Dice Poker

I play a fair few CRPGs. Given how little gaming I got in my time at uni, it was a way of plugging the gap.

One thing that's always bothered me about CRPGS (yes Bioware, I'm talking about you) is the paucity of decent in-game gambling.

Take, say, Bioware for example. Roam the Old Republic playing Pazaak! Or, as I call it, Pontoon - a game I stopped playing after about age 11 because it wasn't very good.

Then Mass Effect came along with its much better gameplay. Play Quasar, while roaming the galaxy! A game suspiciously like...Pontoon.

Meh.

I recently completed The Witcher (on only my second playthrough. What a game...but back to the point).

In The Witcher, you play a game called Dice Poker. You and your opponent have 5D6 each and try to score rolls similar to card poker - multiples of the same number, straights (1-5 or 2-6).

It's really simple, but it's also addictive. I'd actually boot up the game just to play dice poker.

And it wasn't !"£$%^&* pontoon!

As such, I think that I'd introduce this game into the Fading Suns universe. After all, it's simple to play, easy to play anywhere with a flat surface and is pretty damn fast.

Here are the rules on The Witcher Wiki. Enjoy.

Couple of LARP thoughts

A couple of thoughts:

FS needs a 'pulling rank' mechanic. There is one in the contracts subsystem, but it would be nice to see something more general to allow high-ranking characters to use their rank - for persuasion or coersion, as they will.

The character system is too complicated. Blessings and Curses need to go - I'm thinking of either a limited amount of bennefits/negatives to stats at chargen, or keyword-based traits, much like the system in the Vampire MET rules.