Quote:
Originally Posted by Flyndaran
Do you really want to start that topic up again? Luck is supernatural no matter how you try to twist it. It doesn't exist in reality.
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You clearly have a strong opinion about Luck, but it's not really relevant because we're not discussing Luck, we're discussing who controls events in a game.
A game master gets to decide, for example, whether there are orcs in a particular room, or what the difficulty of a roll will be or what the outcome of a roll will be. There is nothing "supernatural" in this. The GM runs the simulation of the world. He is the interface. Impulse Buys are about delegating that authority to the players on a limited basis. When Joe says "But can there be a chandalier? I want there to be a chandalier!" The GM can allow Joe to spend a CP in exchange for the chandalier existing there.
This is not "supernatural" or "unrealistic." It is not implausible that there was a chandalier in the room. It's just that the player, not the GM, decided this, and paid a point for it.
The same applies to Impulse Buys for successes. Joe makes an Acrobatics roll to swing from the chandalier and fails. "I don't want my character to fail, can he succeed?" And in exchange for a point, he does. This isn't about
luck, it's not like the character
got lucky. He just succeeded. The
player took control of the narrative (which is usually controlled by the GM, at least this part of the narrative) for a brief moment.
This is why I argue it has nothing to do with realism but tone. A game without impulse buys is better for giving the
players a sense of loss of control. Horror is a great example of a genre where that's really good. Other genres are the rogue-like, where the randomness of events is the entire point of the genre. In other genres, you want to give
players a sense of control, where narrative might need to make "more sense" and you want to cut down on the randomness of events. A lot of adventure fiction has that, or myths, where failure or success has a great deal of narrative weight or are directly the result of the character's actions, rather than simply resulting from random weirdness or a universe that doesn't care.