Luck: Mundane or not?

[sir_pudding]

Spun off from: http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?p=1358574

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Luck is not luck.

Where is that written? How would "luck" work game mechanically that would be different?

Luck the advantage is supernatural

Is there errata in my Basic Set? It says the trait is mundane.

(since you seem to be purposely misunderstanding my common definition of magic.)

I'm not being obstinate on purpose. I'm saying that without a source, "wild" Luck can just be regular luck. Somebody that just happens to catch a bunch of lucky breaks can have it descriptively, rather than prescriptively. You say, "Man, that dude was one lucky son of a gun!" and then you give him Luck. No magic (or Magic/Magick/Psi/Superpower/Providence/whatever) need apply.

[Flyndaran]

In reality, luck is defined after the fact to describe improbable events. In gurps, it is a probability altering advantage before the fact in my views plainly supernatural.

(Sorry for thinking you were trolling me. My mistake. I did make my sig. for a reason.)

[Sindri]

In real life some people happen to roll well throughout their life while others don't.

I see the luck advantage of allowing you to state your character to be one of the former beforehand instead of playing out tons of characters to get one that is lucky naturally.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Sindri

In real life some people happen to roll well throughout their life while others don't.

I see the luck advantage of allowing you to state your character to be one of the former beforehand instead of playing out tons of characters to get one that is lucky naturally.

That is superstition, which is supernatural. You may believe in the supernatural, but it is not "realistic" as it is defined.

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

That is superstition, which is supernatural. You may believe in the supernatural, but it is not "realistic" as it is defined.

I don't mean they are lucky because they have some magical ability.

If you get ten people and have them roll dice a set amount of times some of them will be more lucky. They all have equal chances of rolling a 20 and over time they will approach the proper percentage of 20s but that doesn't change the fact that a finite set might roll higher than another finite set.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Sindri

I don't mean they are lucky because they have some magical ability.

If you get ten people and have them roll dice a set amount of times some of them will be more lucky. They all have equal chances of rolling a 20 and over time they will approach the proper percentage of 20s but that doesn't change the fact that a finite set might roll higher than another finite set.

Statistical anomaly does not mean luck as it is used in common speech. In common speech, people are lucky as having a special ability, not just experiencing unlikely events.

Getting up when I did today to the second was extremely unlikely, but didn't require any supernatural force.
The fact that some events are considered good, and others bad, does not make those unlikely events any more magical.

Maybe we should take a step back and ask if anyone here believes in real life luck. If you do, then I understand why you would see Gurps Luck as realistic.
But if you don't, then I'm at a loss to understand.

[JCurwen3]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

That is superstition, which is supernatural. You may believe in the supernatural, but it is not "realistic" as it is defined.

Just to play a sort of devil's advocate, we don't know that things like genuine luck and one or more other things that are generally categorized as "supernatural" or "paranormal" aren't possible or don't exist.

Many millions of people even believe in angels, one (or, rarely, more) god(s), and one very special case of someone returning from the dead after being dead for three days (and strangely celebrate the event with coloured eggs, candy, and bunnies).

More down to Earth, not everything is explained yet, we barely understand anything about the brain or consciousness, and who knows what strange things we have yet to be forced to reconcile with "common sense" that a future theory quantizing gravity might lead us to discover.

Not that I believe in anything that is considered supernatural myself. I prefer, as a classical skeptic, to abstain from believing anything, even rather mundane and commonly accepted things, treating them as seemingly useful fictions that I'll only ever loosely accept as tentatively "true".

That's my point, they're all seemingly useful fictions, these things that most people call "realistic". The fictions may turn out to be true... or not. But for some people things like TK (or the survival of the "soul" after death) are realistic even if relatively undocumented and not accepted as mainstream, and for others (often, but not always, gamblers) real luck is realistic. I'd advise any gamblers to read up on probability and statistics and constantly scrutinize themselves lest they fall prey to the Gambler's Fallacy; but heck, I might meet the one person that strangely always beats the odds, and in that one case I'd be giving them poor advice.

Fiction, reality, in the end, kind of the same. What's realistic will depend on who you ask (and in a game, who's playing it), and may very well have little or no correlation to what is actually true... if anything.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

In reality, luck is defined after the fact to describe improbable events.

Agreed but I don't see how this doesn't apply to Luck. How would you write a luck trait that wouldn't be "magical" in your view.

In gurps, it is a probability altering advantage before the fact in my views plainly supernatural.

From the point of view of the players maybe "before the fact" is accurate (although you do declare after you roll, so literally, from their PoV it is after the fact of the roll), but clearly not supernatural. From the PoV of the characters it is certainly after the fact and isn't supernatural (without an appropriate source), although people in the game might believe it is (just as people believe in supernatural luck in the real world).

[Flyndaran]

Luck is probability manipulation whether conscious or unconscious, and that is magical.
If you want a character that can make improbable pistol shots, then you give him a high skill, not some undefined super ability that affects everything he does.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Luck is probability manipulation whether conscious or unconscious, and that is magical.

So a character like Ishmael has a probability manipulation power? Was that Melville's intent?

What about a historical person that survived disasters and wars? What about the few people that have won multiple lottery jackpots? Are they real world superheroes or wizards? There's no skill of "winning the lottery".