Move budget awards putting everything into one big move.

I agree that there are flaws in the current move budget system. And I've been thinking about ways to improve it. To award having more variety in moves.

Limiting a number of available moves + introducing per-move budget sounds like a good option. Bot sure if it's the best or only thing to adjust though.

This sounds like a hard limitation. But what about a soft one? Placing everything into one move is technically possible, but it should cost more move budget points than if you split similar functionality between different moves. Basically compound moves should increase the power score of the move, and the more different functions you add, the higher the cost, and it could be exponential.

In general, from game design standpoint, I prefer soft limits and sandboxes, more than hard limited systems. But I agree it does not always work.

So, open to discussion here. Interested to hear more from you and others.

I get what you're saying. I'm still leveling, so maybe I haven't gotten to the point yet where diminishing returns starts to make expanding more worthwhile than improving my big damage move, although it does get a bit complicated to find that point. I think a big part of the concern I'm having so far is that you can't win without damage and it feels a bit too easy to ramp it up instead of doing more interesting things. If you do have a limited amount of moves, maybe also allow an unlimited amount of low cost ones so characters can still have some purely flavorful ones.