The positive reinforcement in general is really effective for speeding up fights. It kinda keeps everybody paying attention to combat, so they can start planning their turn ahead of time. And just doing that much even makes combat more enjoyable, because we’re not being lazy, and zoning out when it isn’t our turn. We’re actively thinking about what to do next.

I was also thinking of converting it to a purchase system, rather than just a roll for percentages. that way you could buy an encounter back for say 5 chips, and maybe a daily for 10 or 15. If you did it that way it might make more sense for the chips to reset at an extended rest. You could also buy an action point for say 8 or 10. Of course you still can’t spend more than one action point in an encounter. Maybe even purchase back healing surges for 3 or so.

I like the idea of the purchase system (especially for daily powers) ‘cuz I’ve never been fully satisfied with 4e’s tendancy to require a rest after every 2 encounters or so.

The original concept was that if a player hadn’t declared his/her initial action within 1 minute, the player’s initiative fell to 1 point behind the next actor in the initiative order. Technically that was still in effect (at least while I was still DM) and the party seemed to have gotten over major lags in deciding on an action. However battles were still slow, particularly with long convoluted resolutions to actions (mostly from controllers, though certain drow barbarians ended up doing a LOT of stuff in one turn).

The army currently teaches its occicers and NCO’s that it’s better to make an OK decision NOW than it is to make the best decision later. I wanted to make that applicable to D&D but as Ed mentioned, the negative effects were a little too adversarial (player v. DM rather than character v. monster).

But it doesn’t help when it’s the GM who’s slow.

As to using one at a time or all at once, I’d make a rule that you can only roll once per turn. Because if you roll five times, that will slow down the game.

Personally, I’d use a chance of a bonus action point instead of recovering a power. This would be anextra AP that could be used even if you’ve already spent one.

However, if you save up and cash in five chips, your probability of getting the power back more than one time = 0. The probability of two successful rolls with the five separate five percent rolls is only .05 (.25 * .2), but it’s still greater than 0. The probabilities get vanishingly small the more successful rolls you hope for (down to .0000003125, or 0.00003125 % for five out of five), but it never reaches zero.

Bottom line, unless I’ve botched this horribly, it’s always a better play to roll each turn (unless you haven’t spent an encounter power you want back yet).