Focus Pool: Always Three?

[WatersLethe]

What would be the impact of giving everyone a focus pool of 3, right from the start?

Why would you do that?

1. Give people items that grant focus powers. For example, my homebrew Holy Avenger gives dispel magic as a focus power, but the player might not have a pool yet.

2. Some confusion surrounds which powers grant points and which don't. This could do an end run around the problem, since everyone would always have 3.

3. Some characters start at level 1 with two already, and hit the cap shortly thereafter. Why beat around the bush?

4. If a player has one neat power they like, why make them jump through hoops to get more that they don't intend to use just to get two more pool points?

So, would that destroy anything?

[Excaliburproxy]

Here are the issues as I see them: It would mostly boost the power of focus spell casters disproportionately early on and make your second and third focus spell feats less useful (since they no longer grant any bonus besides gaining a new option).

For the former issue, you could give everyone a baseline "focus spell" of some sort. Alternatively, you could just give out focus points in a progressive manner (1 focus point at level 1, 2 at 5 and 3 at 9, maybe); by later levels, you could maybe expect non-casters to have items to spend their focus on.

For the latter issue, you can give those feats an additional benefit, maybe? Like: maybe every focus feat past the first lets you regen 1 focus point as in interact action once per day. You could also ignore the issue but I think there are a lot of powers that aren't very attractive without them increasing your focus pool as a rider effect; for instance, there are certain domain spells that I like for flavor but would never take without the focus pool increase.

[Temperans]

You could also make the cap 5 and give everyone +2 (that way they start at 3) and letting focus points continue to add prevents them from being a resource burden. It also kind of fits the 3+stat from the previous edition, but since it's just one pool it shouldn't get out of hand.

The problem however is that they then kind of stop being a scarce resource and give more immediate power.

[rainzax]

There are 6 tiers of Focus Pool:

Pool 1, Recover 1 (Low Flow)
Pool 2, Recover 1 (Low Flow Plus)
Pool 3, Recover 1 (Low Flow Double Plus)
Pool 2, Recover 2 (Medium Flow)
Pool 3, Recover 2 (Medium Flow Plus)
Pool 3, Recover 3 (High Flow)

The two middle tiers are closest.

[MaxAstro]

I think if you gave everyone full Focus pools from the get-go, you would also be somewhat obligated to give all classes early feats that grant Focus powers, to narrow the power gap caused by letting casters go wild right from the get go.

I actually think that's a good thing, though - honestly I want Fighters to have semi-wuxia style Focus spells.