Failures can be so much more interesting than fumbles
“Ha ha! You rolled a 1! You threw your sword on the ground, you idiot!
So speaks the spotty teen DM, delighting in the zany and whacky possibilities. But I – I mean he – is missing out on a great depth and breadth of storytelling.
Let us suppose our characters, when attempting something they are supposed to be good at, they are actually, as the FATE RPG says, ‘competent, proactive and dramatic’ characters. There’s space for humour in failure (or success for that matter) but this should rarely be inflicted by the DM, and not for something as common and out of control as a dice roll.
Use failures as an opportunity to introduce new problems. [see other post]
The ‘crit 1’ as an automatic failure does not need to be a WORSE failure.
Our group had an interesting Critical Failures deck for Pathfinder but using it using it as a punishment for a dice roll seemed poor.
“Success at a Cost”
The 5e DMG “Resolution and Consequences” section there’s an interesting option, “Success at a Cost”, which actually features in FATE and other systems too.
In this concept, when a player character misses a skill check by a small margin, they can succeed anyway, but a new narrative complication is introduced. This is the ideal place to use such a table! A player can choose to be heroic and succeed when it matters, and things like the deck of result cards – or failure tables, oracle tables and the like can provide the complication for us.
Playing this way, failures are dramatic and complications only occur when the player wants to push into that territory.
But narrate the results as consequence for a heroic or desperate forced effort by the character, instead of silly slapstick (unless the character is being run in a slapstick way – player choice above all.)