Trying to *Get* Lucky

Burning Wheel Subsystem Advice and Guidance
#1

Hey folks,

The Lucky trait says that if the player makes a random in-game guess (via roleplay), the guess is always right - so long as the player isn’t aware that it’s right. (Gold Revised Page 334)

I’m playing a Bondsman and my GM and I are having trouble wrapping our heads around this aspect of the trait. Does anyone have any insight on how to use this part of the trait - or any stories of having used it?

Our game tends to live in a pretty abstract place much of the time, and it seems like this is a very concrete-level effect. The random component makes it seem like it’s limited to roughly to the realm of probability, but I don’t know. There’s also the epistemological hobgoblin of knowing I have the trait and therefore… Know that any random in-character guess I make would be correct?

Any insight would be appreciated. Thankns.

#2

I haven’t had the pleasure of playing this one before. I like to think of obvious cases and then go backward from there.

The character is in front of three vials. Two are poisoned and one does nothing. Which one does that character drink? Because of lucky, the right one.

So another scenario, you’re running through a maze, do you go left or right at this intersection? You the player don’t know, but whichever one you pick is the right answer.

A little more abstract, you’re at a party and you’re looking for someone that you know is there. Which room do you start looking in? The right one.

What this shouldn’t cover though is if the person is there at all. You could use it to guess which party they might be attending if there where multiple on the same night, but not if they are someone who attends parties, so to speak. Additionally, the last bit is just explicitly saying don’t use this to metagame. If you know that your friends character knows something about an NPC that your character doesn’t know, lucky doesn’t mean they can just “guess” it.

In general, a character with this trait should be regularly stumbling into minor successes that give him minor advantages or save time. That’s what I would look to give as a GM. Ideally, these random successes propel them towards their goal but also towards higher and higher stakes. I’d likely press this as drinking from a fire hose of success if I was the GM. I’d constantly look for ways where luck pushes the character towards challenges, ready or not.

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