Luck negation

This has stemmed from several forums I am on where people say that they like/use luck negation mechanics. to those of you who do not know, what a luck negation mechanic is, is basically any mechanic that allows you to ignore a bad roll, or enhance a bad roll, or effect luck in a positive way. now before I get started I would like to point out that I am in favor of luck negation mechanics, and that this is merely a random thought I had and I wanted to see what others thought on it.

so I was having a discussion about Legend of the 5 Rings. it is an excellent game that I have enjoyed immensely throughout the years. it is oriental based, and the main focus of the game is on playin samurai in a fictional oriental setting. in general it portrays this well. my issue comes down to the mechanics, it has no critical success rules in the typical sense of the words. in order to do more damage, or whatever, with you attack roll you have to increase the difficulty. the system is called roll keep you roll a bunch of D10s and are able to keep only a certain number of them. you then add those dice together and compare it to a target number, higher is better. in order to do more damage you just "raise" which means you increase the target number by five, for every raise you gain more dice for the damage. this is cool, the problem is that if you do not raise and you get way more than yoiu need there is no bonus, yiou still succeed at the minimum required. this is because to do more than the minimum requires a raise.

I have nothing against this mechanic, in fact I kind of like it. I see it as a reverse of standard luck negation. instead of negating just the bad luck, it sort of negates the good luck as well. you cannot ever get that situation were you are accidentally awesome. and I think that is odd. this is more just a rambling thought than a real discussion piece, but I would like to hear your thoughts on the subject.

in some ways its fun to be a lvl 2 dud take out a 24hit dice dragon in 1 hit but.... it depends on the system and the grittyness your goig for i like the "realism" of not killing the big dragon in my dudes gonna die quick games but somtimes ilike a seprate stat were you as a player pick the ammount of luck negatioin as it were that applys like for dicepool maybe something that offers rerolls or lowers/raises threshholds for criting

A reason not to spend edge when dealing with a great dragon in shadowrun; it can spend edge to counter yours, and it's likely got more than you. Best to hide yourself with that Ares Thunderstruck before you try to shoot the critter in the head.

Or better yet, don't roll well and gloat about it in sight of said great dragon; it can spend edge to force a player to re-roll all successful dice unless you spend edge of your own.

You know what game doesn't need luck negation? Nobilis.

I personally find myself moving farther and farther away from luck based board games as I get older. I working out a working strategy just to have it foiled because I roll bad. That's why I like the Game of Thrones boardgame way better than Risk or Axis and Allies. GoT has no dice what so ever. Everything comes down to political maneuvering and strategy. I've lost games of Risk where I had overwhelming forces because I was out rolled, and I've held greenland with 3 troops against nearly ten times as many invaders because the defender wins ties and my dice were on fire.

Roleplaying games are a different beast in my opinion however. People in the world never get to control the outcome of our actions with absolute certainty. Granted some games make simple things too hard in relation to real life in my opinion, and in real life I've learned things I can put to use from books with little effort and few roleplaying represent the ease some people have gaining knowledge just from reading.

Luck in roleplaying has almost always ended up making the story better in my opinion. My Earthdawn character didn't always preform amazing, but there were some times when he did things that the players will never forget. Nate's troll was the exact same way. Even more so actually. I mean even when amazing dice rolls kill my party it seems to improve the next game because people start to actually think about the fact they could die, and thus we all get better roleplaying out of tragedy. Stories don't all have happy endings and sometimes I think it's alright to have an ending that shows that. Dice rolls can facilitate that quite nicely.

Granted not everyone handles PC death well which is kinda sad, but pretty much everyone I've played with is mature enough to realize that if you die in one of my games it was nothing personal. I do sometimes pull punches, but usually it's only if I think it goes counter to the narrative. Not my storyline mind you, but if I think a death could fit into the story at that point I don't usually stop it.