Fumbles

From: Benedict Adamson <badamson_at_...>
Date: Mon, 04 Sep 2000 16:01:39 +0100

Graham Robinson wrote [echoing Tim Ellis, I think]: ...
> Fumbles are a game
> construct and don't really map terribly well into real life.
...
> The problem is the rules are
> so
> vague, that someone else might have losing only one sheep as a fail, losing
> half the flock as a fumble, and are just as 'correct'.
...

I'd say a 'failure' puts you in the roughly the same situation you would be in if you had simply not bothered to do anything, whereas a fumble makes you worse off than that. What a 'failure' constitutes is then relatively easy to imagine. As you point out, the severity of 'fumbles' is however only loosely constrained.

For example, 'failing' to shepherd a flock to a fold means the sheep are not in the fold, as sheep (presumably) will not enter a fold on their own, but are still on the hillside where they started. A 'fumble' might mean some sheep are lost, or dead, or that many of them are lost or dead, or they all are... Mikko, I think, suggested using the RQ mechanic of determining the severity of a fumble once a fumble is known to have occurred.