[NineDaysDead]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I don't believe that anyone has "luck" as a substantive thing in the real world. There are random fluctuations, and we call them "luck" when they're favorable and large (or "bad luck" when unfavorable and large); but no one has a persistent tendency to get favorable or unfavorable random outcomes. The dice have no memory. As Ecclesiastes say, "Time and chance happeneth to them all."

And I have a strong desire for verimilitude in my fictional worlds.

Now, I'm willing to set this aside if one of the premises of the world is, say, the favor of gods or spirits, or a psionic ability to influence random events. That's exploring a fantastic premise. But I just don't buy Luck as a mundane trait; nor as a meta-level narratively granted blessing. "Oh, he's the hero, things will turn out right for him!" Though I might well allow a character to have a belief in their own luck as a Delusion.

Luck doesn't have to mean Luck:

Originally Posted by Pyramid 62; page 7

Extraordinary Luck (Aspected, Social Interactions, -20%) [24];

Originally Posted by Pyramid 62; page 7

Schmidt is a highly experienced diplomat and bureaucrat. Her Intuition and Luck don’t represent anything supernatural or even especially uncanny – she just has very good instincts, especially in social situations, and is highly unlikely to do anything disastrous.

Originally Posted by Kromm

That's pretty much the truth of it right there. Any outcome that could happen due to dice rolls and permitted player declarations on the meta-game level (and not due to special traits, spending points, GM fiat, etc.) is a natural outcome in the game world. It remains natural even when it comes about due to rerolls or point-spending to affect success on the meta-game level, because those influences are not character-initiated within the sphere of the game world, but player-initiated, which makes them indistinguishable from an ordinary turn of events in the game world. It isn't as if the character has knowledge of what could've or almost happened . . . from her perspective, things just worked out in a way that they might have done anyhow. There's nothing especially supernatural about it.

Now at the end of that character's career, it's quite possible that biographers and historians and those singing praises – or even the adventurer herself – might analyze her life and realize that it had more than its fair share of improbable (but still possible and plausible) events. Those people might call her "lucky," and start making claims that this was due to divine favor or a magic charm or whatever. But that's a retroactive perspective and, more important, pure conjecture . . . a hard-nosed secular rationalist and naturalist would just shrug and claim that since the odds weren't 0, what happened happened, and perhaps try to turn it into a lesson in probability for the less-enlightened.