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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8538198" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Yeah that's pretty much the horns of the dilemma. If the cost of saving XP is too low, the incentive is to hold onto them until you no longer desire to advance. If the cost of saving them is too high, then spending them doesn't feel like doing cool stuff, it feels like a mandatory payment to be permitted to succeed. Yet the only reason not to hoard (within the rules, that js) is if hoarding entails losing...which means being punished unless you spend.Given the difficulty of evading the Scylla of "I'm losing out on permanent rewards by spending XP to boost success" and the Charybdis of "welp, time to pay the XP toll so I'm allowed to potentially succeed," I can see why a lot of games just don't go there.It also doesn't help that natural player psychology gets in the way. RPGs as a whole are notorious for inducing hoarding behavior in players. The fact that (for example) T:TON had to punish players for hoarding (of cyphers) was pretty much proof that they knew this was a problem and couldn't find a way to make not-hoarding enjoyable on its own merits. (I don't know if that rule exists in the actual Cypher system.) Trying to design systems that defy general trends of player psychology is a fool's errand IMO.</blockquote>