I dislike the action debt approach for a few reasons, none of which involve it feeling like you're being penalized for anything:FatR wrote:Personally, I'd still prefer to keep the "action debt" system, but I wonder what the Den thinks about this.
1) An immediate this round eating your swift next round is really the only case where something like that happens--readying takes up your standard action before your out-of-turn action rather than after, an AoO is free and getting more with Combat Reflexes doesn't require spending any extra actions before or afterwards, extra attacks from TWF or haste or the like don't ever cost you more actions, and so forth--and the only similar case is the celerity line where you're explicitly borrowing your own future time via magic.
2) Immediates taking up your swift encourages characters to focus on either immediate-action save-yourself abilities or swift-action boost-yourself abilities, and those who take a mix of both are punished somewhat by the inability to use them in conjunction. It's kind of like how most extra attack abilities only work with full attacks and you can't move and full attack on the same turn, so fighters picking up standard-action abilities like a ToB strike maneuver or Awesome Blow or warblades picking up extra-attack-on-full-attack abilities is kinda pointless.
3) The extra restrictiveness of immediate actions causes people to try to write around them to avoid stepping on swift actions. Take snake's swiftness:
There's no reason that the entire spell description couldn't just be "The subject can make a melee or ranged attack as an immediate action" because avoiding the old "quickened spells are free actions you can only take once per round" circumlocution was the whole point of codifying swift and immediate actions, except that the spell shows up in a book introducing a ton of new swift-action spells so making it incompatible with them would be counterproductive.The subject can immediately make one melee or ranged attack. Taking this action doesn’t affect the subject’s normal place in the initiative order. This is a single attack and follows the standard rules for attacking.
This spell does not allow the subject to make more than one additional attack in a round. If the subject has already made an additional attack, due to a prior casting of this spell, from the haste spell, or from any other source, this spell fails.
4) It's a bit harder to remember for new players. "You have one standard, move, swift, and immediate action each on your turn" is easy, as is "You have one standard, one move, and either a swift or an immediate," but "You have a standard, a move, and a swift unless you took an immediate action last turn because you used your swift now for your immediate back then; no, you can't borrow standard or move actions, just swifts" can feel both confusing and arbitrary.
Saving up swift actions isn't really any better, for the reasons you noted. You might as well just give people one swift and one immediate per turn and be done with it; if immediate actions are going to be a big part of the game, with most characters being expected to have several immediate-action abilities, it makes sense not to make it harder or more annoying for characters to use them, and if they're only going to come up occasionally or only for some characters then special-case-ing the action debt isn't really necessary.