I got The World of Near today. It shines so much I had to put on sunglasses to read it.
ANYWAY, I noticed that, on p. 11, it's written that player characters start with 11 points to distribute betwen pools, instead of 10 as in vanilla SS. I'm just curious: what's the reason for this?
Eero's version goes to eleven (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_to_eleven). It's just louder than going to ten.
More seriously, I don't know why, but I do know that some game designs avoid even distributions so the players are forced to prioritize something.
Both ten and eleven are uneven with the three Pools, so it's not that.
The real reason is very simply that 11 is traditional for TSoY, while I opted for 10 in SS because it's an easier number to remember in general. I'm sure Clinton had a good reason for 11 originally, perhaps based on whatever statistical math he used to arrive to his numbers, but those reasons are lost in time and should be asked from him. In actual play anything in the 7-12 range works just fine. Perhaps we might imagine that TSoY is naturally slightly more expensive an environment than default SS due to how many ways of spending Pool you have, but the effect should be negligible.
In a nutshell: it's just me being perverse, no deeper reason. You might want to consider any and all other rules stuff in the book in the same light.