House rules for making them worth more:

- can be spent after a roll is made. if spent before a roll is made, add 2 dice instead but you can't spend 2 fortune for 4 dice.

- can be used to downgrade a condition card for one roll, effects are cut in half, or 2 white dice can be added to the pool to potentially counter it if it is a powerful effect, such as the blind condition. Adjust as need to make the effect still have potential.

- can be spent to downgrade a critical injury when taken, making a severity 3 into a severity 2 for example.

- can be spent to add a defense card after being hit by an attack, if you originally didn't use one. Or spend 1 to add 2 black dice to the roll before they roll

- can be spent to reduce damage taken by 2

- Can be spent to add 3 power or favour, but can't spend 2 in the same round.

- can spend to increase initiative by +1

You only have 3, so I don't see this being all that overpowered. At higher ranks, fortune points as-is seem almost worthless.

Fortune points can (and should?) be awarded by the GM during the session, so often players should get more than three per session. Often in my sessions fortune refreshes at least once or twice.

I like fortune the way it is, as it should be a small bonus to a roll. My players often use fortune to recharge actions/talents.

General thoughts:

Any spends after rolls are made risk slowing down combat a lot. As the player should first decide if to spend fortune on the roll, then it should be rolled. At least in my group all abilities that happen after a roll (such as the Gambler career ability) tend to slow down the game when the player(s) decide if it's worth spending the ability on this roll or not. So I'd recommend at least changing the effects that happen after a roll.

You could also give your players more starting fortune, for example you could say that at rank 4 and above starting fortune = character rank.

Also, remember that a lot of career abilities (and some talents/actions) use fortune points in some way. Making fortune more powerful in general, as you suggest, might actually make such career abilities feel less useful as there are so many other things you want to use your fortune points on. And more powerful fortune points would make career abilities such as the Bailiff far more powerful.

My thoughts on your changes:

can be spent after a roll is made. if spent before a roll is made, add 2 dice instead but you can't spend 2 fortune for 4 dice.

As I said you risk slowing down the game if you can spend after the roll is made, but you could go for adding 2 fortune dice per fortune point spent.

- can be used to downgrade a condition card for one roll, effects are cut in half, or 2 white dice can be added to the pool to potentially counter it if it is a powerful effect, such as the blind condition. Adjust as need to make the effect still have potential.

Could become arbitrary and there's a risk that you don't remember how you adjusted specific conditions. You could simply let players spend fortune to remove recharge tokens from conditions as well as actions and talents, that way the effect would last for fewer rounds = less powerful.

- can be spent to downgrade a critical injury when taken, making a severity 3 into a severity 2 for example.

Risks beeing hard to keep track of. Could be easier to let players spend fortune when resting and lower the severety temporarily when rolling for recovery. Could be used in the same way with disease.

- can be spent to add a defense card after being hit by an attack, if you originally didn't use one. Or spend 1 to add 2 black dice to the roll before they roll

Again I don't like effects that take place after a roll. But spending for defence before the roll could be a good way to go as it is similar to getting one or two white dice on a roll.

- can be spent to reduce damage taken by 2

Reducing damage by 2 seems powerful to me. If I were to allow players to reduce damage with fortune I'd probably go with 1 for 1 instead.

- Can be spent to add 3 power or favour, but can't spend 2 in the same round.

As with damage reduction, 3 power/favour seems a lot, I'd probaby go with spend 1 to get 1 here as well, but with no restriction on spending more than one per round.

- can spend to increase initiative by +1

This is cool, I might introduce this in my group.

I can agree that fortune sometimes feel almost worthless, but I believe your suggestion risk making fortune oveprowered instead. As I read the fortune rules they are supposed to be a small nudge of luck in the right direction, and fortune points should be spent liberally by players and awarded often by the GM.

I haven't put it into practice yet, but we seem to play differently in that you award and refresh more often. We have always played it as you have 3 and that is it, once spent it is gone for the session. Which made them seem not all that helpful. It just seems like these dice come up blank too much, you could sped all 3 and all three blank.

When we had the battle vs the Black Cowl, he had around 8 black dice for defense on a turn where he was getting struck by reckless cleave and I just shook my head when all 7 came up blank and 1 was a bane.

Thats sadistic!

Wait... I mean: Thats statistics!

I make a point of rewarding fortune dice fairly often, primarily for role playing. If you want to encourage players to get into character it's an awesome way to do it. I definitely reward points when the players increase the party tension. A one in six chance to get a hammer *is* minor, which makes handing them out without breaking anything an easy decision.

Use the option to allow a fortune point to add something to a scene in order to create a handy witness, torch or other feature.

Remind PC's they can spend them to remove a recharge token, that is often useful.

As valvorik said, spending fortune on removing recharge is a very useful thing. Most of the fotune point spends in my group goes to remove recharge tokens, often from (improved) defences when they get attacked.

Spending fortune to add something to a scene is also a cool way to use fortune.