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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FrogReaver" data-source="post: 9776873" data-attributes="member: 6795602">I don’t know about better overall as there’s more to consider than just balance and pacing.  But in terms of balance and pacing, it usually makes for a very high variance system where players can trade much better performance now for much worse performance later (often 2-10x better performance now) , very similar to one of the primary drivers of the 5MWD in d&d. This can be overcame by enough constant time pressure (narratively difficult to justify) or by making it relatively difficult to recover (usually players solve for this so it’s not a very robust solution IMO).  That said oftentimes you just don’t have players that really analyze the homebrew system to really optimize for it (and since there’s no internet telling them how, you probably don’t have to deal with extreme optimizations).  Meaning for localized small sample play of a novel homebrew system, you probably never see most issues of homebrew system.  So this may not be an issue in practice for you. There are benefits to higher variance systems. Mostly that players can navigate a single overturned encounter or bad rolls whereas in a low or no variance system, such things are likely to kill them. As such I’d recommend focusing on limiting your ceiling of pc output, so that it’s in the sweet spot.  Probably ceiling = 1.5*floor.  Going to low variance tends to make the game feel samey and less fun, almost like your combat choices don’t really matter.If you can lock down this sweet spot of variance down you probably could make your preferred system style work better.  It’s just most trade exhaustion/hp/hit dice for resource systems tend toward extremely high variance compared to the floor output. Other issues that make such systems hard to develop is appropriate cost. If abilities don’t cost enough resource tradeoff they are almost always use. If they cost too much they are almost never use. That Goldilocks zone is really hard to hit in such systems IMO.</blockquote>

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