(02-11-2020, 10:04 AM)Black Aeronaut Wrote: Hmmm.... Hearing the word 'critical' and 'failure' together like this always makes me think of past nuclear criticality accidents.
In DND terms....
Chernobyl was a Natural One with no chance at a saving roll that resulted in a total party kill. However, that's only on the surface. Once the dust settles, the DM explains to the players all the subtle fuck-ups they made over the last few sessions, and how they all compounded on each other until one of them made that horrifically ill-timed (un)lucky roll that doomed the party to a hideous death.
Fukushima was a series of terribly low rolls at poorly timed moments. You know the kind. The sort where you start to wonder if you somehow got a bad set of dice, or if some demon has managed to take possession over them. You think it's the later because you're almost certain you can hear the evil bastard cackling in the distance as he heckles all your attempts at saving rolls.
Three Mile Island... A pitched battle between a party and an archdemon, where no one realized that the party's wizard was fighting off a possession attempt by the archdemon until it was almost too late. But in a ways, it was. Poor wizard got his mind melted, but at least you stopped the archdemon from using him as a meat puppet to wreak all kinds of untold havoc.
The way you wrote that stuff made me wonder how to describe other real-world disasters (e.g. the Titanic, 9/11, the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake/tsunami, etc.) in tabletop RPG terms...