Quote:
Originally Posted by sir_pudding
There are two ways to approach making Dan Daly in GURPS. One of them is make hundred or so Marines with Overconfidence and play them iteratively until one of them makes it through from the Boxer rebellion through WWI and is able to retire. The other way is to make Dan Daly and give him Luck and Daredevil. I don't think the former is more than a thought experiment, it is probably not playable, and isn't likely to be fun.
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Just so.
Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
No, that's just wrong. That is not what "luck" means.
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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.
Most players want to play the former, not the latter. It would also require a lot of work to build all those characters.
It's also possible to avoid the risk of random character death by having games feature the
appearance of risk, but very little actual risk, as in fact, the GM is working hard behind the scenes to avoid character death; e.g. by having NPCs decide not to kill them, by having challenges scaled to their abilities and not emerge from what NPCs would logically decide to do, etc.
Of these two methods, I prefer the one that is open and honest about it and allows the players a say in influencing probability in the interest of having the PCs be the lucky few who survive insane risk after insane risk, not the vast majority who succumb to probability. I'd rather have Luck than have a PC die ever three sessions and I'd rather have Luck than have the world bend around the PCs to ensure that what appears risky... isn't.
The fact is, the
typical PC has a career filled with more risk than any ten special operators or death-defying daredevils. This happens in even the most grittily realistic game, assuming that there is any violence at all, as almost no normal person will ever have as many violent encounters as nine out of ten protagonists of any kind of story with even the slightest action-adventure elements.
Even CSI techs or analysts in fiction have more firefights than real soldiers in war zones. Characters in RPGs are usually not any different.