Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander
It is in GURPS. The character with Luck is the one who survived ten or twenty occasions when they have a significant chance of dying, whereas the characters without it are the others, probably with otherwise similar stats, who didn't.
|
Well, in that case, forgive me, but it seems that all this discussion of what "luck" means in the real world is just BS. I don't even see why we're talking about it. The claim that there is something peculiar about the way *I* use the word is specious; the peculiarity is in the way GURPS used the word.
And if the effect of playing GURPS by the RAW, and keeping the actual results of dice rolls, is to produce a game that, in your opinion, no one could enjoy playing, because no character could survive more than a handful of sessions, and the necessary fix is to routinely give characters Luck so that the players can reroll catastrophic outcomes . . . well, that seems to me to be saying that GURPS rules are a failure. That's what I call "published rules that make a game unplayable unless you apply a fix to work around their problems."
Now, my experience is that GURPS isn't that lethal. There are a lot of things in it that make death less likely. For example, there's the requirement of a failed HT roll to have injury actually result in death. Buy HT up to a modest 13, and you have a 50% chance of your character not dying till they get physically battered to death. Raise it higher than that, and you can take damage equal to 5x your HP (a 14d attack to center of mass) and expect not to die. Or you can leave HT lower and buy some Hard to Kill, or buy Very Fit.
The argument about the heroic marine makes sense if you envision GURPS characters as running through kill zones, and emerging unscathed on the other side, and if you plan to have your characters do that sort of thing. But in my worldview, doing that sort of thing gets you killed, and the expectation that it won't is the sort of delusion that that Chinese rebellion in the 19th century cultivated. Doing that sort of thing might be heroic, but it's not the sort of heroism you expect to survive. And so I don't run that sort of thing as "adventures." I don't think modern war makes sense as a setting for adventure stories. There are exceptions, such as World War I pilot duels or special ops missions behind enemy lines; but being on the front lines in World War II wasn't adventurous.
I run mostly campaigns with fantastic elements that protect against the realistic effects of combat in terms that are defined in the world; or campaigns that are simply low on combat; or, occasionally, campaigns that involve smaller-scale and less intense violence, such as my campaign about French fencing students, where "first blood" was the usual custom in a duel. All of those are options that work while staying fairly near the realistic end of the spectrum, which is what I personally prefer for the most part. If you prefer the cinematic end, that's an equally legitimate taste; it's just not mine.
Edit: But you know, I'm wondering: Seriously, would any of you guys set out to play in a campaign that involved the kind of activities this Dan Daly fellow lived through, and think that was "adventure"? Or is this just a thought experiment? You seem to think a statistically accurate model of this would be to have a PC die every three sessions, which seems to imply about a 5% death rate for every span of time represented by a single RPG session; that seems like it could amount to an insanely high death rate, not to mention the accompanying crippling injuries, mental breakdowns, and simple wounds.