Gambler
This design document is currently completely unimplemented in Ephemeral Space.
You should not expect to find anything listed here in-game just yet.
Tracking issue:
Name: Gambler
Troupe: Gambler
Archetypes: Freak
Description: Bet on the life and death of other crewmembers. Gain a funny new lump in your head because all of your bets failed.
Objectives: Get X number of life bets correct, Y number of death bets correct, and 1-2 bets correct on player Z
No, I'm not going to bring you to medbay! I have a parlay on Pollymarket for your cause AND time of death and I'm not going into the red again! Actually-can you start breathing a little bit less? Just to speed things along.
I'm not that concrete on the actual mechanics here TBH I thought about making it something like "choose a timeframe and choose life/death" and you get a dynamic amount of GambleBux for riskier bets or something but can't be assed
Open to loosening the restriction on gambler-kills not counting for death bets, but it mostly comes down to how it playtests
Concept
The Gambler is a weird little freak who goes around betting on whether other people will live or die in certain timeframes. If their bets are incorrect, they suffer permanent brain damage as a result.
Abilities
The Gambler has an action with a 5 minute cooldown which targets a player. They can make a bet on whether that player will live for the next 15 minutes, or will die after 5 minutes, but before 20 minutes. Once a bet is created, it can't be cancelled and a new bet can't be placed on the same player. If the player dies, the Gambler bet for them to die, and the Gambler counted as killing them, the bet fails. If the Gambler fails a bet, they receive some permanent brain damage.
Gameplay
The Gambler is a passive-active mask that mostly functions as an onlooker of weird situations, only getting involved when their bets are at risk. This makes their motivations appear quite strange to onlookers, and most people would avoid trying to trust an obvious Gambler.
Though they can't kill people to satisfy their death bets (a bit too cheaty), they may look the other way in many situations, or actively stalk targets to help ensure they live--perhaps appearing like a traitor stalking a kill target.
A Gambler's success is mostly luck, but also plenty of strange skill expression: making educated guesses as to who will try to keep themselves alive versus who has a death wish, trailing players to help keep them alive, or barging into medbay to bet that their triage patients will die eventually, then stealing all the meds.
The Gambler's unique death bet condition--that the death must occur after 5 minutes but before 20 minutes--avoids cheesier situations where you might find someone crit and bet on their death seconds before they die. This way, it requires at least a little bit more foresight.