invisible, figmentary, and dead: that damn turtle

By: Unknown on 17:54

Without a doubt, the greatest fumble result in gaming is tripping over the unseen imaginary deceased turtle. Below, under the last result for 2-handed fumbles, is the oldest version of it I have in my game collection, from the earliest combined edition of Arms Law & Claw Law, which I'm pretty sure is the second ed of both books.

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I love those handwritten charts! They make the later RM charts seem cold and clinical by comparison. Note that under these rules fully five percent of all 2-handed weapon fumbles involve tripping over the non-existent turtle. With a morningstar's 8% fumble range that means you'd hit this result every 250 attacks or so. That's more often than you'd hit any sort of fumble under the Arduin Grimoire, at least if I'm interpreting Hargrave's rules correctly.

Personally, I love the MERP version of this fumble even more. Check out the last result on this list.

(Click image for a bigger version.)

That "You are very confused." cracks me up every time.