Luck: Mundane or not?

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

You believe your game characters exist in real life?


Yeah. Exactly. They're places where the mostly-simulationist GURPS system allows small narrativist inclusions.

If you're such a hardcore simulationist that the idea of a game character being one of those fictional characters who catch a few extra breaks from the author offends you, then feel free to ban Luck and those other advantages. Me, I'm cool with them.

It doesn't offend me. I just see luck as supernatural as any other magical advantage. It helps your character without any realistic method.
I really don't understand why people disagree with that.
I enjoy games with magic, but why label only one magical ability mundane?
Meta gaming magic is still magic, in my opinion. It's like genre conventions that make no rational sense.
I guess I'm the minority. No problem; everyone's different.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Meta gaming magic is still magic, in my opinion. It's like genre conventions that make no rational sense.

...Genre conventions are not normally characterized as magical powers, you know.

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

It doesn't offend me. I just see luck as supernatural as any other magical advantage. It helps your character without any realistic method.
I really don't understand why people disagree with that.
I enjoy games with magic, but why label only one magical ability mundane?
Meta gaming magic is still magic, in my opinion. It's like genre conventions that make no rational sense.
I guess I'm the minority. No problem; everyone's different.

I'm not generally fond of metagaming abilities either but luck has the advantage of not doing anything that you couldn't get anyway just through die rolls. It doesn't manipulate the setting just the probability.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

...Genre conventions are not normally characterized as magical powers, you know.

It's magic that effects everyone equally. But still not reality.
Luck is the same as serendipity or any other background super power.

[Tuoni]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

It's magic that effects everyone equally. But still not reality.
Luck is the same as serendipity or any other background super power.

Isn't that true about everything in gurps?

Character points, having a move that is incremented by 1/4 of a yard, using 3d6 which only allows 16 possible results on any attempt.

None of these things exist in reality. They are all meta-game aspects used to simulate reality. By what your saying, that makes them magic also.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

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

And some people have many apparently improbable events that occur to them over the course of their lives. But then again, maybe not. Maybe that guy who survives getting struck by lightning so many times was actually doing things, without even knowing it that tilted the odds in his favour, both of getting struck, and surviving the strike.

But really, before we pass judgement on Luck, it behooves us to look at what it actually does. "Luck" enabled you, at regular intervals, to take a bad roll and try it again. So what that means is a person with "Luck" doesn't screw up as often as most people do.

So really, it could be renamed "Careful", or "Reliable"...or heck "Competent". Luck actually sucks at making those long shot one-in-a-million shots that the name suggests. If you are trying to make a five or less roll, having luck may triple your chances, but I still wouldn't bet on you making it. A player with Luck is much better off using it to avoid fumbling since having a Luck reroll handy nearly annihilates the odds that you'll mess up. You will still mess up in situations where the character has to make multiple rolls in a short time frame...but that's the player's timeframe, not the character. For example when you have to make a dozen job rolls in 10 minutes to cover a year's activities between adventures.

So...no. Luck is not a supernatural thing. Not necessarily. It could be the product of a guardian angel fending off the worst of life's vicissitude. Or it could just be the result of a person being good at improvising in high stress situations. Or as has been aphorized, it could just be the product of fortune favouring the prepared.

[Not another shrubbery]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

It doesn't offend me. I just see luck as supernatural as any other magical advantage. It helps your character without any realistic method.
I really don't understand why people disagree with that.
I enjoy games with magic, but why label only one magical ability mundane?
Meta gaming magic is still magic, in my opinion. It's like genre conventions that make no rational sense.
I guess I'm the minority. No problem; everyone's different.

I call it supernatural too, in that I wouldn't allow it in a strictly realistic setting, although that doesn't matter much for my games, since they almost always have some supernatural elements. I've opined before that Luck is not a RW trait.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Not another shrubbery

I call it supernatural too, in that I wouldn't allow it in a strictly realistic setting, although that doesn't matter much for my games, since they almost always have some supernatural elements. I've opined before that Luck is not a RW trait.

Oh thank goodness. At least someone agrees with me.
And yes, I almost always imagine at least a smidgeon of the supernatural into my game worlds.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

I enjoy games with magic, but why label only one magical ability mundane? Meta gaming magic is still magic, in my opinion.

Because metagame abilities exist outside the game, while magic exists inside the game. That's a pretty fundamental distinction.

It's perfectly possible to have in-game magic that grants the effect of Luck. That doesn't mean that all Luck in any game is therefore magical.

[aesir23]

One could argue that rolling dice is unrealistic. In the real world (beyond the quantum level) the outcome of most events is the result of a large number of interacting forces.

It's just no fun to write a physics dissertation to determine the outcome of every punch thrown. Chaos and Complexity create an amount of uncertainty that makes it much easier to pretend that even those events that are determined by a relatively small number of forces (a game of chess, for example) are determined by "chance." Luck interacts with a system of abstraction, not with a simulation with the real world.

And, to echo what others have said--there are people who, in the course of their lifetimes, have had more unlikely events occur in their favor than against it. This is bound to happen roughly as much as its inverse.

Why not use the game-mechanical system of luck to allow someone to play such a person?