All games deal with luck in some form or another.
In many tabletop and board games, luck is present in a very direct and physical sense. That is, the rolling of dice, objects designed to portray chance and randomness on a numerical scale. In simple video games like Tetris, winning or losing can come down to the block type chosen by a random number generator.
But even in the most skill-based of video games, there exists some degree of luck. The phrases “critical hit” and “good RNG” are often used in a multitude of different game genres, from first-person shooters to platformers to Metroidvanias. But it’s role-playing games that often take on luck in the most interesting manner, and the way in which video game RPGs have adapted systems from tabletop games to the virtual world is quite interesting.
What Makes You Special?
Often, RPGs portray luck as a statistic alongside others like strength, intelligence, and charisma. Which may seem a little odd at first glance. Most stats in an RPG pertain to things that your character could actively improve or train at, and luck is by its very nature out of our control. That’s what makes the way Fallout handles luck so fascinating.
The Fallout series uses a combination of seven “S.P.E.C.I.A.L.” stats to dictate your character’s skills and proficiencies. The L in S.P.E.C.I.A.L. is for Luck, a stat which dictates things like the chance to score a critical hit, to find rare loot, to avoid damage by chance to trigger a handful of other strange but useful abilities.
It’s an odd case where you can build your character around being lucky, rather than around some other stat and relying on your luck to hold strong. You as the player dictate your luck at the beginning of the game and get the chance to make it better as you level up, giving you more perks around the concept of being a lucky person. It’s a great example of how to handle “gamifying” luck. It not only turns chance into a source of characterization, it puts some element of luck into the player’s hands rather than having it act behind the scenes.
A Small Degree of Luck
In other games, like Dark Souls 3 and Demon Souls, luck plays a much smaller role. These are games, after all, which pride themselves on requiring quick reflexes and solid skill from their players. It wouldn’t make sense for a large degree of player success to be out of their control.
In these games, luck mainly determines the rate at which enemies will drop certain items upon death. It’s not a key component of playing the game, but leaning into it might help players build up a better arsenal of weapons and supplies. Mostly, though, players will focus on other stats that more directly affect their health or damage output.
In later Dark Souls titles (as well as Elden Ring, where the stat is called Arcane but works much the same way) luck also affects the buildup of status effects like Poison and Bleed. The more lucky you are, the more often you can trigger those effects on your enemies.
These games also introduce items that give you additional luck, like the “Covetous Silver Serpent Ring” or the “Symbol of Avarice.” These allow the players to equip luck items when needed and take them off at other times. In other words, while these games still need to have some level of luck, they handle it by keeping it mostly out of the way.
Why TTRPGs Don’t Usually Have a Luck Stat
These video game RPGs are often adapted in their settings and gameplay from tabletop or TTRPGs. But there’s a reason that games like DnD and Pathfinder don’t have luck stats. That’s because they already function around the rolling of dice. The luck component is already inherently present in every roll of those games; to have it also be affected by a player stat would be redundant. Granted, there are abilities that impact the player’s control over the dice rolls and give them a better chance of a good outcome, but they often use limited resources or are not available all the time.
Video games like Fallout use this stat and avoid using random number generators when possible because it’s more satisfying to give the player control. Even though dice are literally up to chance and not dependent on the player at all, the act of physically rolling them provides a level of agency that getting an RNG result just doesn’t.
That being being, some TTRPGs do directly represent luck through a stat controlled by the player, often just a flat number to add to a roll to represent a better chance of success. But still, TTRPGs existing (for the most part) in a physical space with physical dice literally in the player’s hand creates a feeling that the player has some control over their luck, even if that is just a perception.
