D20 Poker and other games of chance. Help! (3.5)

[Jarrick]

Hey folks. I'm currently playing a in a low level, low powered, low magic eberron game with a really nice scoundrel-ly feel. My character is a bard; a former sailer turned opportunistic gambler/cheat/con man/theif with emphasis on the gambling, especially poker.

DnD has a few cool things like the "Cheat" spell that lets you reroll when determining the success or failure in a game of chance. I was wondering if anyone out there had come up with a streamlined ruleset to simulate a game of poker in D20 terms, factoring in things like the profession:gambler, sleight of hand, bluff, and sense motive skills, the aformentioned spell, or whatever else you can think of.

We've been treating Profession:gambler like a perform skill, making it a worthwhile way of spending an evening for our low level characters while the paty pickpocket makes his daily rounds. We add circumstance bonuses to the profession check depending on circumstances and give the other npc gamblers a modified spot check to notice any wrongdoing (We've been caught, but I love a good bar fight:smallwink:), but it just seems kind of flat and we're still perfecting it.

While you're at it, any other games of chance for which you've devised rules would be welcome as well. Also is there a sourcebook for this stuff? We've considered playing actual poker, but it takes too long, and three-dragon-ante has the same problems. Oh, and if you've never played poker in-character, try it, makes for a lot of fun roleplaying.

[John Campbell]

While you're at it, any other games of chance for which you've devised rules would be welcome as well. Also is there a sourcebook for this stuff? We've considered playing actual poker, but it takes too long, and three-dragon-ante has the same problems. Oh, and if you've never played poker in-character, try it, makes for a lot of fun roleplaying.

Heh. Not quite the same thing, but in our last campaign, my rogue managed to get his hands on a magic deck of cards - not a deck of many things, but something similar but more benevolent. I happened to have a real deck of cards in my backpack, because our alternate-week game was Deadlands, so I got that out and spent the session fiddling with it - in the process of which, in full view of the entire group and without anyone catching me at it, I stacked the deck so cold it should've given me frostburn... and then, when the time came to draw from it, I pulled the top five cards off the deck... which were a royal flush in spades. The DM had to agree that if I could do it in real life, my character certainly had the Bluff and Sleight of Hand to pull it off, but then had figure out if you even could stack a magic deck of cards...

Poker in-character in our current game would be quite amusing, in no small part because my current character is an illiterate half-orc barbarian with a short fuse who's bigger and stronger than any two of the other characters put together. (Though I think that's only true when I'm raging if one of two is the dwarven fighter/cleric.)