Do you guys ever incorporate other games into your tabletop sessions?

Five-card draw is essentially a game of luck. There's very little you can do to influence the outcome of the game because you have no information besides past knowledge of how the players play, which is obviously open to manipulation by those players. If I have Ace high, there's a decent chance I actually have the best hand in a 6-player game, but I have no fucking idea what anybody else has. So I'm basically guessing blindly on a feeling that my hand might be the best.

In games like Hold 'em, there's some degree of shared information. If I have a flush with an ace in it, I can know that I have the best possible hand on the board, and play accordingly. Meanwhile, if the cards on the table are shitty (like a 2, 5, 7, 9, and jack, all of different suits) I might want to play with shitty pocket pairs or even just a decently high card, depending on what happened pre-flop. I can then use my knowledge of the other players, in conjunction with the knowledge of the board, to make decisions.

If you look at pro gamblers before and after Hold'em there's a pretty stark difference. There weren't nearly as many people able to make their living off gambling before the game got as popular as it did, because most games people played for money were purely chance. Then Hold'em arrives and suddenly skilled players are able to win on a semi-consistent basis.

Now, the average Hold'em pro is going to bust out of maybe 85% of tournaments, but they can still give themselves a 15% edge, which is way higher than random chance.

That's really interesting, actually. I've always wondered why Texas Hold'em dominates poker games, while there are ones with much simpler rules like five-card draw.

I think one would only want to play a short ' minigame ' (15 mins or less) unless your party were up for longer games.

Some games that might work:
>Card games
>Small chess-type games like minishogi
>Go / weiqi on a small board
>Dominoes
>A tafl game
>Connect 5 or connect 6 played on a flat grid board with Go stones to make it seem more serious

We tried this once and it was fun but one of our group actually plays quite a bit of online poker and he kinda swept the floor with us. I like the idea of rolling for an extra card that could work.

>and I'm considering giving them the opportunity to play a game of Texas Hold 'Em to try and get some cash. Would that be too jarring?

I dunno, frankly Texas Hold 'Em is a pretty deeply engaging game. I love both poker and D&D but I have to admit as a player I probably would find it a little jarring to make the mental switch from D&D to poker, then back from poker to D&D once the game was over.

Is the party going to play against each other? With the DM as one single NPC that's playing with them for some reason? Or are you going to play as multiple NPCs and have to deal with keeping several hands straight? Do the PCs have to roll Bluff checks or will you leave that up to player skill? There are a lot of things to think about before you just drop this into a game.

One of my party was a gambler, so when he went to gamble/info gather the DM let us play the other players at the table. And we played cards.

Poker is one of the most strategic games ever(or maybe blackjack with the card counting(counting is not cheating)), you can litterally bluff your way to the pot with nothing but a 2 high

>Texas Hold 'Em

FFS, play one of the hundred other variants of Poker that AREN'T Texas Meme 'Em. Omaha, After The Queen, Two Card Guts (w/ or w/o Harvey), just not the slogfest that has replaced casual table poker. Be creative. Your players might even appreciate getting outside the ordinary.

One of the henchmen of my BBEG is a gambler who managed to survive and become a recurring antagonist since the players like him enough to let him go. His gimmick is that he creates a deal with another person and then they choose a game to play. The deal is clad in magic so that the winner will always get what they want if it's something the loser is able to provide them.

First encounter involved a game of poker. Their servitude in exchange for information on the BBEG. They won and split ways. Second encounter was a game of dice with one of the party members when they split up where the player had to kill the other members of the party if he lost.

Next encounter will probably involve a coin flip with a double sided coin.

It's fun to have more than a standard fight with your encounters.

>gaming inside the game
If they do anything other than play Basilisks & Burrows, they're doing it wrong.

I made up this bullshit gambling game on my feet, when my players went to a casino. Rules were as follows.

>DM acts as dealer
>Both dealer and player roll dice
>Whoever has the higher number wins
>However, after each 'hand' (consisting of 5 rolls) the house gets a +1 modifier to their roll
>Therefore, the game gets harder for the player as it continues
>Buy ins apply, player must pay a set amount to even get into the table, meaning they must play for a bit to break even
>Before the game a value is decided, which will be won by whoever wins the roll
>I.e after one hand (5 rolls), the house has won 2 and the player has won 3. The value was set as 50, so the dealer's total winnings (2x50) are subtracted from the player's total winnings (50x3) and thus the player is left with $50 profit.

That's the base game, but it gets interesting when you have a divination wizard in your party.

>Portent ability (roll 2 d20 at the start of the day and record the numbers rolled, and apply them to any rolls the player makes throughout the day)
>I allow the player to add these portent rolls to their gambling rolls, giving them a good advantage over the house
>Various mind-reading abilities, I count them as adding +5 to the player's roll (at the cost of 1 spell slot)

Different dealers had different skills, for example high-end casinos had bigger modifiers on their dealers' rolls, making it harder for the players to win.

On reflection, the game (or my DMing) was probably too easy, but I thought they deserved a break after their most recent quest, which involved them all nearly being eaten by lava bears. If you choose to use this game, I'd advise that you don't go as easy on them as I did, because they ended up winning about 11,000gp.

I like this. I was just trying to imagine a simple dice game with rounds and community dice a la community cards in poker.

I like the aspect of roleplay that you were able to incorporate especially. You get the "house always wins" effect.

bump for gud bread

>I made up this bullshit gambling game on my feet,

I did something similar once. It turned out the improvised game had a lot of nonsense and contradictory rules because a wizard cursed the entire town to get hyped over card game that all of them played differently.

Wizards are a good excuse for anything these days.

Great idea!

Mixes things up and offers a different challenge. Also great for immersion. But...

Do you want to just play a few hands? A poker tournament with sensible stakes takes hours. Maybe learn Blackjack instead?

I have been thinking about integrating minigames into an RPG for a little while. Things I am considering are
>A Dread tower for showdowns
>Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes for bomb defusal
>One of those drinking games where you have to slap a spot on the table fast for initiative
>A chase mechanic, not sure yet how, but something that models relative distance instead of the path and uses events on the path as challenges
>An auction mechanic for face offs, like in Dogs in the Vineyard
>A guess the flavor of Jelly Bean mechanic for temporary powers (in a kid supers game)

My only suggestion is make sure its cool with everyone before you start playing. You don't want one player to feel bored out of his mind if the rest of the party decides to play poker for an hour or two and he wants to roleplay or something.

A friend of mine who plays a lot of online poker once came to my poker night. He had to rebuy in after half an hour. He played for long averages and bet way too much. An hour later he was out again and left in a huff.

I remember who I mentioned I did this once on Veeky Forums and Veeky Forums got super mad.

I played E-card, a game used for the finale of season 1 of Kaiji.

Cee-lo best impromptu RPG gambling. All you need is 3d6.

E-card is so fucking fun, holy shit. A friend and I decided to try it after watching the anime together, and it was just a blast. Each decision was agonizing.

How do you play?

There's tons of variations. I prefer the one Suikoden used, combined with a touch of the traditional for more than one player.

>NPC is bank, players are trying to beat the bank
>each participant gets a chance to throw three dice in a cup / bowl / box lid to generate a scoring roll, up to three times
>bank rolls first
>rolling a pair plus one off-die gives a score of the face value of the off-die
>higher scoring pairs beat lower
>rolling three of a kind beats all pairs
>higher three of a kind rolls beat lower
>1-2-3 is an automatic loss
>4-5-6 is an automatic win
>rolling outside the set area (cup, bowl, box lid, whatever) is an automatic loss
>any other roll is no score

>higher scoring pairs beat lower

And by this, I mean that the face value of the scoring die (the singleton that doesn't match the pair) is higher. Thusly, 2-2-6 beats 6-6-1. Also, as soon as you generate a scoring roll, you're done. No trying to reroll for a higher value.

You said a lot of words there

Rolled 1, 2, 3, 6, 3, 5, 2, 6, 6 = 34 (9d6)

I'll run you through. Simulating 3 sets of dice rolls.

Rolled 5, 4, 6, 2, 3, 5, 3, 2, 3 = 33 (9d6)

>Rolled 1, 2, 3

See that first set I rolled? 1-2-3, so I auto-lose.

That third set
>2, 6, 6
Would have a theoretical value of 2, had I not already failed miserably.

AGAIN!

>3, 2, 3
Okay, it took me to my third set, but I got a 2. Now it's your turn -- your target to beat is 2.
>dice+9d6

Rolled 3, 4, 4, 1, 4, 5, 5, 3, 4 = 33 (9d6)

Rolling my dude

>Rolled 3, 4, 4

You rolled a 3! You beat me. I pay your wager. The next player would now take a shot, or in the case of GM/NPC -vs- 1 player, we start over.