Opend20: Action Points

Action Points

Action Points (AP) function as a universal pool for both in-game charge-limited powers and abilities, as well as out-game mechanical intervention on behalf on the player in order to advance the narrative or limit shortcomings due to character design and/or circumstance.

That's quite a mouthful. But AP are actually quite simple in practice. The following section explains the use of AP, and comments on how they might be utilised by different types of players/characters.

Charges

Rungkor is a Babarian-turned-Paladin following the standard OGL D20 rules. He can rage 2/day, smite evil 1/day, remove disease 1/day, turn undead 2/day, summon his mount about 1/day and cast a 0th level spell 1/day. This system is neither simple nor elegant. If recreated in OpenD20, Rungkor would have 6 different powers to represent these class abilities, and a pool of 7 AP with which to activate them. If Rungkor's player chose to, the pool could be specialised (which costs less), so that there was a pool of 4 'Barbarian Rage' AP and a pool of 10 'Holy Power' AP. It is entirely up to the player.

Purchasing specialised Action Points costs half as much. So, for every one Character Point spent on a specialised Action Point Pool (APP), you get two points in that pool. The disadvantage of this is that specialised AP cannot be used for dramatic purposes (see next section) that don't relate directly to the specialisation. For example, if Rungkor did not have an intimidate power, but wanted to simulate it using his two 'Barbarian Rage' points, that would probably be okay (if the GM says so under the given circumstances). But Rungkor could not use those points for 'dramatic editing' if his player wanted to be able to communicate with some Orcs and had not purchased the appropriate language.

Dramatic Editing

Even the very best designed characters are occasionally going to be unable to perform mechanically what the Player was intending for cinematically. There are just too many variables in roleplaying to be able to fit every contigency onto a character sheet that's at most a few pages long.

To combat this, OD20 supports 'dramatic editing'. Players can subtract from their APP to adjust in-game variables in the following ways:

• Mechanically, to add or subtract from dice rolls (the exact amount per AP spent depends on the type of roll being made)
• Mechanically, to gain temporary access to a skill or power that the character might reasonably be expected to be able to use (e.g. because the character is using wiki on their computer, they might spend AP to gain temporary access to a knowledge skill they had no ranks in) - GM arbitrates, of course.
• Cinematically, to fugde the normal 'laws' of the game, e.g. falling 20 stories and only spraining an ankle - the sort of thing that does occasionally happen in real life, but not with any regularity).
• Cinematically, to make minor alterations to the history of the character/game in order to advance the plot of for purposes of simplicity ("Luckily for me, I spend 3AP and discover she had left the gun in the draw by mistake"; "Um...I spend 1AP because I took a french class in my last semester at Uni, so I know how to say 'Look out!'")

Mechanics of Action Points

Action Points cost 10 Character Points each, or 5 Character Points for a specialised AP. All characters receive 1 AP per level.

See Also

• Disadvantages
• Panache