Knife Game

[Captain Kablam]

Bishop, Five Finger Fillet, call it what you will, I want it.

I'm running a campaign where the players are in a goblin city of sorts, and gambling came to mind. However, I looked at some of the games for gambling, and none of them had the particularly vicious streak I was looking for. I mean come on, goblins.

Anyways, I have a few ideas, but I want to see if the community had any rules to translate this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knife_game) into dice rolls. As well as any suggestions on how bets should go.

[Greenish]

You could just use series of attack rolls (maybe with compulsory auto-finesse), with misses… hitting. Add penalties for trying to do it really fast and/or with a more impressive pattern.

On the other hand (which still has fingers), that's basically the stuff Sleight of Hand is for (especially Sleight of Hand as a Perform skill). Again, set DC based on the speed and the pattern, and add damage to fails.

[Know(Nothing)]

Straight Sleight of Hand rolls?

Or set a DC based on the complexity of the pattern. If you fail it, you hit your hand or finger, doing damage. If you fail by 5 or more, you permanently damage your hand or finger.

[Psyren]

You should also decide how healing magic will affect damaged or severed fingers. Even if regular healing doesn't work, can the PCs polymorph into a troll/hydra to remove the mutilation and change back again? Will fast healing work? Certainly powerful spells like MR/LW/W/M/H should work.

[Greenish]

Sleight of Hand (Dex; Trained Only; Armor Check Penalty)

New use: the knife game.

The point of the game is to stab the spaces between your fingers. You can only use light piercing weapons, or one-handed piercing weapons at -5 penalty. (Special: if you have more than two hands, you may attempt to use two-handed weapons at -10.)

{TABLE=head]Basic DCs
{TABLE=head]Pattern|DC
Basic|10
Medium|15
Advanced|20[/TABLE]
[/TABLE]

If you fail the roll, you take half the damage of if you'd just attacked yourself with the weapon you're using, and take -2 penalty to all checks using that hand until the damage is healed.

Action: Basic pattern is a full round action, medium pattern is two rounds, and advanced is three rounds. You may increase the DC by 5 to make the attempt one step faster (full round -> standard), making it obviously more impressive. You may attempt to speed the attempt several times, but may not perform it faster than a standard action.

You may not take 10 or take 20 with this use of the skill.

[theIrkin]

you can have them betting flat odds (or get better than even money for the local champ) matching the speed or pattern of an opponent. the first rolls and sets a DC with his sleight of hand roll. he played conservatively going as fast and complex as he knew he could. then the other person has to exceed, not just equal, the DC. continue until someone fails to exceed the previous success and they have to pay up.

[Waker]

Greenish's suggestion is probably the best one. Alternatively you could say that a participant has to make an attack roll against the table with the fingers providing Soft Cover (Modifying table AC) or a Miss Chance (Where a miss results in hitting a finger). Increasing stabbing speed is treated similarly to Flurry, granting extra attacks at the expense of accuracy.