Best critical failure

[Jonny]

Given the quality of the natural 1 in the latest episode, I thought it might be fun to discuss our own best experiences of a critical failure.

Mine was when I was GMing a game set in the Pacific Northwest, and the characters were investigating a series of Wendigo attacks. Unbeknownst to them, their boss was secretly possessed by a Wendigo spirit. So they (accidentally) break up the Wendigo cult their boss was working with and one of the characters asks to look through the documents and see if he can figure out who any of the members are. He rolls snake eyes (it's the Savage Worlds system, so that's a critical failure), so I tell him that all the information makes sense - it's clear from cross-referencing the documents that "Mr. A" must be their boss! I told him the absolute truth, but because I told it to him as the result of a critical failure, no-one believed him and they rejected his theories as conspiracy nonsense. When the twist finally came, they were properly shocked!

I love a critical knowledge failure, as the information doesn't have to be wrong. It can be 100% right, but the player doesn't trust it because it came from a critical failure, thus making it an even greater failure

[theoverlord]

I think I may have mentioned this in another thread, but the best critical failure that I've seen I actually rolled. I was playing a dwarven brawler who (quite naturally) had quite a high fort save. The PC's were all at a party and so I roll played getting some drinks and started drinking. After a couple of hours in game time and a couple of drinks I rolled a natural 1 for the effects of drunkenness, passed out in a toilet and nearly drowned. If it wasn't for one of the other PC's noticing this I would have had to roll another character, and would have been happy to, to save the embarressment

[Melysllew]

Back in the first proper set of campaigns I played in I was a halfling rogue and I maxed out all my skills in the doing cool stuff with acrobatics skills as early on as I could. The reason I say 'set' of campaigns is because we had a story with the same characters running with different DMs at different times. At the time I was DM (this was also my first game I'd ever DMed) so my PC was essentially an NPC for those games.
Anyway, I had the party collect these orbs from temples at the end of the first game which had to be errected on the top of standing stones on a sacred island to slay a possessed queen. The players decided that each person would carry one orb so as not to risk losing them all, and so each person had to roll themselves to get said queen-killing orbs onto the stones. I, the rogue AND the DM, rolled a 1 after everyone else passed with some of the highest rolls in succession I've ever seen...