Quote:
Originally Posted by Atgxtg
Translation: Angry players? 
The old Mayfair DC system used Hero Points for both purposes but I was a MArvel fan so I never saw how that worked in practice. |
It was more complicated than that, but that was the practical long term result. What happened is it tended to breed for two mindsets:
1. Don't use the hero points because you don't want to fall behind. This meant a double-or-nothing philosophy where players who got lucky got ahead where as those who didn't got trashed. Since those with higher abilities tend to need this sort of thing somewhat less, this could turn into a rich-get-richer effect.
2. Don't spend them on experience because you might need them for emergencies. This meant that those players never advanced.
And by the by, DCH was exactly the game that taught me this.
Now, if you get to decide at the point where events happen to use future advancement, this is not as big a problem.
A bigger one is that the value of an advancement roll isn't symmetrical throughout the course of a BRP character's career; at the bottom end, they're hard to come by, and are most likely to get you actual advancement; at the top, they're easy to get, but don't usually actually produce advancement. This means it gets more and more painless to use one this way at exactly the period in one's character life one is least likely to need it.