If you ever have some bad tabletop luck, remember that I once rolled a crit failure in a Fate game (1:81 odds), used an FP to reroll it, got a crit failure again, and ended up getting abducted by a cupcake

A defeat with odds worse than 1 in 6500

You got a shiny Pokemon of failure.

Can I yell about Rolemaster?

sure

I'm unfamiliar though

Rolemaster is a game that has two factors relevant to this discussion:

1. EVERYTHING IS A STAT.

2. Starting characters are basically indistinguishable from talentless schlubs.

So I had a character who, for various reasons, had a flaming sword.

My group ends up in a fight with an NPC who was simply better than us, to the point that we literally could not harm him without extreme luck, which in Rolemaster amounted to something like consecutive 100s.

So finally, during this, I role a critical failure that cascades so low on the charts that my flaming sword basically unleashed a giant fireball on everyone.

We win. Because for some godforsaken reason, my armor had a better fire absorption stat than the NPCs armor does, so the fireball killed him and left me alive.

So we killed a boss by critically fumbling that we could not have killed by competent succeeding./

you failed so hard it wrapped around to success

More games need that. Critical failures they end up turning out well for an inexplicable reason

About ten years ago, a friend of mine and I were looking for a table top group to join, and called up one posting for a D&D game. The DM was very fond of his homebrew critical failure and success tables; instead of the normal result of auto failing on a Nat 1, or double damage on a nat 20, he would roll 1d1000 on his chart.

"The DM was very fond of his homebrew critical failure and success tables" ah, the dark times

(Yeah it was the first red flag)

Anyway, if you rolled a nat 1, confirmed it with another miss, the GM rolled on his table, and the worst result, on the 1d1000 table, was 1: you are disarmed of your weapon, and it automatically hits your nearest ally for x12 damage

Guess what my friend managed to do on our second session, and guess who the nearest ally was?

Two nat 1's, and a 1 on the d1000

that beats mine

narrowly

That's a 1:40,000 chance

wait--

TWO nat 1s

yeah that's pretty extreme

are you sure those dice were all right

I quit that game soon the next session

crit fumble tables were never good

and also served to widen the fighter/wizard gap

because guess who never had to make weapon attacks

Yeah, I was actually a spell caster

But that didn't protect me from my friend's bad rolls, apparently

(Interestingly, I didn't end up quitting because of the bad rules, I quit because the GM was a garbage human being to boot)

(That would engage in Alex Jones style conspiracy rants)