I don’t very much like how stat highlights and XP work in AW, so I am often thinking about other way of doing things (short of simply removing highlights, XP and advancement). I am always breaking 2E’s Seduce or Manipulate Someone move :(
Anyway, here is one way :
IMPROVEMENT
Whenever another player character maneuvers to put you in an ideal position to roll a highlighted, and you do, tell them to mark an experience circle. Whenever you reset your Hx with someone, mark an experience circle.
Here is another way:
IMPROVEMENT
Forget about highlighted stats. At the start of the session, hold 2. Anytime, you can spend 1 to change a 6- roll to a 7-9 or a 7-9 to a 10+. (No, you don’t get to step up to 12+ this way, nice try.) At the session end, spend each you still hold to mark an experience circle.
I like the second one. You get to choose between being good during the session, or improving.
RépondreSupprimerOnly thing, some players may want to avoid triggering moves so that they can keep their holds.
Eric Nieudan giving xp for not making risky moves defeat the purpose,don't you think.
RépondreSupprimerYes, that's a downside. Why incentives!?!
RépondreSupprimerYou also lose XP for avoiding bad results, so imo it balances out.
RépondreSupprimerAlso I think that as a MC, knowing that a player could can avoid a 6-, I wouldn't hesitate making proper hard moves. Which would be beneficial to the fiction in the end, possibly.
What don't you like about how it works in rules-as-written?
RépondreSupprimerMy own concern with it R.A.W. is that rolling highlighted stats happen so frequently that resetting Hx, which happens much more rarely, becomes a non-event. Your first suggestion, which of the two would be preferable to me, addresses that by making advancement by highlighted stat much more rare. I do like that, but I also do kind of like how speedy AW advancement can be - it makes advancement less of a pacing mechanic and more of a tangible reward mechanic I can actively engage in for a specific purpose.
The second option seems to encourage passive play, which I'm not a big fan of. Bringing it hard as an MC without destroying the game shouldn't require a bail-out mechanic to compensate, it's a skill an MC need to learn/retrain (by the same logic an MC will be bringing it harder to players who still retain their XP hold than the ones who have already spent it, so that concern is still present.) I'm also generally a fan of advancement mechanics that take place in-session rather than post- or between-session, again since that makes it something to actively strive for rather than a pacing mechanic.
Mikael Andersson it's a matter of taste, mainly. The main things that rub me the wrong way are :
RépondreSupprimer- If the game need the players to act in some precise way, why not just ask? Like the MC's agenda / always say / principles do. One could highlight stats without tying to XP.
- Highlighting stats for me is in direct contradiction to the only players' principle in AW : play your characters as though they were real people. I am almost unable to do both at the same time. And when someone pushes towards their highlighted stats, I often find them not to be a very believable character, but incomprehensibly changing in mood and behavior from session to session. (Which is what I try to fix with the first hack, allowing to explore specific facets of the characters but maybe with less character-bending.)
- Some players aren't very interested in their highlighted stats or XP, others are quite centered on them. With both type of players at the table, I find the game quickly imbalances which leads to frustration on all parts. When at the third session, one or two players were at their fifth advancement, and the others at one or two, it always spelt premature endgame. I've seen that in various gaming groups. This part of the system amplifies that difference between the players, I seek to unify.
Interesting! I hadn't considered that, but I'm also rarely sitting on the player side of the table and thus don't experience that friction between reward system and play instructions first-hand. It actually seems a general and far-reaching design paradox when put that way, that implementing any sort of reward system for valuing some actions over others compromise the player's ability to express their character in a way they, and maybe others at the table, find believable. A bit of that old bugbear "your character wouldn't do that, you're just playing for XP".
RépondreSupprimerIn one sense the whole PbtA framework compromises this, though. Making a move (such as "Seduce or Manipulate") rather than acting in a manner that is not a move (such as genuinely grovelling) is rewarded by the framework by granting you relatively more agency over the narrative. But if I feel like what my character ought to be doing in that situation is grovel, I will get neither agency nor XP nor any other rewards of any kind. That friction between what I think my character ought to do and what the game steers me to do is in my view PbtA's main feature, because often what I think my character ought to do is less fun and cool than what the game tells me to do through its mechanics. The XP reward system to me is just adding another dimension to that, where the players explicitly tell me what sort of stuff they'd like to see from me.
One possible solution I can imagine here is borrowing from Primetime Adventure's Fan Mail system, which serves a very similar function:
IMPROVEMENT
Whenever someone rolls a 6-, put a token in a shared pool. Whenever another player thinks your character did something awesome, however they define awesome, they can remove a token from the pool and tell you to mark an experience circle.
That's a good one!
RépondreSupprimer