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Old 04-11-2017, 09:01 AM   #45
Icelander
 
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Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#39): Daredevil, Luck, Super Luck

Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
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.
GURPS Honesty or Selfish doesn't mean what most people mean when they say someone is honest or selfish, either.

For the vast majority of campaigns, the PCs are meant to pass through many dangers. It is very common for these dangers to be quite severe. Nevertheless, the PCs surviving is usually viewed as a desirable outcome, at least by the players.

In the real world, someone who survives many instaces of mortal danger, which might have killed many others, might fairly be characterised as 'lucky'. This is after the fact, obviously, not an innnate trait of the person, but for a character in a role-playing game, traits that reflect something that people in the game world only notice afterwards like Luck or Destiny, are perfectly reasonable.

Giving PCs the meta-game trait of Luck is more-or-less a way to increase the odds of the PCs being one of the rare exceptions who survive, rather than the statistical average who die. There are alternatives, of course; including the GM providing the apperance of dangerous situations, without much in the way of real danger, or metagaming through GM-manipulation of dice rolls, or just having every player create five characters and taking over a new one when the previous one dies, because that's how probability works when people take many chances in a row.
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Last edited by Icelander; 04-11-2017 at 09:12 AM.
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