u/Illegal-Avocado-2975

At my table and the game that I run, there are a few house rules. The ones relevant to the situation are these.

First of all, I do crit successes and fails for both attacks and skill checks. These are the best or worst likely outcomes to the situation. For example, a knowledge check by the party brainiac (the scholarly one) is going to say...know exactly which book they've read that has the answer and they can go and get it (or find another copy in the more local library) on a Crit Success, and at worst will be absolutely certain that they read the answer in a completely wrong book and waste time.

Second one is that a Crit Fail will never harm, hurt, or really do much more than mildly inconvenience a player. No the weapon will not break, the botched sword swing will not end up lopping off the fighter's own wedding tackle...none of that. They're more going to be things like "As your blade strikes your opponent, you feel the grip bet spun in your hand and you are no longer sure of how well you're holding the sword." Mechanically the player can attack next round at disadvantage, or spend a bonus action to reset the weapon in their grip.

Essentially, I like to use the crit fails as a way to give my descriptions of the combat more descriptive than the usual "You swing and miss". These rules were laid down at Session Zero, they were agreed upon by the players at that time and we went on with the game.

Third one is that we track ammunition and there's a chance that you either not find (in this case) your arrows, or that the arrows can get damaged. Could be damaged when the enemy fell on it after getting perforated by one, could be one got trampled...but arrows can be damaged and/or lost. Most of my players who are archers also have the skill to make replacements out in the field. Most of them carrying replacement parts in their packs and will repair them during the camping scenes before a long rest.

When the player in question lost his cool, this was five sessions into the campaign and other players have had their Nat 20s and their Nat 1s. So this player had plenty of time to see the sort of shit I pull for crits. Session five, the party was ambushed by bushwhacking bandits looking for a quick score and these travelers with horses and pack mules was a likely target.

Our problem player was an elven archer (elven ranger) named Carl. Not his real name, but it amuses me to use the "Damnit Carl" meme for this. He nocked an arrow, drew his bow, aimed, loosed and rolled the dreaded Nat 1. My description was as follows.

"As the arrow leaves the bow, you hear the peculiar buzzing vibrating sound of the fletching coming loose. The arrow veers hard to the right and into the trees."

Now I like to make stuff up in situations like that so I decided to change the encounter from a bandit attack to the appearance of a dire bear who wasn't fond of being shot in the ass by Temu Legolas over there.

"As everyone is deciding what sort of war crimes they want to inflict on each other, you hear the RWAAAAAW! of a large bear bellowing in pain. A bear larger than you've ever seen before stumbles out of the woods and takes in the sight of all of you, party and bandits alike. Re-Roll for initiative." I had everyone reroll since the addition of the new element would cause everyone to have that moment of "What the F...?" and reorient to the situation.

Look up "OODA Loop"

Two of the players say "Thank Gawd! Maybe we won't be dead last anymore" and everyone rerolls. The new turn order is set and battle commences. Three of the bandits have the first three turns, the bear gets next and the rest of the order is unimportant. Of the three bandits, one decides that while the party might be willing to listen to reason and an apology, the bear sure as hell isn't. Another of the three faints dead away, the final one flees in terror. Bear goes and engages with the brave bandit and there's a mixture of bandits engaging the bear, peeing themselves, or fainting dead away. Between the bandits and the party, taking down the bear was easy, the bear thinned the number of bandits that the party had to deal with, good fun for an random encounter, EXP and loot was shared by all and they had bear steaks for the cook fire when they camped for the evening.

As the British comedian Ed Byrne would often say "Jobs are good." and that should have been that.

Nope! Carl had a huge problem with it all. He said that this was bullshit, that I was targeting him, I had promised that a crit fail wouldn't result in the person getting harmed. I countered that the bandit fight was going too easy, the arrow isn't part of equipment that I promised would never be broken since ammo can be lost or damaged in normal combat, he wasn't being targeted, and no one was harmed. No one lost a limb, no one lost their life, and it was an entertaining combat. Hell! Since they were going to be doing a long rest that night...no one even lost resources. The others in the party agreed that it was a fun random element to happen as a result of a bad dice roll.

Carl said one final "This is fucking bullshit", grabbed his stuff, swept his arm across the table (the "sort of flipping the table" I mentioned in the title) and stormed out of the store.

Store staff asked what happened and I think they're going to be talking with him next time he comes back to the store. This was last night's game and I've since extended an olive branch to him to talk and see what was eating him so badly that he reacted this way. I don't think he's blocked us and he's still part of our Discord server so hopefully he's just had a really bad day and this is an anomaly. But if we don't hear back by the end of next Friday's session...he's likely going to be removed from the group.

We'll just have to wait and see.