Do you use Action Points

[Invader]

Do you use action points in your campaign or are you against them and are there any official ones you don't use for any specific reason and are there any house ruled ones that you do like to use?

[molten_dragon]

Is there a good list of suitable ways to spend action points outside of eberron? House ruled ideas are fine as well.

Yep, Unearthed arcana (and therefor the SRD) has several other ways to spend action points.

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/actionPoints.htm

[Palanan]

Oddly enough, I was on the verge of asking about action points myself, since they never seem to come up that often in discussion.

I had the impression they showed up first in one of the versions of Star Wars d20, maybe as a trial run? Never been in a game that used them, and it always seemed like One More Thing to keep track of.

.

[Invader]

Yeah I kinda like the idea but I was trying to decide if I wanted them in my campaign or not.

[kaminiwa]

My friend's campaign uses Luck Points, so I picked those up instead. 1 Luck Point = reroll any one roll (almost always a d20, but occasionally used for horrible damage, especially if it was a critical)

Her campaign rewarded 1 Luck Point per session, to a cap of 10 at any given time. The more you had, the more "lucky" you were, too - any random chance event like "Does this town sell the item I want?" would get a bonus, so it was encouraged to save them up and blow them all on the REALLY important rolls.

I personally do 5 per level, which works out to be ~1.33/session. I run a somewhat more brutal campaign, and I wanted to encourage the PCs to constantly burn expendable resources this campaign, rather than the normal stockpiling behavior I see :)



As a player, it's nice being able to "fix" those situations where my character is the master of all things Diplomacy and... oops, I rolled a "1"!



As a GM, it's utterly wonderful being able to throw save or die effects at my PCs on a regular basis. In a normal campaign, I would never dream of throwing my PCs up against a Psion that just spams Dominate, or a dungeon where every other encounter is a save-or-die effect, because... well, that way lies a lot of unfun TPKs :)

It really helps take the "edge" off of those sessions where the PCs just can't roll well to save themselves.

It makes the PCs a lot more comfortable taking epic, dramatic actions, because they can just reroll failures :)

("Jumping a chasm, you only fail on a 2 or lower, but if you fail, it's 10d6 falling damage" is something I'm used to players being terrified of, but mine will sprint towards it and leap :))



My players will also occasionally "abuse" the way the pool refreshes when they level up: If they know they're going to level this session, and have a bunch of unspent points, they have a lot of fun being awesome at minor tasks they'd otherwise never dream of wasting a luck point on.

(I actively encourage this, and usually make sure that the last session of a level has at least a minor boss for them to dump luck points on. As an added bonus, if they're completely dry, that minor boss becomes a lot scarier :))



I've found that failed saves have a lot more impact: The party Paladin spends them pretty fast, so is occasionally hit by a save-or-die with no luck points, and suddenly EVERYONE is paying a lot of attention to that die roll.

It also seems to make it more fun for the players when they do fail a save. Rolling a "1" on a save-or-die sucks. Rolling SIX failed saves in a row is just the Universe's way of saying it's time to roll a new character :)



In short: It lets me add tension to the game, while actually reducing the risk of TPKs. It makes failure more bearable for the PCs. It lets the PCs occasionally have "moments of awesome" that they'd normally never be willing to risk. It evens out those days where the dice just hate the players.

[Invader]

My friend's campaign uses Luck Points, so I picked those up instead. 1 Luck Point = reroll any one roll (almost always a d20, but occasionally used for horrible damage, especially if it was a critical)

Her campaign rewarded 1 Luck Point per session, to a cap of 10 at any given time. The more you had, the more "lucky" you were, too - any random chance event like "Does this town sell the item I want?" would get a bonus, so it was encouraged to save them up and blow them all on the REALLY important rolls.
I
I personally do 5 per level, which works out to be ~1.33/session. I run a somewhat more brutal campaign, and I wanted to encourage the PCs to constantly burn expendable resources this campaign, rather than the normal stockpiling behavior I see :)



As a player, it's nice being able to "fix" those situations where my character is the master of all things Diplomacy and... oops, I rolled a "1"!



As a GM, it's utterly wonderful being able to throw save or die effects at my PCs on a regular basis. In a normal campaign, I would never dream of throwing my PCs up against a Psion that just spams Dominate, or a dungeon where every other encounter is a save-or-die effect, because... well, that way lies a lot of unfun TPKs :)

It really helps take the "edge" off of those sessions where the PCs just can't roll well to save themselves.

It makes the PCs a lot more comfortable taking epic, dramatic actions, because they can just reroll failures :)

("Jumping a chasm, you only fail on a 2 or lower, but if you fail, it's 10d6 falling damage" is something I'm used to players being terrified of, but mine will sprint towards it and leap :))



My players will also occasionally "abuse" the way the pool refreshes when they level up: If they know they're going to level this session, and have a bunch of unspent points, they have a lot of fun being awesome at minor tasks they'd otherwise never dream of wasting a luck point on.

(I actively encourage this, and usually make sure that the last session of a level has at least a minor boss for them to dump luck points on. As an added bonus, if they're completely dry, that minor boss becomes a lot scarier :))



I've found that failed saves have a lot more impact: The party Paladin spends them pretty fast, so is occasionally hit by a save-or-die with no luck points, and suddenly EVERYONE is paying a lot of attention to that die roll.

It also seems to make it more fun for the players when they do fail a save. Rolling a "1" on a save-or-die sucks. Rolling SIX failed saves in a row is just the Universe's way of saying it's time to roll a new character :)



In short: It lets me add tension to the game, while actually reducing the risk of TPKs. It makes failure more bearable for the PCs. It lets the PCs occasionally have "moments of awesome" that they'd normally never be willing to risk. It evens out those days where the dice just hate the players.

This is an excellent point. There's a lot of fun save or suck/die spells but I generally never use them because while I'm OK with my party members occasionally dying I usually don't like to not give any way to avoid it.