble they roll is directly connected to a choice they made.

At the risk of getting too literary, what was once a story about random shit happening for no reason becomes a story about greed. "It was the golden idol that killed me."

Because it's always the golden idol.