Luck: Mundane or not?

[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".

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

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.

I don't believe in a real ability of luck.

Luck in common speech still refers to a statistical anomaly just flavoured with magical thinking. People generally think that someone is just "statistically lucky" but they express it as if they were "magically lucky" because that's just how common speech works.

I think luck is a useful cinematic way to represent someone who would be considered "statistically lucky" at his death before he actually dies.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Statistical anomaly does not mean luck as it is used in common speech.

Game mechanically that's all Luck does, it ensures statistically anomalies.

In common speech, people are lucky as having a special ability, not just experiencing unlikely events.

Both meanings are common. I don't believe in supernatural luck, but I might say, "That was lucky" or something. Not because I think that providence smiled on me or anything, but because I think the odds of the thing occurring were relatively low.

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.

Like I said, it can be descriptive. "This character is lucky, in that he will survive his dangerous adventures". You can call it "plot protection" or "narrative armor" or whatever but it applies to real people too. If you read a biography of T.E. Lawerence there's absolutely no chance that the second time you read it he'll die in Saudi Arabia. Does that make him supernatural?

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by Sindri

That was what I was trying to say except that when purchasing the luck advantage the player says beforehand that he will be viewed as luckier in hindsight.

Yeah, I got ninja'd pretty hard there. I was only responding to the first post in the thread. =P

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

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.

I don't think we need to pry into what anyone's beliefs are here. Yes, "Luck" is a statistical coincidence which can only be observed after-the-fact in real life, but that doesn't mean that it's a magical force if it acts in reverse in a game. If you consider an RPG to be cooperative storytelling, buying Luck just means that you're saying "this is one of the folks who, at the end of the story, will have coincidentally done better than his mundane characteristics would indicate." It could alternately be a supernatural force acting through the character; or it could be cinematic hyper-competency, as I described in my last post. It all depends on how it's justified.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Game mechanically that's all Luck does, it ensures statistically anomalies. Both meanings are common. I don't believe in supernatural luck, but I might say, "That was lucky" or something. Not because I think that providence smiled on me or anything, but because I think the odds of the thing occurring were relatively low.

Like I said, it can be descriptive. "This character is lucky, in that he will survive his dangerous adventures". You can call it "plot protection" or "narrative armor" or whatever but it applies to real people too. If you read a biography of T.E. Lawerence there's absolutely no chance that the second time you read it he'll die in Saudi Arabia. Does that make him supernatural?

You believe plot protection exists in real life? Yet you don't call it magical?
I don't see how those two beliefs can co-exist.

So you mainly use luck as a synonym for improbable when the outcome is considered beneficial? Most people really believe in luck as a force, so I hope you understand how some might misunderstand you.

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

You believe plot protection exists in real life? Yet you don't call it magical?
I don't see how those two beliefs can co-exist.

Plot Protection exists in the sense that some people survived when others did not, and you generally only get the autobiographies of the survivors. Fiction writers generally give the same protection to their main characters. That's all he's saying.

So you mainly use luck as a synonym for improbable when the outcome is considered beneficial? Most people really believe in luck as a force, so I hope you understand how some might misunderstand you.

Nobody here has said they believe luck to be anything but coincidence noticed after the fact.

[BlackLiger]

Luck, as defined in the core books for GURPS, is a meta trait, as it does not directly affect the game world, it directly affects the REAL world. It makes you be able to re-roll dice. As such, it is NOT supernatural. It is not something the character could become aware of. It is not something the character can rely upon. It is Meta-state, and thus outside of the character's perceptions.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

You believe plot protection exists in real life?

No, I believe that it "exists" in fiction, even in realistic fiction. I believe that in real life the past is immutable, and often the present was the result of events with low statistical likelihood. Once having occurred these events have a 100% chance of having already occurred. When you read the biography of the guy that survived, there is a 0% on any given reading that it will transform into the biography of the guy that didn't. Does that mean he had "plot protection"?

Yet you don't call it magical? I don't see how those two beliefs can co-exist.

Do you think it's inappropriate to say that some unlikely event was "lucky" or "unlucky" merely as a description of it's desirability (or lack thereof) and unlikeliness?

So you mainly use luck as a synonym for improbable when the outcome is considered beneficial?

That's the way lots of people use it. That's certainly what it means game-mechanically in GURPS.

Most people really believe in luck as a force, so I hope you understand how some might misunderstand you.

Other than some obsessive gamblers I've never heard anybody call luck a "force". I've certainly never imagined that characters in fiction (that aren't otherwise explicitly supernatural) have such a force protecting them, only the author. Equally I've never imagined that a historical person had any such force protecting them, only that had they died I would not be reading about how they had not. Do you?

I've asked you thrice:
How would you Flyndaran of Forest Grove, Companion of Fireball the Cat, and Drinker of Diet Soda make a metagame trait to represent a person who has "plot protection" or whatever you want to call it?

[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.

[bcd]

I am going to go against the grain here and say that luck in real life is a learnable trait. I do however separate luck into two components: one is essentially a stochastic process and the other is the acquired skill of managing that stochastic process.

The stochastic process is the fortuitous event. This happens to us all every now and then, some sudden coincidence that has the potential to benefit us some way or other. Essentially, our ability to influence the generation of this fortuitous event is nil.

The acquired skill is the ability to frequently position yourself in such a way that should a fortuitous event happen to you, you will be able to make the most out of it. After all, what good is a fortuitous event if you weren't there to benefit from it? This isn't really one single skill as such but in the case of GURPS you could decide that the Luck advantage represents this on a broad spectrum. Narrow-band luck could be represented through high skill levels, or talents, or some other way.

As a real life example, consider the man on his way to catch the bus. He arrives late at the bus stop, but as luck would have it, the bus is also running late and so despite himself being late the man does catch the bus. Very lucky.

So how can the man use his acquired ability to cause the bus to fortuitously be late? He cannot, this is a stochastic process over which he has no control. The unlucky man is one who, when he notices he's already a minute late and it's still another five minutes walk to the bus stop, resigns to his fate and just saunters along expecting to have to wait an hour for the next bus. The lucky man is the one who thinks, but if I'm lucky the bus will be late too so I'll run and be at the stop in two minutes instead of five and maybe I'll catch a windfall. Sometimes, of course, he runs and still misses the bus but the occasional success will tend to vindicate his effort.

Society tends to call it "luck" when both a fortuitous event happens and you were able to benefit from it in some significant manner so the lucky man in the example above would be considered more "lucky" by society than the one who didn't bother to run.