Action!
Action Points are one of the better additions to fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons. We’ve seen their like in many other roleplaying games, to be sure — I’d venture that they’re a part of more modern RPGs than not. This isn’t exactly innovation on D&D’s part. Officially including them is a first for D&D, though, and a welcome one. [Edit: Apparently it isn't, as they were included in a 3.5e supplement. This is still the first time they're part of the core system, though.] They serve their purpose — rewarding the party for pushing on in the adventure, and making up to some extent for the loss of expended resources. Better yet, they can have a dramatic effect on a combat.
But what if they could be more dramatic still? Chatty DM has put forth that question, and the various commenters have answered it by providing a wealth of ideas as to how else action points might be used. I’ve developed an addition to the system myself, which I present in more detail here.
First, action points in my game can still be used for any of their official purposes. They can grant an additional action, and they might have different effects based upon the character’s paragon path.
However, they can also be used in order to interact directly with the scene, by altering the environment in some way. Using an action point in this way grants the player narrative control, allowing him to direct the flow of the scene. He has fairly broad discretion, in exchange for giving up the extra action and other possible bonuses to which he’d normally be entitled, but there are a few limitations.
First, the narrative action must be reasonable within the setting. A player might spend an action point to declare that he’s damaging a support column in order to collapse a portion of an abandoned mine’s ceiling, or that the guard he’s trying to use Diplomacy on is from the same village he grew up in, which gives him a bonus. However, he can’t cause a meteor to fall out of the sky and hit someone (unless maybe there’s a meteor shower going on at the moment…), or that the guard isn’t actually there. The narrative has to work with the environment as it exists.
He might be able to add elements, if they’d make sense. If the character in the mine needed a weapon, he might declare that he finds a pickaxe that’s luckily resisted the ravages of age. He’d have to have a good rationale if he wanted to find a halberd there, though. On the other hand, if he’s standing in the evil lord’s castle, a halberd might be reasonable to come by, while a pick would need more justification.
The second major limitation is that the narrative action can’t directly hurt a creature. A player can collapse a ceiling, but he can’t declare that the orc standing beneath it dies instantly. (The orc will probably take some damage, unless it somehow evades the falling stone, but that’s not part of the player’s narration — it’s simply a consequence of the narrated action, which is the collapsing ceiling.) He also can’t cause an NPC, even a frail old man, to suffer a sudden heart attack. He could cause a cliff to crumble, but he can’t dictate that the monster standing near the edge falls off — it might, but it also might manage to leap to safety.
Finally, the third limitation is that the narrative action can’t guarantee a die roll. The player cannot narrate a hit. He can create circumstances allowing him to make a skill check, but he can’t narrate that the check succeeds. He can’t cause the enemy to automatically miss or to fail a saving throw.
As a GM, I’d use the rules on page 42 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide to determine a guideline for the effects — and I’d be generous in my interpretation, scaling the possible effects up a few levels or adding appropriate conditions, because an action point is a limited and valuable resource. A mine collapse at level 5 that’s a regular improvised action might cause 3d10+4; with an action point, I might increase that to 4d10+5 (the 10th-level equivalent). This isn’t too much, because the character might have easily used that action point to attack with two powers for 4[W] plus bonuses. Depending on the quality and creativity of the narration, I’d hand out further bonuses at my discretion. A bonus to an attack roll is a fairly likely way of doing so, because a cool idea backed by an action point should have a good chance of succeeding.
A system such as this encourages the players to come up with creative ideas for using their action points in combat, rather than simply saving them until they need to “nova” by dropping two big powers against a threat. It also leads to some interesting uses of action points outside of combat.
The downside is, it calls for much more GM flexibility. It’s fairly easy to use action points to create distractions and otherwise gain a fairly good chance of circumventing some encounters, so it’d be a good idea to have some alternatives in mind for any given encounter. It also makes it much easier for the players to take an approach you’d never expected — and players are prone enough to doing that already.
Even if you don’t want to open things up quite this much, the comments on Chatty’s post offer a few other alternatives for expanding the role of action points in your campaign.
Related posts:
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- Narration in Combat
- Dramatic Timing: The Action Cache
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Categories: 4e d&d |
“Officially including them is a first for D&D, though, and a welcome one.”
While I think it’s a great addition, I have to say even from the offical materials available, this has been introduced in a (not 100% similiar) way back with Wizards official material Unearthed Arcana (check page 122 if you got a copy). If I remember it correctly the idea itself has been around in non-core material before as well.
The approach (for the 3.5 system) was adding a smaller die (1d6-3d6) to make sure you got a better chance for a higher outcome, or ignore the miss chance with blind figthing for one round or … Monte did an outstanding job on the book and I hope you give it credit here :). [for me it is and was the best approach to action points so far]
TheLemming’s last blog post: Temptations of Evil - Part Two: Evil in Group(s)
I never picked that one up. But I was under the impression that Unearthed Arcana was a book of optional rules. (Well, all rules are optional. Read “rules that aren’t necessarily expected to be part of a regular D&D game,” I suppose.)
If 3.5 did incorporate action points into its official system, I stand corrected.
I do seem to recall something similar in 2e, although I’m not sure whether that was from an optional sourcebook or from our group’s house rules.
Hey Scott,
they were optional as everything in Unearthed Arcana - but still official (Wizards) material - still the options were a lot more and I think the system is more in the fluff direction than the current one - which is less fluff.
TheLemming’s last blog post: Temptations of Evil - Part Two: Evil in Group(s)
Sorry edit function is broken here at work… *cough*
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/actionPoints.htm - I remembered Unearthed Arcana was incorporated into the d20srd - and even the whole actionpoints section can be found there.
TheLemming’s last blog post: Temptations of Evil - Part Two: Evil in Group(s)
I like this implementation, though I admit that I’m not sure I’d use action points as the driver. Though, if I’m playing D&D (rather than Spirit of the Century or Adventure, which have this idea built in) I can’t think of a better substitution and suspect it’d grow into a whole subsystem if I let it.
Sounds like it’s time to playtest it.
@Lemming: Thanks for the correction, then. I might need to track down a copy of that, now that the 3.5 books are going cheap.
@ScottM: Someone in Chatty’s thread had proposed a parallel system of “Style Points” — I like to keep the bookkeeping simple though. There was also a mention of another game in which the GM could force the player to explain an action in more detail by handing out an action point, which is an option I’m considering taking up.
You can check the rules out at http://d20srd.org - most of the unearthed arcana went into the SRD - and the whole action points section is online there!
TheLemming’s last blog post: Temptations of Evil - Part Two: Evil in Group(s)
I’m submitting this post to OPEN GAME TABLE for consideration because… its awesome!
There’s been some concern over at the RPG Bloggers google group that the author’s work is being submitted without their consent - so I just want to clarify: Nothing will be published in Open Game Table unless the author releases the material for inclusion in the Anthology. This post was simply submitted for consideration; which is the first step towards identifying the best in RPG blogging. Let me know if you have any questions over at the The Core Mechanic or in the OPEN GAME TABLE google group. I hope that this clears up any confusion you may have.
@Jonathan: Thanks… and no problem. I would’ve assumed as much. You’ve always struck me as a pretty conscientious sort.