The Campaign Builder's Guild

"Adventure Points"

For any kind of check there is a "critical success." A critical success is a success by some superfluous number of dice. For every critical success you make, you gain one adventure point.

To use your adventure points, you must declare beforehand that you are using them and what you intend to do. You automatically succeed. The cost is a number of adventure points equal to the diference between actual successes and required successes.

To prevent hoarding, there is a maximum on adventure points equal to your luck bonus.

Escalating action, anyone?

Uh, why couldn't someone just try juping repeatedly until they maxed out on AP? Hardly seems in character or balanced.

Quote from: RaelifinUh, why couldn't someone just try juping repeatedly until they maxed out on AP? Hardly seems in character or balanced.

Good point.

Maybe just getting an adventure point a day.  Or a random number a day.

Would probably require four successes (or a number of successes one more than the number of dice most people even roll). Besides that, most people roll often enough to do something that wasting actions in the middle of combat just to get AP (which they could do by actually jumping *to* somewhere) would just be a waste.

Whoa, tripple post.
EDIT: Curse you ElDo! Curse yoooooou!

I figured that AP would last until you used them. That way after each combat you could jump over a log until you filled up.

Hmmm... limited duration, maybe? I mean jumping over a log hardly even seems check-worthy, though. More of a movement encumbrance.

Looking back on it, this doesn't work in any system where any check is automatically successful (see my number-crunching probability breakdown). Abilities might be bought on a system that starts at two each and adds three or four.

One possibility is you could use Adventure Points to add dice to your pool on any check. Or to make a normally impossible task possible (by adding enough modifiers to your roll to make it succeed on a natural 6.

I like Adventure Points (Hero Points, Luck Points) as a concept, but only so long as they don't become too dominant. They should be rare and non-hoardable somehow.

They also can work well as a mechanical implementation of some kind of magical or mystical power:
The Blessings of the Prophet be upon you! (+2 AP)
Use the Force, Luke! (spend 1 AP)

The best thing may be to have the GM hand out 1 or 2 points each session, which either have to be spent that session, or perhaps can be held up to a certain limit. One thing I'd hate as a GM is trying to monitor whether AP are being accounted for properly.

I very much like the idea of unique point-uses. It isn't one of the originally proposed magic systems, but there are always ways to work it in. And yeah... the luck score limit is meant to keep these things in check, but per-session and per-encounter duration limits couldn't hurt too bad, right?