[NineDaysDead]

Originally Posted by whswhs

But I'm not talking about that behind-the-curtain stuff. I'm talking about the narrative concept "Alice is lucky." The fact that you can use the rules for Luck to build abilities that represent other things isn't relevant; the ordinary use of Luck is to represent a person being "lucky" as a persistent attribute, and it's that ordinary use that jars me.

The Krommquote I posted addressed this issue, did you read it? Here are some more:

Originally Posted by Kromm

Phil makes the most fundamental point here: RPG characters do not exist. Thus, when constructing a "reality" around them with tools less powerful than a supercomputer with the complexity of the universe, vast tracts of reality must be compressed into fudge factors (a process not unlike what physicists call "renormalization"). Luck is such a fudge factor. It lets one tell a story where an actor enjoys a perfectly plausible but statistically unlikely outcome without worrying about butterflies flapping their wings half a world away, never mind cosmic rays streaking in from the far side of the galaxy. It isn't a supernatural device, but a dramatic one . . . it's no more supernatural than character points. Realistically, not everybody starts out with the same potential, yet every PC gets the same number of points at the start of a GURPS campaign, and for precisely the same reasons as why Luck exists: dramatic necessity.

Or even medium-to-large ones, like "everybody in the campaign starts on an equal footing" (equal points), "you can pick whatever appearance you like" (weak constraints on combinations of sex, height, weight, and ST, and no constraints at all on hair, eye, and skin tone), and "the GM's word is law." If the GM wants to run a campaign called Six Scary Gingers, and mandates red hair for everyone, a minimum ST of 12 for PCs, and 250 points all around, then that's the campaign. It isn't supernatural for six strong, red-headed people to exist and be close peers in all-around competence; it's just improbable. Luck is a similar sort of thing.

Ditto. And I would add that if you're forbidding Luck, you ought to make people roll their characters randomly while you're at it. The guarantee that you'll have the full campaign starting points and no disadvantages you don't want is the most hamfisted dramatic gesture of all, representing profound luck in a world where a typical collection of people will include the abused, the addicted, the chronically ill, and the profoundly poor, not to mention the clumsy, the stupid, the ugly, and the weak.

This isn't a bad reading, really. Luck effectively increases just about any score just a little once in a rare while. Looking at its outcomes over a career, it represents being fractionally better at everything without being expressly superior at one thing. It's easily interpreted as a knack for synergies among one's skills and talents rather than at a narrow set of feats.

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Either way, Luck is intended to be viewed from the end of the story, so that you say, "Wow, wasn't he lucky?", possibly followed by the obligatory quip about skill rather than luck. But so is the entire combat system! Fighters don't actually move around in little overlapping pulses making discrete dodges and steps. They maneuver constantly, in a sufficiently complex way that you would need that supercomputer I mentioned to handle the outcomes. All the finite, discrete rolls do is establish a general thread that you can look back at and identify as "the battle." This doesn't make combat skills and HT rolls supernatural, though.

Originally Posted by Kromm

This is a truly excellent point! I have had several players use Luck in ways that ultimately hurt their characters.

"Hey, I have Luck, so I'm going to bet all my money on this mob poker game!" is a good example of the mere presence of Luck hosing the PC: The character ends up sucked into a dangerous and risky venture because the player decides to make a meta-game bet ("Luck will let me win at an ill-advised card game."). If Luck fails to result in victory, the PC ends up broke. Even if Luck comes through, it hoses the PC because mobsters who expected this nobody to lose are now angry and want his head, and the player just used up her Luck on Gambling, so she doesn't have it for Fast-Talk or Dodge or HT rolls. This isn't a hypothetical example – it happened in play!

Then there are dramatist players who like to use Luck to fail mandatory rolls that don't let the player opt out or "throw the match." They want to get spotted, captured, ill, or whatever because they find the idea of that adversity inspiring. It tells a better story. I've had a player use Luck to fail a HT roll to resist disease (a roll I required, because the body fights disease regardless of the subject's desires) so the PC could get sick and have an excuse to end up in a hospital for plot reasons. This didn't benefit the PC at all . . .

Luck is really, truly a case of a player paying points to cheat a PC into a more-central story role – nothing more and nothing less – unless it's given modifiers that turn it into a power the PC can control.

Originally Posted by Kromm

Just so.

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Luck normally falls into a category that stands completely apart from mundane, exotic, and supernatural: "meta-game." Things in this fourth category do not exist at all in the game world, and therefore cannot be judged in terms of their relationship with the laws of nature there. They exist on the same plane as character points, disadvantage limits, and GM fiat, and serve story, not simulation. If you have no problem accepting that all the PCs have the same potential (points) or that nobody in the universe has Talents because the GM hates that game mechanic (fiat), then you should have no problem accepting Luck – it isn't any different.

The fact that Luck costs points like in-world traits isn't a case against this. Luck costs points because it benefits the player, and everything that benefits the player costs points. This includes both things that make the player's character more successful because that fictional person is more capable (in-world traits) and things that make the player's character more successful because the mechanics favor the player (meta-game traits). In-world, there's no way to see meta-game effects, as they look like the randomness of the universe. Favorable ones like Luck are comparable to the "plot armor" of the protagonists of heroic fiction, and enable the player to buy a more-central role in the story, nothing more.

I said a lot of this in the early days of this thread.

Obviously, a player could add modifiers that move Luck into the exotic or supernatural category: Active, Costs Fatigue, Game Time, and just about any power modifier would do this. Then all the arguments about it being a strange ability would become valid. As written, though, Luck doesn't even exist in the game world . . . it just ensures that the player gets to play a slightly more positive story role. It's basically no less cheating and no more exotic than the GM being your buddy and giving you an extra 20 points without telling the other players; it's just more honest and structured than that, to avoid hard feelings.