"Christmas roll" Certificate

[Whimsical]

Last year, I gave my players a Christmas roll. I took the idea that my DM had used in the past of giving each player a re-roll opportunity in his game each Christmas and transformed it into something geekier. I gave one of the following certificates to each of my players in my D&D game this last Christmas.

[highlight]“Christmas roll” certificate[/highlight]​

Whenever you are playing in Frank Steven Gimenez’s Dungeons & Dragons game, you may exchange this certificate for the privilege of editing the current adventure scene in one of the following manner:

• After you have rolled to determine success or failure with a d20 or percentiles, you may replace the resulting die roll with the die number of your choice.
• If your character is killed, you may instead chose to have your character be “mostly dead”, with her hit points equal to one minus your character’s Constitution score and stabilized
• Whatever legendary feat of coolness you are able to persuade the DM to allow.

This certificate is transferable. No expiration date. Not useable with RPGA games.

"hit points equal to one minus your character's Constitution score" in my game works like "HP: -9" in a regular D&D game.

But before I print these out again, I'm checking to see if these certificates could be better. So, if you see how this certificate could be cooler, please tell me.

Also, do you or any of your GMs do anything like this in the games you are in?

 

[Angel Tarragon]

Use certificate to automatically confirm crit?

 

[Wystan]

Wow, that third option is slightly better than the other two, is that a Bonus feat or just talk me into it when you actually get a feat?

How about the following:

“Christmas roll” certificate​

Whenever you are playing in Frank Steven Gimenez’s Dungeons & Dragons game, you may exchange this certificate for the privilege of editing the current adventure scene in one of the following manner:

* After you have rolled to determine success or failure with a d20 or percentiles, you may replace the resulting die roll with the die number of your choice.
* If your character is killed, you may instead chose to have your character be “mostly dead”, with their hit points equal to one minus your character’s Constitution score and stabilized.
* Regain 1d10 hitpoints of the use of one spell of your max level -1.
* Confirm the current hit as a critical and add +1 to the critical multiplier.

This certificate is transferable. No expiration date. Not useable with RPGA games.

 

[DrNilesCrane]

I hand out "re-roll cards" (good for one free re-roll, except hit points, or you can use one to add 20 to your next roll or force a bad guy to make one re-roll on something that directly affects you, like a to-hit ro confirmation of critical) for each player on their birthday, plus everyone in the groups gets one around the end of the year. I keep them simple and they work extremely well: I've been doing this for about six years and the players love them. As they are rare, they don't upset the game balance and I don't run into issues with players suddenly turning into cowards if they are out of cards (since it could be many months & many adventures before they get a new one).

EDIT: Mine are strickly non-transferable to anyone else, otherwise this could spark "Hey, if you had used your re-roll card, my character might have lived!" issues.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

Sounds like a good concept. As long as there's not to many of them floating around at any one time it shouldn't affect game balance too much either.

Olaf the Stout

 

[Aeric]

I just have Santa leave a Deck of Many Things for them under the Christmas tree.