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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5975808" data-attributes="member: 54877">Yes. The problem there is that they are only a magical fatigue system. Which means the only trade-off is do you use your points for this spell now or some other spell later. And then you run into the math problem that with scaling, where if you use a simple system you tend to favor lots of overly powerful small effects or rolling all those little effects into a few big effects (one or the other, not both). It's very hard to get that scaling right, in practice. It's particularly tough in D&D when effects range from detect magic to wish. (It works pretty well if you gear the math to about 3 levels worth of D&D spells, which is why I think a lot of people like such variants. A lot of people do most of their play within about 3-4 spell levels.) Whereas, with Vancian magic it's still all magic, but you get the siloing effect of the slots by level. Or if you go to a real fatigue system, say like Dragon Quest or close to one, like early RuneQuest, then using magic drains the caster of resources that matter outside of magic. In DQ, "fatigue" is burned a lot like real D&D hit points to avoid the more serious damage effects, meaning that casting spells has consequences beyond not casting a spell later (and in DQ, means that they can skew the power point math, letting the side effects counter-balance it). Or you can have a system like default Fantasy Hero, where "endurance" is coming back very fast after combat, but becomes a serious tactical consideration when exhausting yourself makes running away a problem.  I think both true fatigue system and siloed slots have a lot to recommend them, but "power points" tends to take on the disadvantages of both, with the only thing to show for it being an easily grokked tactical system that has a thin veneer of strategic depth. If the veneer didn't scrape off so fast in play, I might like it more, but power points tend to get "solved" in the strategic sense, fairly rapidly. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> Or to drag it back around on topic, the carrots and sticks inherent in actual power point systems, when applied to something as wide as D&D magic, tend to be perverse if your goals are to manage rest and nova issues.  If you complicate a power point system into a broader "fatigue" system, you'll tend to have enough richness in the broader system to deal with these issues some other way (e.g. require food for mid-day partial fatigue restoration).</blockquote>

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