{"id":30800,"date":"2016-02-22T18:54:19","date_gmt":"2016-02-22T23:54:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=30800"},"modified":"2016-02-22T18:54:19","modified_gmt":"2016-02-22T23:54:19","slug":"experienced-points-skinner-boxing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=30800","title":{"rendered":"Experienced Points: Skinner Boxing"},"content":{"rendered":"

As many of you guessed from the end of the last column<\/a>, this week I’m writing about skinner boxes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And yes, that means I never did get around to answering the original question, “Why do games have a luck stat?” (That is, where your character can invest in increasing their overall luck.) To answer that now: I’m not really sure. It’s always felt like a strange and alien abstraction to me. There are indeed lucky people in the world in the sense that they “rolled well” at some point in their lives, but there are not lucky people in the sense that they roll better than the rest of us on a regular basis. There are people who win the lottery, but there aren’t people who have a better chance of winning the lottery than the rest of us, or are just naturally predisposed to lottery-winning. <\/p>\n

Then again, we’re talking about a system to simulate roleplaying stories, not real life. And some characters are indeed just naturally lucky. Forrest Gump seems to be the go-to example of this. So if you want to play through a story where your character is implausibly blessed by fortune, then I guess the luck stat does that. <\/p>\n

The other important thing luck gives us is the SPECIAL system. Fallout just wouldn’t be the same if it was based on SPECIA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As many of you guessed from the end of the last column, this week I’m writing about skinner boxes. And yes, that means I never did get around to answering the original question, “Why do games have a luck stat?” (That is, where your character can invest in increasing their overall luck.) To answer that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30800\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}