Basic Info:
Player: GreenWolf
Position: Card Sharp/Gambler
Demeanor: Trick is friendly and outgoing, to such an extent that it can become overbearing at times. He talks loud, he talks a lot, and he talks fast.
Nature: Trick's flippant attitude is a mask designed to conceal his true nature. He is crafty, cunning, and calculating. If given the opportunity to get ahead by cheating, Trick will do so without hesitation. Not quite a pathological liar, but pretty darn close.
Description: Trick is about 5'8" and 170 lbs. He has dark eyes and brown hair. Although he is clean-shaven, he always looks like he last shaved the day before. He usually wears a cheap collared shirt, black slacks, and a fedora.
Stats:
Health
- Physical Health: 7
- Mental Health: 7
Attributes
- Physical Defense: 4
- Mental Defense: 4
- Perception: 5
- Agility: 5
- Strength: 2
Skills
- Persuasion: 4
- Bluff: 4
- Melee: 4
- Sneak: 4
Specialties
- Sleight of Hand: 3. Trick doesn't play fair, and will use any and every method available to him to stack the deck in his favor. This had made him adept at sneaking things right under the noses of adversaries. Grants a bonus to Sneak when trying to move or hide small objects without being noticed. (For example, hiding a knife up his sleeve.)
- Calling Your Bluff: 2. Trick has played enough poker to recognize when someone's lying. Grants a bonus to Perception when trying to detect someone bluffing.
- Poker Face: 2. Trick has mastered the art of not giving anything away by his facial expressions. Grants a bonus to Bluff when talking to an individual (not groups) face-to-face.
- Card Sharp: 3. Surprisingly, people don't like it when you cheat. Sometimes, they can even get violent about it. Trick thinks the best response to this is to carry a knife, and be fast with it. Grants a bonus to his first Melee attack with his knife during combat.
- Side Shuffle: 2. Cards and combat are very similar: they both involve thinking one step ahead. Often, the one leads to the other. Knowing when that will happen is something Trick is well-practiced at. Grants a bonus to Agility when dodging an opponent's first attack that could have been reasonably expected to occur.
Gear:
- A pack of cards
- A knife
- A Zippo lighter
- A pack of cigarettes
Equipment:
Possessions:
- Various books on gambling, cheating, and bluffing
- A photograph of himself inside the Pioneer Club (Dated 1954)
Personal History:
Born August 5, 1930, in a small town in rural Pennsylvania, Jackson Trick was destined for a life of mediocrity. A farmer's son, he was never expected to amount to anything more than that. But from a young age Trick enjoyed betting. He'd bet on anything — the weather tomorrow, the results of schoolyard games — anything that had an unknown outcome.
As he got older, he turned to card playing. He started out small, playing no- or low-stakes games against friends and relatives. But as he honed his skills he began raising the stakes, moving onto to semi-professional games throughout Pennsylvania. It was here that he began to hone his skills as a card sharp in addition to his skills as a card player. He got caught multiple times, but as time went on he got better and better at avoiding detection. By the time he was 21, he claimed he could outplay and outfox any man in Pennsylvania. (It wasn't true, of course, but it was pretty close.)
So he went to Vegas.
In Las Vegas, Trick found that while his skills might have placed him amongst the best back home, in Vegas, he was an amateur again. He spent the next several years clawing his way up the Vegas totem pole, all the while making money, losing it again and then some, but always managing to do a little better than break even. Eventually, he settled into a spot in the middle of the pecking order.
When he was 23, his luck changed for the better. Literally. During an anonymous game of poker in one of Vegas' many poorly-lit backrooms, Trick found himself to be amongst the last two players at the final table. The two of them both went all-in, and his opponent, seeking to raise the stakes even more, bet a poker chip that he claimed made its owner luckier.
Trick, of course, cheated, and claimed the poker chip for himself with a minimal amount of violence. And sure enough, it did make him luckier. He started winning more and more games, sometimes in the most improbable circumstances. He began climbing to the top again, propelled by a combination of his anomalous luck and his own skills.
Trick's luck had to run out at some point though. He won too many games that he should by all rights have lost, and eventually he upset the crime bosses that ran the city. If anyone was going to rig games in Vegas, it was going to be them. Which meant that Trick had to go.
Trick managed to escape Vegas with his life, but only just barely. He didn't get far though before he was found by Foundation agents sent to investigate his improbable winning streak. Through a mixture of bluffing, lying, and sheer (possibly anomalous) luck, Trick managed to convince the Foundation into hiring him. They still confiscated the anomalously lucky poker chip though.
Languages
- English
- Italian
Miscellaneous:
- Trick is ambidextrous.
- May also have possibly lost his soul to the devil in a card game.
XP: 9
| Name of Source/Purchase | XP Change | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Mother Knows Best | +2 | ? |
| The Sound of Pages Turning | +4 | In the past |
| Grey Dawn | +3 | Declined |