It's a fantasy setting where luck can run out

>It's a fantasy setting where luck can run out

How would you elaborate on this idea?

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mythic Iceland

Luck is a precious resource to be horded. Some people are naturally lucky a disproportionate amount of the time, some people just have rare lucky days. A very easy supernatural test is known widely enough that its folklore among commoners, and this test reveals how much luck you have right now. Like, you dip a white flower in a special solution while holding the stem, and the number of petals that the color sticks to is how much good luck you have, and the petals that fall off are the bad luck you have.

No one wants to have bad luck, and to make up the difference they will steal luck from other people any way they can. The wealthy or powerful keep a rolling ball of maxed out luck, which combined with their already impressive resources makes them virtually unassailable. No plan can work to the detriment of someone who is fated to have everything go his way for the next few days.

People with abnormally bad luck are ostracized and reviled, because no one wants to be caught in the crossfire of whatever inevitable tragedy will befall them. This does, however, make them useful tools if you keep them at a distance. A supremely unlucky man, in the right place, can topple a dynasty.

Bad luck exists to create good luck, and thus balance is restored.

Hit Points

Each person is born with a set reserve of luck, which may be positive or negative. This reserve drains like radioactive decay--e.g., each time you flip a coin, 0.01% of your current luck reserve is depleted, and your luck reserve gets asymptotically closer to zero (neutral).

In relatively-wealthy places, a person's luck reserve usually is discerned at birth with a simple magical test. If a baby is born with good luck, his parents typically give him a bunch of money and tell him to pick lottery numbers as soon as he gets old enough to understand what a lottery is (until then, he doesn't count as being able to "roll" on lottery tickets) until his positive reserve is depleted. If a baby is born with bad luck, his parents try to leave him alone as much as possible, lest he accidentally gamble away all their money. In these places, (1) half of the people used to be lucky but have traded their good luck for wealth, and (2) the other half of the people are unlucky and go through life desperately trying to avoid any situation in which their bad luck might damage their lives.

Because, in the long term, almost everyone in these places dies with either neutral luck or negative luck, the excess negative luck overflows into Bad-Luck Demons...

(In poor places where people can't afford magic tests at birth, good and bad luck are mostly equal. Though there's still a slight excess of post-mortem bad luck due to unlucky deaths, there isn't enough to spawn Bad-Luck Demons.)

Each person is born with a set "exchange rate" of good luck/bad luck. The lucky people may have a rate of experiencing amazing luck 10 times and then only suffering mildly bad luck 1 time before starting to become lucky again. It is not this linear or simple though, instead being able to accrue "debt" of bad luck amassing together into bigger incidents and eventually deadly accidents should the debt become big enough.

People in this world depend and calculate upon their luck. Knowing their rates of luck, some try to push it further to become really lucky in one great situation e.g. "A person is to attend a tournament and makes sure to seek out potentially unlucky situations to have a plus on their 'luck account'. The next day, he aces the tournament with the opponents simply having worse luck than the person in question had." In this example, the individual sought to be unlucky to further the chances of being lucky later on.

This has also lead to the common practice of immediately doing something important after having suffered a stroke of bad luck due to the belief that they're now in the positive.

The primary risks in the world are that you can't accurately predict your luck. Your exchange rate might leave you with 10 small minor incidents/humiliations or just combine into one massive disasters with you going blind and losing a leg in a freak accident.

Around the world, there are people wandering around, manipulating the luck of others, claming to be the ones of fate, that no amount of luck can change it. These are the primary antogonists of the world known as the Faters. They believe that those who try to amass and manipulate their luck to the better are dabbling into things that are not meant to be controlled.

The people that do amass large quantities of luck and live the good life still live in constant paranoia though, afraid that their bad luck "debt" will come back to haunt them soon.

A bit longer than first intended.

I'mma let you finish, OP, but I have to say my favorite luck system I've seen in an RPG is in Monster of the Week.
Nasty things tend to happen to PCs during a game, and bad stuff tends to snowball on you. That's okay, though. Everyone has a few boxes on their sheet for luck, (some more than others) and you can burn one of those to "fix" a bad roll, escaping from the consequences by sheer luck.
They don't regenerate, though. Every time you burn one, it's gone for good, and so you have to ration them carefully, and try to only use one when it will save your life, or where using one might prevent needing two later.
But as you go on, you find your luck boxes getting marked off, one by one, from the first one that's labelled "Okay" until you hit the last one, which is labelled "Doomed."

When you're all out, you are now Doomed. The GM is encouraged to skip the "soft moves" and go straight for the "hard moves" -- in Apocalypse engine parlance, this is the difference between the setup for something bad coming at you, and the follow through when it actually hits you. Like you don't notice the minefield until you hear the click underfoot, nor do you hear the monster until its claws are tearing at you.
At the doomed stage, the game starts to feel like Final Destination, where everything is out to get you. Your only hope at this point, if you're not one of the one or two classes that can get an extra luck point from a level up, is to get out there and find a real honest-to-god good luck charm and hang on to it for dear life.

Rock falls, everyone dies

Just one, huh? I guess you do only need one after all.

Since luck is a known factor, society is structured to reduce random chance as much as possible. Surveillance is extensive to the point of being ubiquitous, so that no one will randomly be noticed at the right or wrong time. There are several test to determine a citizen's abilities, so that one's job and rank are a matter of one's overall merit, and not simply impressing the right person at the right time. The government supports the less fortunate with resources and opportunities, so that no one would suffer simply from being born in a bad situation. Punishments for crimes are clearly delineated, so as not to depend on a judge's whim, and are generally mild, so that escaping the eye of the law would not be particularly fortunate.

Because luck and fortune can do so little for individual citizens, their mysterious efforts are instead focused outwards, to help society as a whole. Scientific research regularly yields miraculous discoveries. Natural disasters are discovered soon enough for the society to prepare, and the damage they do is mitigated. Enemy nations suffer unexpected setbacks and hardships, thwarting their invasion efforts before they begin. Society prospers, and because it is structured to share its prosperity with the masses rather than hoarding it for the few, anything that's fortunate for society is fortunate for the people in it as well.

I don't know how you intend to represent this mechanically, but might I suggest a jenga tower?

>It's a Vietnam setting where luck can run out

It ain't me starts playing.

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Neat

Dread the rpg
youtube.com/watch?v=MDQk5FQVhzI

Yup. That's where I got the idea.

In Savage Worlds, there is a reroll mechanic. You get three at the start of each session, and you can earn more through roleplaying and what not. On one evening, I swapped the standard system for a jenga tower. Players could reroll as much as they wanted, but each time they wanted to reroll, they had to pull from the jenga tower first. If the jenga tower falls, doom upon the one who toppled it.

My players really enjoyed it.

Luck, you say?

Luck operates under the "open door" philosophy, you align your path with the flow of the cosmos, as long as you keep attuned to that principle good fortune will come to you one way or another, the problem is that life is hard and following that path is tricky, so bad luck comes when you inevitably stray from it. Only absolute masters of the way manage to secure consistent good fortune and even they have a to go through bumps now and then.

You can also manipulate your luck through more indirect means such as maintaining good karma and feng shui but these are complicated and time consuming disciplines, not just matter of doing altruist actions or wearing a charms as its commonly believed.

This.

didnt they get injected or something? I vaguely remember my body modification fetish stemming from that

Indeed they were. They were injected with something that gave their a ridiculous amount of luck. It backfired when they ran out of it.

Edge

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if you mean the mechwarrior version which was "I undo that" I agree 100%

>be newton
>about to die
>travel to another world
>invent cloak
>turn a girl into a guy
>inject catwomen with luck drugs
Newton is such a baller. If there ever is a debate about Newton versus Leibniz, this pretty much shows Newton is the chad of calculus.
Its also hilarious that a girl audience show shows that the two main girls constantly lust after eachother's men

>A very easy supernatural test is known widely enough that its folklore among commoners
And, of course, a noble would just go to an apothecary to have his midichlorians checked.

Hitpoints

>Its also hilarious that a girl audience show shows that the two main girls constantly lust after eachother's men

You do know it was written by horny dudes, right?

from what I remember the story initially was some shonenshit but then it got shelved and later reworked into a shojo story. The female lead went from a sexy girl into a tomboy average girl. And the gourry clone is a typical blonde pretty boy. Its targeted at girls. And if its written by guys its even more funny to see girls get blown the fuck out without them even knowing.

Whatever, dude.