Action Points

[Plane Sailing]

I am all for the re-roll type, as both a player and GM of such games.

The downside of the re-roll approach is that you can never get better than d20+skill mods. Adding +1d6 (or the best of 3d6 which gives a better chance of getting higher results) can take you above and beyond what you are normally capable of - and that is an important benefit of action points in my opinion.

I've played one d20modern game and I was the first one to use action points and it was so cool that everyone else started using them too. It gave a nice "edge" to the PC's

 

[Ahrimon]

The action pts you have to declare in advance and only give you +1d6 (and later +2d6, +3d6, etc) are really pretty useless to most players. I am all for the re-roll type, as both a player and GM of such games. I am also a fan of action pts that have more than one use - class abilities, save bonuses, state recoveries, etc. Mutants & Masterminds, of the games I've seen that have such a system, really does it the best in terms of scope and usage.

Action points don't have to be declared in advance of the roll. They have to be declared before the DM declares the result. You can look at your result, decide if you want to spend an action point to increase it, tell the DM your final result and then face the consequences.

Ahrimon

 

[Henry]

One piece of evidence from my game experiences: In d20 Modern, no one EVER thought about action points. There were few of them, and people hoarded them.

In Spycraft, people thought about them all the time. The difference? Crit rolls.

In Spycraft, you have to activate a threat with an action point - you choose to or not to, and there is no confirming roll. Once it became prevalent to the players, they started at looking at using Action Dice for making the villains fumble, for augmenting their rolls, for NEGATING my enforcing fumbles on them, etc. They were an active part of the game - even if they only had three in the session.