Subsurface Scattering Without Rays?
There are lots of ways to fake SSS with greater or lesser fidelity. A few recent-ish methods:


Screen-space blurring of object lighting (described in detail here)





Using “interior” ambient-occlusion maps generated from a normal-flipped version of the geometry to approximate local thickness, providing an easy way to fake light transmission (more information here, with an addendum here)




There’s also the assortment of techniques in the GPU Gems article PaulHK linked to. One thing I’d add is about the light-falloff-texture approach mentioned at the beginning of it, which Valve used for a couple of interesting effects in Source games in addition to fake SSS—see their $lightwarptexture documentation for some information about that.