Action point system ??

Hi all, I was playing Fallout 2 today and I fell in love with the action point system. I think it is a much better system than the “one move action, one standard action, some free actions…” system in D20.

Has anyone really looked at this, I am excited but I don’t want to reinvent the wheel here.

Thanks !

-Tatsu

rolemaster did something like this. They called them iniative points and were linked to %action. It kind of went like this: Combat starts, a round is made up of x initiative points (call it 20) which represent how long an action takes. Every action has a %cost (percentage representing an amount of effort-in D&D a full attack would be like a 95% action-with 5% left over for a 5ft step). Its been a long time and I don't have my books in front of me (or even available-damn moving...). Anyhow every action had a % and IP cost and when you spent 100% you were done for the round. Rounds-new round new 100%.

for D&D you could simply do away with the IP cost and go with straight % or action points which ever you prefer. A round is made up of 100 action points. A full attack is worth 95 points. Partial action is worth 45. Every square of movement is worth 1 action point or 2. It would take some work to balance the number but in the end you would have a system where activating a magic item might only be 20 action points, drinking a potion in less. I would work readied actions a reserving a number of action points you could use during someone elses turn. You could structure counterspelling and/or a parry action to work this way.

I once made up an action point system for Shadowrun, which was pretty cool, but horribly complicated and it was a burden to track multiple NPCs.

An action point system for D&D would be pretty simple to do, since the actions are already defined in a similar way (just not as detailed).

The biggest problem - the one I had faced above - comes, when you actually want to make it different from the standard system, in other words, if you want to split actions so that it results in a common flow, where everyone acts, not the current one person acts, then second person acts, then third person acts, etc.

This is what I had done, based on the Champions initiative, where the combat round is split into several smaller segments and you get only fractional actions (measured in action points) during each segment.

One option to do this would be to get rid of rounds completely (you can count time for spells and such in another way) and simply start the combat at zero, then count up in action points spent as actions are being done.

For example, an attack costs 50 action points (but for ease of play the points are spend after resolving the attack), moving 1/10th of your base move costs 5 action points, etc. Now you simply add up your individually spent action points and have an "initiative count" move up from zero. Whenever the count comes to your individual current total, you can act.

Initiative can be handled with a delay, so that you start the round not at zero, but at some other total.

Well, there you have something to work with!

Bye
Thanee

Thanee said:

I once made up an action point system for Shadowrun, which was pretty cool, but horribly complicated and it was a burden to track multiple NPCs.

Click to expand...

Same here. It was nice for Shadowrun, as it got more and more to modeling actual events as they flowed (you move, others move, you get to move again) instead of turn-based.

Drawbacks: you have to spend time assigning values to how long something takes to perform, then start calculating how much each person has to spend, then keep track of how much was spent and deduct it from the remainder... ugh, with feats, skills and all of the other details in the game I wouldn't do it for shear need to keep moving. I like to finish multiple battles per session, not have a single battle with multiple peons last hours.

Jack's system is the most like what I want.
Idealy, everyone would get some number of saction points and different actions would cost different amounts. Then, if you are, saw, a high level fighter, you can make a an attack in fewer points than other people. Or some such.

I'm still not 100% sure how this would work, I'm still thinking. Please, any more ideas of how to frame this out?

-Tatsu

The point of an AP system is not to model the existing system with different names, but to mainly be able to split up full-round actions into small bits, which could then be put together differently, like moving a bit, then attacking twice instead of the full 3 or 4 attacks you could make.

You basically just have to pick a number to represent one round (like 100 AP, higher numbers probably work better here, with 5 or 10 you just don't have too much leeway), then cost actions accordingly.

One problem arises, whether you want to make a difference to a single attack or one attack from a full attack action. Usually the cost for the latter should be significantly lower than the cost for the first, but if you allow to freely mix actions, the latter becomes clearly more powerful, as it basically is the same for a lower cost then.

Of course, you could just drop standard action attacks and simply cost single attacks depending on BAB.

Getting rid of rounds (and counting time in instances of 100 AP, if that's the number chosen) gives even more freedom, as the concept of rounds is not necessary anymore, if you move to such a system.

Bye
Thanee