One of the problems I’ve found with action points, bennies, plot points, and other similar mechanics is that unless they’re crucial to the game, players tend to forget about them. And even when they are important, keeping track of them can be a challenge as the light-weight chips or tokens get covered up, buried, or pushed out of the way.
Our solution has been to use plastic poker chips, which have the advantage of being large enough to seen and thus, remembered. They’re easy to toss around the table (important for games like Serenity or Spycraft where the points tend to fly fast and furious) and while they can make an annoying sound that grates on the nerves when ground together, mostly they get the job done. Except, of course, when the light plastic chips go rolling off the table, or bounce where you weren’t expecting.
For Star Wars, we’ve kicked it up a notch thanks to campaign members Cory and Brendan, who were in Wal-Mart and found a set of weighted poker chips on clearance. These are far superior than what we’ve used before. The weighted chips have heft to them, so they’re less likely to slide around on the table, and they come in a variety of colors (including white, red, blue, green and black). I’m planning on using blue and green for Force points, White for destiny points and Red for Dark Side points (which should be far and few between … but still, it’s good to have them there)