On Action Points

At HelgaCon last weekend, probably everyone got sick (or at least bemused) by my grousing about "Action Points" (a.ka. Fate, Fortune, Hero, or Benefit points, et. al.) by the end of the weekend. The first time I saw a mechanic like this was in the 1980's with TSR's Top Secret game (in the form of "Luck Points"); I knew calamity was near when they slid into 3E D&D's Unearthed Arcana product. One problem with Action Points is that they're a purely abstract game mechanic, disconnected from any specific in-game activity, and that always rubs me the wrong way. When a player says "I spend an Action Point", it's an intrinsically out-of-character statement (again, there's no specific, concrete reality that the PC is manipulating with that choice). When you tell the story afterwards, what can you say about the use of an Action Point? There's simply no in-game reality attached to it. They are an attempt (see below) at a narrative story-telling device, not really a game-playing device (and longer than these games have existed, I've been in the philosophical camp that stories and games are opposite activities). Paradoxically, the story-telling device becomes invisible in the story that you try to tell later on. Related to this is that Action Points always have a sizable list of effects that you can trigger with them. Partly because they are purely abstract, the list is hard to remember, and completely opaque to a new player. It causes a lot of book-referencing to recall what abstract effects Action Points can have. This abstraction requires players to memorize complicated, legalistic formulae to make use of them. For example, you can't just say "I attack twice" in d20; you have to say "I use Extra Effort; Category Surge: Extra Standard Action; and use an Action Point to offset the resulting Fatigue". (Ick.) Similarly, we had a game this weekend where, despite everyone's best attempts, we simply couldn't track down the correct ruling for death-avoiding point-usage until days after the game. But more important than any of that is that Action Points don't meet the goal that they're intended to. The sales-pitch for Action Points is always "Action Points provide extra effort to allow truly heroic, breathtaking derring-do in the climax to a story". Well, first of all, as a player, I can never tell exactly where the climax is while I'm playing (again, that's a story-thing, not a game-thing; it's only recognizable afterwards, once the game is finished). Secondly, that's not how I ever witness action points being used -- rather, they're always used as a defensive risk-limitation device. They don't turn average results into great ones; they're really used to turn dramatic failures into regular-plain-average-results, either in the form of (a) avoiding a killing shot by a villain, or (b) avoiding an embarassing failed skill roll for something that should be simple. In actual play, a huge failure is more painful than any great result is helpful, and therefore, Action Points become a normalizing device that irons out dramatic moments into more plain-average moments. There's actually fewer points of intense interest to tell about a game with Action Points than without them (primarily, fewer dramatic setbacks for the players, and fewer amazing feats by the villains). Let me say this: I'm pretty fond of the 1980's Marvel Super Heroes game by TSR, and it had a vaguely similar mechanic called "Karma Points" that never bothered me so much. Let's see if I can explain why: First, you had a pool of dozens or hundreds of points. Second, use of Karma for an action had to be declared before any dice were rolled for the action (unlike modern games). Third, the use of Karma made for an automatic success; you just had to spend as many points as required to make up the difference for success (subject to running out of points). Fourth, the mechanic for using them defensively was so massively sub-optimal that you'd never see it in play (again, unlike modern games). So the end result is that they would in fact get used proactively for big stunts that you really did have to succeed at in advance. (And they didn't requre temporal retconning a la you miss/now you hit, nor could you spend a point and still fail anyway). That said, I still wouldn't want the mechanic in my pulpy fantasy adventures. There's some other problems with Action Points, that observant friends pointed out this weekend, that I wouldn't have identified. One would be using Action Points as a cushioning device for otherwise lazy, unbalanced game mechanics. A second would be the ridiculous back-and-forth when players can spend Action Points, and villains can cancel them with their own Action Points, to absolutely no consequence on the game itself (but plenty of out-of-character mechanical thrashing along the way). Those are all good points. But Action Points are most decidely not.