I was reading a little theory on John Kim’s page and came across this article: RPG System Design: Hero Point Mechanics. It is really a great discussion of the topic and covers some really good ground. I mean, we used “Fate Points” in Rolemaster (and other sufficiently random systems) to mitigate “unfortunately random character death”, but we didn’t really think about all the possible ways to implement these buggers way back then….over time, they’ve really come into their own.
~AoB
High Adventure Games 
I recently worked up hero points for my game and cited Kim’s page too! It’s a little dated but a good summary. I wanted to go with more high-impact points that avoided some of the bad things I was seeing from more conventional points in our games (e.g. action points). Here’s the discussion and what I came up with: http://mxyzplk.wordpress.com/2009/10/14/request-for-comment-hero-points/