a rather critical example of a critical fail

[Star Ranger4]

We're fine, how are you?

Harrison Ford crit fail on a charisma/convince check?

[Black Aeronaut]

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.

[Tennie]

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...

[hazard]

Fukushima wasn't a series of terribly low rolls at poorly timed moments.

Fukushima's safety systems worked according to design until everything got flooded, when that was a known risk and during design and construction got compromised on. What happened with Fukushima was that a bunch of decent rolls that would've normally been passable got hammered by circumstantial penalties from decisions made whole campaigns ago.

[Labster]

Wellll.... not entirely.  As soon as the large earthquake hit, the reactors should have been shut down.  This would have cost millions of yen to restart, but saved the whole site.  Later, the reactors that were going critical should been shutdown flooded with seawater immediately.  This would have involved on-site employees who just happened to be on shift that day deciding to take billions of yen in loss on behalf of the company.  There were a whole series of bad decisions on that day at Fukushima Daiichi, each of which seemed too costly, but made the cost of failure even greater.

Yes, there were early bad decisions -- make the wall 3m taller, nothing would have happened.  Not putting the backup generators in a flood zone, cooling would have worked.  But on the day of the tsunami, no one was willing to be the tall poppy, so everyone lost out.  But they seem like ordinary failures, only critical in the nuclear sense.

Trinity on the other hand, was a critical success.  "Is that a 20?  Okay, I guess we're doing this.  The earth and skies erupt in fire as you summon Shiva, destroyer of worlds.  And we'll have to pick this up next session."

[Black Aeronaut]

In that case, Fukushima would be the party making several really bad calls over the course of several sessions, and getting some nasty rolls on the random encounter table that practically kills all but one or two members of the party while the Demon Lord makes off with a nice size chunk of the kingdom's border. He's not gonna get to keep it, but damn if it ain't gonna be a long, hard slog of a war - one that everyone's gonna remember for a very long time.