fun gambling mechanics (pf or 3.5)

[Elvenoutrider]

Hey playgrounders, I have a player who wrote into his backstory that he is good at gambling. I wanted to work this in by throwing a gambling tournament as an event to one one of the plot mcguffins along with some other goodies. Whether they actually try to play fair or even just steal the item from the event remains to be seen but I expect gambling to come into play.

The pathfinder ultimate campaign rules leave me wanting. A simple comparison of bluff, sense motive, slight of hand, and other stats seem kind of boring to me but I also think it would be impractical to play out a card game, giving my characters bonuses and redraws as befits their skill rolls. I am trying to reduce the number of solo sessions I am running.

Has anyone seen or invented any fun mechanics for gambling?

[ComaVision]

Though I never had the opportunity, I bought Three Dragon Ante with the intent to build a couple sessions around it.

[BowStreetRunner]

I've encountered gambling rules in D&D before, but they were always essentially games of chance and/or skill for the players, not the characters. You could really just use any game you like but keep in mind:

Profession (Gambler) means the character has the skill and knowledge to make a steady income through gambling. At the very least this would mean understanding the odds in each type of game - which games were sucker bets to avoid and which ones gave favorable odds. It would likely mean knowing the rules of how to go about getting into a game or setting up a game of one's own.

Bluff vs Sense Motive is going to come into play with games like Poker where players attempt to determine based on betting habits whether another player has a good hand and just how good that hand may be. It really does nothing for games like Roulette or Craps.

Sleight of Hand vs Spot/Perception is going to come into play when someone begins cheating.

[Zaq]

What does it mean, in this particular case, for a character to be "good at gambling"? Is he just honestly lucky? Is he good at cheating? Is he good at crunching numbers in his head and calculating the best risk to take (or, alternatively, good at counting cards and so on)? Does he focus on competitive gambling (the iconic example of which is poker), and his skill at gambling comes from reading/manipulating the other players more than from doing anything with the actual numbers?

Basically, if you want this to matter, I think the best thing to do is get some more information from the player about what he intends his character to be good at, and then you can make sure that whatever mechanic you use takes that into account.

You do also have to take into consideration how much time you want this to take at the table. I've had a GM actually have the players deal out a few poker hands or a few rounds of blackjack while the characters were trying to blend into a casino (the main goal was trying to spy on someone and unobtrusively gather information), and that was fun because we knew it was coming and knew how to prepare. (The casino was run by the mob and we were trying to hinder the mob's efforts, so we didn't feel bad about cheating, and it was interesting to come up with the subtle ways a D&D party might cheat at a casino that isn't completely paranoid about magic use—my favorite was that one character had the ability to see from viewpoints other than their own square, so it was easy for them to look at other people's poker hands and bet accordingly.)

So if your group would have fun with that, you can make it happen. But if the group as a whole doesn't really care about casino-style games and wants to focus on D&D, you'll want to avoid spending half of your session on poker, so you might boil it down to a handful of rolls, or you might just see if the player's clever scheme is enough to succeed—after all, a skilled cheater isn't relying on chance, so if cheating is the name of the game, you aren't going to use dice to determine the outcome of the game so much as just call for some skill rolls (if necessary) to determine the outcome of the cheat.

[StreamOfTheSky]

The Suikoden series has Chinchirorin (http://suikoden.wikia.com/wiki/Chinchirorin) which is both fairly simple and fun, and can result in dramatic swings in fortune and debt (especially if you carry over your winnings to a new wager). And appropriately enough uses 3d6. If you don't want to use an actual bowl or the like but still want to simulate the chance of going out of bounds with the dice, you could just add a 5% chance of it or something.

As for adding some sort of benefit for skill investment or the like...not sure. The bard spells Improvisation and (in some ways) Cheat offer a chance to improve rolls. You could let ranks in gambling give some dice rerolls, like the Luck feats.
For a card game like blackjack or poker, maybe a successful gambling check result equates to counting cards (but it's D&D, so it works far more effectively than in real life, of course) that lets you determine what the dealer's full hand is. DC would start high and get easier as the remaining deck shrunk.