The Mirrored Road into the Interior

So in the game last night I got to playtest a new rule. I'm not sure how well it will work out, but we'll see. I'm running an Eberron campaign, which means that the players have action points. Last night, during a moderately tough fight, one of the PCs was dropped by a fairly massive critical (and this wasn't the hard fight of the night) and unfortunately, everyone had seen both of the dice rolls and they knew the extra damage this opponent had been doing, and they knew it was a critical (the base attack plus strength bonus would have killed the character, the crit shoved him below -10.) Well, I hadn't intended any party members to be all the way dead at this point, so I instated an off the cuff rule. Assuming your character has at least five action points, I am letting the players take half experience for the encounter and burn five action points to bring their character from -10 or below to -9 and stable. This only applies to death through damage (no using this to counter a disintigration spell) and there will be cases where it doesn't apply, though not too many. If they do something that leads to an unescapble death situation, like jumping into a volcano unprotected, they don't get to burn action points to survive... or they do, but then they continue taking damage and die anyway. (And I do have intelligent opponents who have nothing to do in a combat round do things like finish off fallen foes.)