The Role Playing Public Radio Forums
General Category => RPGs => : beej October 26, 2011, 10:37:37 PM
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How do you handle gambling in Wild Talents? Assuming someone doesn't have it for a skill, what do you do use?
Lie for bluff? Mind for card counting? Coordination to swipe/switch cards? I'm just stabbing in the dark here. Any suggustions would be very helpful.
Mahalo
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Technopathy can rewire electronic gambling machines and cheat that way, hypercharm can bluff their way out of anything with Lie, illusion powers/powerful psychics can make you think that someone's got a full house, Mindreaders can see what the man across from them is holding... Yeah, there are a few ways to do it.
Couple others off the top of my head would be speedsters swapping cards faster than you can see, someone who is telekinetic or has a strange noodly appendage (Londo in Babylon 5) can hold a hidden card somewhere no one will find it, or a hypermind might count cards to verify exact probabilities of the current hand.
We need a main Wild Talents thread, I think. ;D
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None of those are ways to "handle gambling". Your asking about ways to cheat, which is something PCs don't need advise to figure out.
For an actual gambling roll if the player doesn't have the gambling skill I'd suggest a roll using Sense+Charm.
Height Vs Width depends on the game. With something like poker or blackjack it's quality over speed, but with dominos (people gamble on all sorts of things) where the objective is to be the first one done then width is more important.
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Maybe it's the players I've gamed with, but I'm embarrassed to say that I literally could not conceive of a situation involving gambling in-game that the players weren't entirely larcenous. Point to you, I suppose.
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I just felt like pointing it out.
I can count on one hand the number of times my players have actually gambled "fairly". Everyone wants to set things up in their own favor.