  We explore gauge actions for lattice QCD, which are constructed such that the
occurrence of small plaquette values is strongly suppressed. Such actions
originate from the admissibility condition in order to conserve the topological
charge. The suppression of small plaquette values is expected to be
advantageous for numerical studies in the $\epsilon$-regime and also for
simulations with dynamical quarks. Performing simulations at a lattice spacing
of about 0.1 fm, we present numerical results for the static potential, the
physical scale $r_0$, the stability of the topological charge history, the
condition number of the kernel of the overlap operator and the acceptance rate
against the step size in the local HMC algorithm.
