I'm trying to come up with a clever way to run a gambling session between 2 NPC's and a PC.

I know I'll want to use a progress Tracker. What else besides Guile/ charm checks should I use to move their progress forward and back?

I think I'll have different effects depending an what they are betting with and whether they try to cheat or not. I'm just struggling a bit here.

Help me Hive Mind!

Thrakazog said:

If you check my TTT conversion, I made a gambling system for chapter 1, with a tracker plus cheating and the consequences of doing so

Link is in my signature.

Ah, That's where you hid it!

I looked in your house rules before. I'll take a look now.

We use intuition(Int) vs Guile(Fel) to try and read through bluffs, and Skullduggery (alternately Folklore for game knowledge) to just exemplify manipulating the game or possibly palming cards/cheating.

Sometimes I secretly roll 3-white & 3-black at a turn start just to add to a player's pool without them knowing since gambling sometimes involves luck (like if it comes up challeng-challenge-bane I might say 'you have a poor hand' so he could spend his turn using Guile to bluff with appropriate cards if necessary).

We have a gambler in the group so this has come up more than once ^_~

I played a simple Gamble scene once and as the game was a game of chance and strategy (backgammon, tric trac in french), I (the GM) would determine random modifiers to the PC's gambling test (representing the good or bad luck of the dice rolls). I would do the same for the opponent, and then both players would roll a Competitive Gamble check (Int).

So, for example, the modifiers could go from Easy to Daunting totally randomly, each game.

I found it very fun.

Here is my recipe for gambling encounter i've tested yesterday:

Gambling mini-game

1. Assemble a 7 space progress tracker.
2. Each player involved have his token on the first space.
3. Start a raise-bet cycle until everyone is fine, creating the pot for this hand. (use some color token for various denominations, like chips)
4. Each player that stayed at the table make a contested roll against the opponent on the left (the active and resistive player choose wich skill to use...like: folklore to know the rules better, intuition to guess other hands, skulduggery to cheat, guile to bluff....u got the picture!)
5. Move each token ahead: a player can choose to advance once up to the number of success / 2 boons scored in this hand. A chaos star put the player back one space....or is caught cheating if they attempted so!

Reapeat 3 to 5 for next hands, until at least one of the players reached the last space (but make sure each one have made an even number of rolls).

At this point the game is over, and each one collect the pot in this manner:

1. Whoever reached the last space take 1/2 of the pot (if more players reached the last space, they share this half)
2. Whoever reached at least the middle space (comprising the player at the last space) shares the remaining pot in equal parts
3. The others lost theirs moneys.

In case of undivisible numbers, what is not divisible remain on the pot for the next sharing or the next game...

This worked well for me and my players, i hope it wil help someone else too!

Bye!

Ghiacciolo,

That's similar to what we ended up using, but probably even simpler and more elegant. I'll give it a whirl next wekeend and see what the folks think.