I think gambling in D&D is a good topic for a future post. I know I’ve researched and invented many forms of gambling for my D&D games over the years. Perhaps it’s time to share that experience with the Dungeon’s Master readers.

The key to any form of gambling in D&D is to keep the games simple and remember that you got together to play and RPG and not poker (or blackjack or whatever).

@Rook
There are 17 skills, and I’ve only touched on 6 so far. More to come, I promise. I’m going to get around to all of them eventually, but if there’s a particular skill you want to see soon, let me know.

@Chase Dagger; on the subject of quick and easy card games in real game time, how about this. Each player rolls 5 or 7 d12s (which is closest to the 13 numbers and faces in a regular deck) and just use simple poker style rules with 1s as Aces. Since there are no suits, you leave out flushes, but straights would still work. Just an idea off the top of my head.

The tell a joke in combat thing got the wheels turning, and now I see generically as Bluff in Combat. If a joke makes sense; then sure why not, but I doubt all monsters have a sense of humour. Alternatively if the PCs think of something decent to lie about during a fight, I’d ask them to roll a Bluff for sure.

I like the cheating at cards idea a lot, but I would really like to see an article about card games within D&D. The games would have to be short and fairly simple to keep the pace of the actual game moving, but I’m sure it could be done.
Gambling is an exciting idea it would be interesting to see what games could be synthetically created with just dice rolls.
I’d like to see a way to incorporate the bluff skill in the games. I assume the Bluff check would get harder (in some way) each time you cheated in front of the same person.