Making Gambling interesting for multiple players.

By Oblivyax, in Star Wars: Edge of the Empire RPG

Hello everyone,

In an Edge of the empire online game, I am a Gambler.

For a few important encounters the GM made a tournament with a NPC I needed to delay, and 3 other NPC.

I'm rolling 'Deception' to play, I have 4 Cunning and 2 ranks in Deception.

While I was in the tournament, the other players were boarding the important NPC's ship, placing a tracer device inside.

Now, we are low on cash, and we needed funds.

My character wants to gamble to make money, obviously.

GM says: At the casino play 4 games. Roll 4 'Gambling' checks, against a fixed difficulty based on the wager.

So I spend most of that day in the casino, represented by rolling 4 rolls, and we have the results.

How do other game manage Gambling?

1) The only other player is a character with Presence 4, Cool 1 Rank. He could participate in my gambling. Is there a way to make multiples players participate and make gambling entertaining for multiple players at the same time?

2) How do you play gambling as a "sideline" just to make money (We were wasting time for 2 days, and we already have enough main quest and side quest going on)

3) How would you represent the difficulty to gamble on 1 roll only? Our Gm put (after reading on forums I think):
25 Credits = 1red dice difficulty

50= 1Red 1 Purple

100= 2 Red

250 = 2 Red 1 Purple

500 3 Red

1000 = 3 Red 1 purple

And it goes up from there, upgraded difficulty again at 2000 4000 8000 etc

Thank you for your advice, opinions and references.

There's as many ways to handle gambling as there are possible gambling games!

The Force die is a fantastic randomizer, as are the percentile dice, and I make use of those as needed. For example, a player of mine was looking for a friendly game of Pazaak. @Maveritchell came up with some Pazaak rules , which I knew about, but I had previously downloaded them and the PDF had become corrupted, so I just made up something on the fly :) My player wanted to "count cards," so I had him roll a Perception check, and rolled the Force die before the check as a randomizer: black pip = setback die, white pip = boost die. That was completely on the fly, and it worked fine! Of course the Force die kept coming up with black pips, to my player's chagrin, but he still ended up winning quite a bit before he rolled 5 Threat on his check, and the NPCs decided they didn't want to play with him any more :)

There are also official rules for various games, which I didn't really take time to look up in the moment. The EotE Core Rulebook has general rules for gambling (competitive Cool or Deception, with multiple rounds possible, and you can alternately use Skulduggery to cheat). These are in Chapter III: Skills , on a sidebar above the Cool skill description.

Page 87-88 of Fly Casual has a dice game called "Hintaro," which just has you rolling an unmodified 2 Boost dice and resolving the roll based on the dedicated table there on page 88.

Under a Black Sun p27 has rules for the galaxy's most popular game of space-poker, Sabacc.

@awayputurwpn is correct on all fronts. I'd also add that the fan made No Safe Haven has an encounter for gamblers that gets everyone involved and There is a modular encounter in (I believe) the Corellia sourcebook that covers gambling with a nice twist.

5 hours ago, Aurin said:

@awayputurwpn is correct on all fronts. I'd also add that the fan made No Safe Haven has an encounter for gamblers that gets everyone involved and There is a modular encounter in (I believe) the Corellia sourcebook that covers gambling with a nice twist.

When I first read it, I thought you said "on all fonts," and so I was very confused. I was like "I don't remember talking about fonts."

:P

You could run a dedicated gambling session. Play With Real Cards/dice and prepare NPC sheets for the non-gambling PCs.

3 hours ago, mulletcheese said:

You could run a dedicated gambling session. Play With Real Cards/dice and prepare NPC sheets for the non-gambling PCs.

lol. I often use the poker analogy to explain tabletop rpg's to folks. A bunch of grownups getting together to play games, BS, tell stories, and have fun. It's just a different game.

On 8/1/2017 at 3:38 PM, Ahrimon said:

lol. I often use the poker analogy to explain tabletop rpg's to folks. A bunch of grownups getting together to play games, BS, tell stories, and have fun. It's just a different game.

Totally. In fact, I got my poker group together to play Star Wars a number of years ago, and everyone had a blast.

It's all about the relationships, in my experience.

Edited by awayputurwpn
On 7/28/2017 at 11:46 AM, awayputurwpn said:

There's as many ways to handle gambling as there are possible gambling games!

The Force die is a fantastic randomizer, as are the percentile dice, and I make use of those as needed. For example, a player of mine was looking for a friendly game of Pazaak. @Maveritchell came up with some Pazaak rules , which I knew about, but I had previously downloaded them and the PDF had become corrupted, so I just made up something on the fly :) My player wanted to "count cards," so I had him roll a Perception check, and rolled the Force die before the check as a randomizer: black pip = setback die, white pip = boost die. That was completely on the fly, and it worked fine! Of course the Force die kept coming up with black pips, to my player's chagrin, but he still ended up winning quite a bit before he rolled 5 Threat on his check, and the NPCs decided they didn't want to play with him any more :)

There are also official rules for various games, which I didn't really take time to look up in the moment. The EotE Core Rulebook has general rules for gambling (competitive Cool or Deception, with multiple rounds possible, and you can alternately use Skulduggery to cheat). These are in Chapter III: Skills , on a sidebar above the Cool skill description.

Page 87-88 of Fly Casual has a dice game called "Hintaro," which just has you rolling an unmodified 2 Boost dice and resolving the roll based on the dedicated table there on page 88.

Under a Black Sun p27 has rules for the galaxy's most popular game of space-poker, Sabacc.

I believe that the rules for Sabacc also appear in Suns of Fortune, somewhere closer to the end, I don't have the book with me (waiting in a the waiting room while my wife is in a lactation class with our 12 day old son)

Have them share the buy-in:

10 hours ago, EliasWindrider said:

I believe that the rules for Sabacc also appear in Suns of Fortune, somewhere closer to the end, I don't have the book with me (waiting in a the waiting room while my wife is in a lactation class with our 12 day old son)

Page 119 of suns of fortune has sabacc rules

On 8/3/2017 at 9:05 PM, EliasWindrider said:

Page 119 of suns of fortune has sabacc rules

Nice find! I never realized they were in there. SoF is a great resource. At a cursory glance they look identical to what's in the Under a Black Sun adventure.

And congrats on the new wee one!