04-11-2017, 01:27 PM | #61 |
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Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#39): Daredevil, Luck, Super Luck
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04-11-2017, 01:32 PM | #62 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#39): Daredevil, Luck, Super Luck
But that's completely missing the point. There is a quality in the real world called "being physically attractive," and I can choose to play someone who has that quality. There is a quality called "being rich," and one called "being physically fit," and so on. But there is no quality in the real world of "being lucky." In the real world, the belief in "luck" as an actual trait that a human being can have is what GURPS calls a Delusion.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
04-11-2017, 01:39 PM | #63 | |
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Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#39): Daredevil, Luck, Super Luck
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Leading a life that benefits from a statistically improbable amount of good events is equally an emergent property of a vast number of tiny effects. Emergent properties are very real. |
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04-11-2017, 01:41 PM | #64 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#39): Daredevil, Luck, Super Luck
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And "realism" in the sense in which GURPS uses it, as an antonym of "cinema" (or "epic"), looks to me to have something to do with the way in which Kromm's tastes differ from mine.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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04-11-2017, 01:41 PM | #65 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#39): Daredevil, Luck, Super Luck
Quote:
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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04-11-2017, 01:47 PM | #66 |
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#39): Daredevil, Luck, Super Luck
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04-11-2017, 01:54 PM | #67 | ||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#39): Daredevil, Luck, Super Luck
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Luck, in GURPS, is a trait which allows for characters that consistently beat the odds by surviving. In the real world, such people exist, at least over certain periods of time, but can obviously only be evaluated after the fact. Both are meta-game constructs that allow for certain fictional concepts and which might also apply to real people, but in the case of real people, can only be evaluated by looking at results after the fact.
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Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela! Last edited by Icelander; 04-11-2017 at 02:00 PM. |
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04-11-2017, 02:53 PM | #68 | |
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Location: Ventura CA
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#39): Daredevil, Luck, Super Luck
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Last edited by sir_pudding; 04-11-2017 at 03:00 PM. |
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04-11-2017, 02:58 PM | #69 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#39): Daredevil, Luck, Super Luck
Quote:
Being able to take advantage of random fluctuations in the environment certainly exists as a trait. It's called "intelligence" or "evolution" or "life." As Pasteur said, chance favors the prepared mind. And all those things are emergent qualities that cannot be reduced to simple physical variables. But consider a poker game. The aim of poker is to take advantage of random variation in what cards you get by an intelligent strategy that involves things such as knowing the odds of getting the card you need if you draw, or in the next deal, and knowing how to size up your fellow players' behavioral signals, and knowing how to bluff effectively. If you can do those things, you can expect to win over time. But you can also win a particular hand, or even a string of hands, by happening to get good cards. If you get five hearts, or three fives and two jacks, you likely will do better in that hand than the more skilled player across the table. And we can imagine that a person might happen to draw good cards in a series of multiple hands. Now, (1) getting good hands like that is not an emergent quality at all. There are attributes such as person-who-knows-the-odds or person-who-has-a-poker-face, but there is no attribute of person-who-gets-good-hands (assuming they don't have cards up their sleeve!). And (2) of those two qualities, the one we call "luck" is not the specialized emergent quality of being a good poker player; it's the particular history of getting good hands in a particular game. Using "luck" to refer, not to having favorable random outcomes, but to having favorable outcomes that other people don't know how to reduce to something straightforwardly predictable, is an abuse of language. That was the point Rand's character was making: "You'll never be rich, because you think what I do is gambling."
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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04-11-2017, 03:39 PM | #70 | |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#39): Daredevil, Luck, Super Luck
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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.
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Tags |
advantage, advantage of the week, daredevil, luck, super luck, [basic] |
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