CoreyHaim8myDog
Explorer
I guess what I'm getting at is this:
If you've already established that you're not playing an antagonistic GM (in the vein of Basic D&D), then you've decided that you're not going to kill the PCs unless they're really asking for it (either through stupid or heroic actions, where death would be suitable to the genre). You just want to scare the players, and make the story more dramatic. At that point, why do you need a meta-game resource to regulate that? Why can't you just fudge some dice rolls, whenever you feel like it? How does it improve any aspect of the game when the Big Bad goes down before it can even act, because the GM spent too many Dark Symmetry points on keeping the Dragon up for another round? Is it just a way to keep the GM engaged with the game aspect of it, by giving a resource to manage?
It give the players agency. If you, as a player, take a risk and see the threat pool going up, you know that YOU have a hand in your later fate. Fudged rolls are all in the GM's hands. This engages players directly in the overall dramatic arc of a scene or an entire adventure.