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PostPosted: Thu Nov 09, 2017 5:50 am 
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So in bloodsword there seems to be many opportunities to gamble. I recall freys roosters, old man of the mountain, and some of the situations a trickster can get the party into in book 3 and 4. I think gambling can be easy out of the game by simple d6 rolls but is there any variations. Perhaps turn it into a multiple choice card game or some other system? The Magus Kalugen game was just for 1 round. Might be good to put that into the story but surely gambling deserves a page or two, or even an entire supplement based around it?

What is your experience of this? Don't NPC's get angry when you win? I think in the blood sword books there was strong retaliation for successful players who acquire wealth like that. What about factoring in cheating npcs? House advantage?

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PostPosted: Thu Nov 09, 2017 7:01 am 
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Theres a few pub gambling games in the Glissom gazeteer part of Prince of Darkness.

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PostPosted: Thu Nov 09, 2017 10:06 am 
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I think Damian is right, ;) . Plus , if players cheat. I think there are 2 situations . Either , the PC and NPC handle the situation themselves. Or that s an opportunity to use the rules about arresting and tribunal ^^.

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PostPosted: Thu Nov 09, 2017 12:02 pm 
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Had a glance. Seems there are a lot of knife throwing games and one simple dice game. Wonder if there are other systems that won't be too far drawn out for resolving a players luck at the tables.

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PostPosted: Thu Nov 09, 2017 3:08 pm 
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Gambling is a great way of injecting non-combat conflict into a game and, if the stakes are for something other than money, a way to progress the adventure, too.

BUT, all too often, gambling games in RPGs are either a simple skill test or played out by the players as if they were their characters. Both are unsatisfying mechanisms: a simple die roll ends the tension too quickly, and the second option assumes that the players have the same skill with the game as their players (which is not assumed for other elements of Dragon Warriors, such as combat, stealth, etc.). The second option works well if there's no skill involved, such as the Crown & Anchor game played in Glissom, but otherwise should be avoided.

So I offer some alternatives:

  1. For games where it's obvious to all players how each is doing, run the game like combat - each player starts with a set amount of "Health Points" and, each round, they attack each other and do damage according to their "weapon". In this context, Attack, Defence, and Damage scores should be assigned according to the character's skill or familiarity with the game their character is playing. The winner is the last person in the game with positive Health Points. This doesn't really work with games that have more than 2 players but could, for example, be used for a gaming tournament played as series of 2-player bouts. For each game, the GM would need to come up with a narrative for what each attribute (Attack, Defence, Damage) represented in the game. And variations could also include armour bypass, too (which would represent reactionary actions the player could take in the game to avoid their position being worsened by the other player's action).
  2. Skill-based method (attribute checks). In my games, skills are not based on d20 rolls, but a d6 + attribute. in this way, talented characters are consistently better (maybe unassailably so) than their less talented counterparts. For games with no random element, a player with 6 less Intelligence than his opponent will have no chance of victory, which is reasonable for all-skill games like chess. Games with a random element may require a roll with 1d8, 1d10, or higher, depending on how much the random element influences the outcome of the game. For example, chess has no random element, so would be played with 1d6, but poker, which is part skill and part random (but mostly skill), might be played with 1d8, and monopoly, which has a significant random element, might be played with 2d10! If you want something more drawn out than a single check, make the challenge a best of 3 or best of 5, with an opportunity for players to concede or increase their stake each round.
  3. Alternate skill-based method. The random element of the game is reflected by a number of d6, which each player rolls (the higher the random element, the more d6 are rolled - anywhere from none (for chess) to maybe as many as 6d6 for a highly random game (but still with some skill involved)). The GM decides over how many rounds the game is played and, each round, the player rolls 1d6, adding this to their total, along with a quarter of their Int score (rounded down). If the character has a skill in this game, they add their relevant skill rank, too. The game stops after a pre-determined number of rounds and the player with the highest final score wins. This method is great for allowing players to supplement their stake between each round and bluffing, etc., and players can also withdraw at the end of any round, forfeiting their current stake.

There are a couple of special cases to consider, too:

Continued in next post

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PostPosted: Thu Nov 09, 2017 3:11 pm 
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Cheating
Players may attempt to cheat by making a stealth check against every other players' perception score. They suffer a -1 penalty to their stealth score for every +1 bonus they want to receive in the game (either to one of Attack, Defence, Damage in option 1, above, or to their skill result in options 2 and 3).

Reading the players
For multi-round games (and this works well with option 3, above), players can attempt to determine how well the other players in the game are faring. I use Guile vs. Conviction in my games, but this could just as easily be an opposed Looks test (either d6 + Looks, the highest wins, or d20 <= Looks, the person that rolls the highest number under Looks wins). The GM tells the player what they think of the other players' positions based on the result (but, of course, the player doesn't know if they succeeded in their roll or not). If the player has some skill in the game, he may add his skill rank to his Looks score for the purposes of this roll.

Fleshed out, the above would probably make a good chapter in that "adventuring" book Kharille mentioned in another thread!

And, should you be interested in my skills and guile rules, old drafts of my working ruleset are published on the Cobwebbed Forest:

Skills: http://www.cobwebbedforest.co.uk/librar ... Skills.pdf

Guile: http://www.cobwebbedforest.co.uk/librar ... ies#social

Feedback and comments (and any alternative mechanics for representing games of skill) most welcome!

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PostPosted: Thu Nov 09, 2017 3:36 pm 
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Need to go through those pdfs. So much I visit during office hours as it is....




Maybe ones like pure luck can be aided with psychic talent. I'm sure a high psychic talent character will do well on roulette. Maybe on cards.


Some of those 'games' make part of the story, like the kingdom of wyrd chess game with the cheating elf. And what about that stupid dice game in book 1 battlepits with that 'grandmaster'.


Guess a simple d6 roll wouldn't suffice. Surely some games can use a high intelligence roll. Can we make a fun system with minor intelligence and psychic talent factors? Maybe even a looks factor, I know I tend to lose at roulette to pretty croupiers....

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PostPosted: Tue Nov 14, 2017 5:36 pm 
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Kharille wrote:
Maybe ones like pure luck can be aided with psychic talent. I'm sure a high psychic talent character will do well on roulette. Maybe on cards.

I'm not in favour of "dump" stats, as which psychic talent, intelligence, and looks are often seen (especially by non-magickers). Creating a use for psychic talent to represent a character's fortune/destiny/fate in some way might be an interesting approach to addressing that. I try to make psychic talent a little more useful to non-magickers by making a minimum value a pre-requisite for benefitting from certain magical items - powerful items require a higher psychic talent to wield. I've even considered extending this to spell effects - for example, a character with a high psychic talent score that receives a healing spell restores more Health Points than someone with a lower psychic talent score - but I haven't come up with a fair mechanism to represent that yet.

Kharille wrote:
Maybe even a looks factor, I know I tend to lose at roulette to pretty croupiers....

I allow characters to attempt to distract opponents in combat (http://www.cobwebbedforest.co.uk/librar ... euvres.pdf) to provide bonuses for other characters engaged with the same opponent. There's no reason why an equivalent manoeuvre wouldn't work during a social encounter. Con artists are charismatic for a reason and there're a wealth of studies showing that attractive defendants typically receive lighter sentences than their less beautiful counterparts for exactly the same crimes.

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