Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
But that's completely missing the point. There is a quality in the real world called "being physically attractive," and I can choose to play someone who has that quality. There is a quality called "being rich," and one called "being physically fit," and so on. But there is no quality in the real world of "being lucky." In the real world, the belief in "luck" as an actual trait that a human being can have is what GURPS calls a Delusion.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NineDaysDead
Being attractive physically attractive is an emergent property of a vast number of tiny effects; There's no such thing as an atom of attractiveness.
Leading a life that benefits from a statistically improbable amount of good events is equally an emergent property of a vast number of tiny effects.
Emergent properties are very real.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
That's completely irrelevant to what we're talking about.
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No, it isn't. Appearance, as a GURPS trait (along with Charisma, of course), is a vastly simplified gamable treatment of a subject that in the real-world is prohibitively complex and allows players to play characters that are
consistently attractive to almost everyone. In the real-world, the only trait such people reliably share is that almost everyone rates them as attractive.
Luck, in GURPS, is a trait which allows for characters that
consistently beat the odds by surviving. In the real world, such people exist, at least over certain periods of time, but can obviously only be evaluated after the fact.
Both are meta-game constructs that allow for certain fictional concepts and which might also apply to real people, but in the case of real people, can only be evaluated by looking at results after the fact.