Why We Roll: The Story Behind Criticals & Fumbles

I still remember the first time someone rolled a natural 20 at Moiz's place.

It wasn't in some dramatic moment. No boss fight, no climactic confrontation. Someone was trying to sneak past a bandit’s tent. The dice hit the table — a twenty — and the whole room erupted like we'd just won something important. In a way, we had. We'd discovered that the best stories don't happen because the DM planned them. They happen because four people around a table are genuinely invested in a world that doesn't exist.

That was 2016. We had a rulebook, a table and some vague ideas what we were doing. Eight years later, we've run games for more than a hundred people at a single event. This is the story of what happened in between.

The Living Room Era

It started the way most good things do — quietly, without anyone realising it was starting.

Four of us had been playing board games together for a while. Competitive, strategic, satisfying — but always finite. You'd finish a game of Mice & Mystics after six hours and it would be done. Complete. Moiz suggested we try Dungeons & Dragons. None of us had played before except him. That was the extent of our qualifications.

What we found in that living room was something board games hadn't given us — a story that didn't end when we packed up the table. Characters we cared about. Decisions that carried weight across sessions. A world that remembered what we did in it.

We played every month. Then twice a month. Then we started roping in friends who were curious. Moiz's living room, which was perfectly sized for four, became considerably less comfortable at six. Then eight. We started calling ourselves the Uncles League — a name that made sense to us and probably no one else.

The strange thing about word of mouth is that it works precisely because nobody is trying to make it work. People came because someone they trusted told them it was worth their time. We weren't advertising. We weren't building anything. We were just playing, and apparently playing well enough that people wanted in.

The Squatting Years

By 2018 we had a problem that sounds like a good problem but genuinely wasn't — more people wanted to play than we had Dungeon Masters to run games for them.

Being a DM is not like being a player. A player shows up, makes decisions, rolls dice, and reacts to a world. A DM builds that world, populates it with people and problems, runs every character who isn't a player, adjudicates the rules, and somehow makes it all feel alive and responsive at the same time. It is an enormous amount of work and it requires a particular kind of person who finds that work joyful rather than exhausting.

We didn't have enough of those people. So we decided to make more of them.

Criticals and Fumbles formed in 2018 not as a gaming group but as a framework — a structured approach to training Dungeon Masters and supporting a player base that had outgrown our capacity to serve it. We wrote programmes. We ran workshops. We codified things that experienced DMs do intuitively so that newer DMs could learn them deliberately.

We needed space. A former member offered us the use of a shared office they had access to — an arrangement that was somewhere between generous and informal, which is to say we were essentially squatting in someone's professional workspace with permission. We were grateful. It was not glamorous. There were sessions where the office furniture was not quite right for gaming and we improvised extensively. There were evenings where we had to pack everything up and pretend nothing had happened before the morning shift arrived.

We ran some of our best games in that office. The improvisation helped, I think. When the space itself is slightly improbable, it frees everyone at the table to lean into the improbability of the whole enterprise.

The Year Everything Paused

2020 was when we learned something important about what we had actually built.

When in-person games became impossible, we assumed the community would go quiet. Instead it reorganised. We shifted to smaller satellite games — tighter groups, more intimate, conducted entirely online. Players who had been part of larger tables found themselves in campaigns with three or four people where everyone's choices mattered more visibly. DMs who had been running big events experimented with different systems, different formats, different stories.

The community didn't shrink. It scattered and then regrouped, which is different. By the time in-person games became possible again, we had a player base that had spent a year getting very good at playing under unusual conditions. They were more adaptable. So were we.

A Permanent Home

In 2021 we ran our first public event — a D&D session for Xpidemix, a gaming café that had become a kind of gravitational centre for the Singapore hobby gaming scene. It was the first time we'd taken the table somewhere that wasn't someone's living room or a borrowed office.

Something shifted that day. Running games for people who had never played before, in a space built for exactly this kind of gathering, with the energy of a room full of curious strangers — it felt like the thing we'd beebuilding toward without knowing it.

Xpidemix became our permanent home. A place that understands what it means to sit around a table with dice and imagination and treat that as something worth taking seriously.

Growing the Party

2022 brought conversations with The Charlie Bravo Squad about what a larger, more collaborative community might look like. It expanded how we thought about what C&F could be — not just a gaming group, not just a DM training programme, but a genuine community organisation with the infrastructure to support a much wider range of people and activities.

We launched the Learn To series — structured sessions designed specifically for people who had never touched a d20 in their lives. No prior experience required. No expectation that you'd know the rules before you arrived. Just a table, a patient DM, and a story waiting to happen.

In 2023 we started working with the National Library Board on monthly sessions. The NLB partnership meant something specific to us — it meant tabletop RPGs were being taken seriously as something worth making accessible to the public. It meant the hobby had a place in Singapore's cultural infrastructure.

In June 2024 we organised a mass event with NLB alongside other RPG providers and community groups. More than a hundred players. Multiple systems running in parallel. DMs we had trained running tables with confidence. People who had never played before discovering what we discovered in Moiz's living room in 2016.

I won't pretend I wasn't quietly overwhelmed.

What We're Building Now

2025 has been a year of looking inward. We've been focused on the worlds — four homebrew settings that our DMs have been developing across years of campaigns. Titan's Gate. Temasek Tales. SingaporeZ. Shattered Tales. Each one a living collaborative project, built by multiple DMs who have been adding to each other's lore, reacting to each other's stories, and creating something that none of them could have built alone.

The wiki you'll find on this site is the beginning of making those worlds accessible — to players who want to understand the history of the places their characters inhabit, to DMs who want to build on what's already there, and eventually to anyone curious about what a community can create when it decides that the world-building is as important as the game.

Why We Roll

The question people ask most often, when they hear what C&F does, is some version of: why go to all this trouble for a game?

The honest answer is that it stopped being about the game a long time ago.

The game is how we meet. The game is the shared language that lets a table full of strangers become people who trust each other enough to be genuinely ridiculous together. But what lasts after the campaign ends, what you carry out of that room and into the rest of your life — that's the friendships. The people who have seen you roll a natural 1 at the worst possible moment and stayed at the table anyway.

We started in a living room. We squatted in an office. We found a home in a gaming café. We organised play for a hundred people with the National Library Board.

Every single step of that happened because someone brought a friend who brought a friend who sat down at a table and picked up some dice.

The table has room. It always has.