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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 5791206" data-attributes="member: 2011">Or can we turn back the dial to 2E where it was never a rule?Why does each edition always turning the dial forward? Eventually, 9E will be a game system where the players don't even show up. They just send messages to the DM on their iHeadpiece devices that the monster never hits. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" />Ok, that's over the top, but you get the idea.An Action Point isn't a character's ability, it's a player's ability. The character doesn't know he has Action Points. For that matter, the character doesn't really know that he has Healing Surges (or at least it's a gray area).In game, I would prefer the character to use character abilities that the character knows about. Do you really want to play a game where the PC knows about his fate points and knows when to use them? You want the PC to know that he is dead, so he'd better use a fate point to negate it?Effectively, mine is a style of roleplaying where the PC makes decisions based off the scenario in game a lot more often and there are very few rules where the player makes a decision out of character and outside the knowledge of the PC and outside the abilities of the PC per se.Action points are not in the hands of the PC. They are Monopoly rules in the hands of the players. There should be ZERO ways for players to affect the outcome of the game outside of the abilities of the PCs. IMO. YMMV and obviously will. There should be no "player abilities", just "PC abilities". No Deus Ex Machina rules, especially ones controlled by the players.And the other aspect of Fate Points that make them even more egregious in this game space is that they are auto-win (at least from how I have always heard them described). Unlike Immediate Interrupts, they will always occur. Shield doesn't always occur. It won't stop a 20. Even a Teleport immediate interrupt might not always work if the PCs are somewhere where Teleports don't work, or where the monsters can interrupt a teleport or change the location of the teleport.When abilities are in character, they can be disrupted by the environment or the abilities of the enemies. When abilities are meta-rules out of character controlled by the players, even the DM (typically) cannot disallow them. They just happen. The game has now changed. Erase what just happened off of your character sheet because some game designer thought it was a good idea to spoon feed the players because a string of bad dice rolls might happen.And yes AA, that's exactly what player instead of character abilities in a game do. Many game systems don't have these artificial crutches and they work just fine. D&D didn't have them for 2.5 decades and worked just fine and sold many millions of copies and even the 8 years of 3E/3.5 for the most part only had its version of Action Points (which in many ways, are not as prone to abuse as 4E action points). It's only in the last 3 years that those non-PC ability game elements crept heavily into 4E. I'd prefer if the dial wasn't turned any further in that direction and was even cranked back a bit. You don't.</blockquote>

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