Taming Resilience

We have been contemplating whether Resilience might be too powerful of a stat in our current system.  It basically works like Damage Reduction in D&D.  There is a minimum hit of 1 in our system when a hit makes contact, so for a Warrior who had +3 Res, almost every hit against him was only scoring a single point of damage.

Our new idea is to give the characters Endurance Points (EP) instead of Resilience.

They might work in the following way:

PROPOSAL #1:

Endurance Points are spent by performing a physical action or by taking a blow.  Usually 1 point each.  EP can never drop below zero.  At the beginning of every turn, you recover 1 EP automatically (unless a status effect is preventing this.)   Therefore, you always have a minimum of 1 EP to work with in most cases when it is your turn to act.

If your EP is nonzero, it will absorb 1 damage point for you (after armor) when taking a blow (the way resilience used to, but limited to 1 point per hit.)  So +2 Armor, and 3 EP, if I am hit for 5 points, the armor takes it down to 3 points, the EP absorbs 1 (and is reduced to 2EP), and I take two points actual damage.   The cool thing about EP is that it wears down.   If two or three enemies attack you in one round, by the time the third gets to you, your EP is gone so their hit is more effective.

Ok, that is too complex.  It requires another set of counters to keep track of things--things that change rapidly--and we really don't want to keep track of more things.

Here's an attempt to simplify the concept and keep the same flavor:

PROPOSAL #2:

After each action is complete you get your full endurance points back.  Every blow you take during the next round reduces your EP by one.   Whatever you have left-over when your turn comes around is usable for any action requiring a certain number of EP to perform.

The downside to this is that if you have 3 EP and don't get hit, you could perform a 3 EP action on one turn, then immediately repeat it on the next turn.  That's kind of contrary to the whole idea that it would track physical exertion when performing difficult feats.

PROPOSAL #3:

The non-hit-related version.  You start out with full EP.   You spend EP as you use it.  You gain 1 EP at the beginning of each turn (unless a status effect prevents this.)

If you have 3EP, you can use all 3 points to do some amazing thing on your first turn.

Your next turn, you will recover 1EP.   If you attack, this will reduce to 0, so you decide to wait.

Next turn, you recover another and now have 2EP.   You decide to do a 2 EP action rather than wait it out one more round.   You're back to zero again.

Next turn, you recover 1EP.   You use a regular attack, and finish off the opponent.

This seems to be the simplest solution, by far.  The only downside is that enemies gain no particular benefit over you when your EP is at zero, and you have to track EP, but the EP doesn't change as frequently as in Proposal #1, so it should be much easier to track.

I think it would be easy to add a few rules to make up for the downside mentioned.  For example, when your EP is zero, maybe shields are ineffective, or maybe attackers gain a +4 bonus to Advantage against you.

OR...

Resilience works as it is now, except that you only get 1/2 Resilience protection against hits.