My players haven’t been using HX very much at all, so on the next session’s love letters I’ve included this move on…

My players haven’t been using HX very much at all, so on the next session’s love letters I’ve included this move on…

My players haven’t been using HX very much at all, so on the next session’s love letters I’ve included this move on all but one of them

Howling & Haranguing: whenever you roll+HX to help or interfere with anyone, you get +1 xp.

33 thoughts on “My players haven’t been using HX very much at all, so on the next session’s love letters I’ve included this move on…”

  1. Wow.  You’re gonna see a lot more helping & hindering.  I’m tempted to try it with a similar group, but I would place a fictional limit on it so it doesn’t run past a session or two.  Fictize the force, Luke.

  2. Most of the players have +0 or -1 with half of the other players so I think that’s why it gets neglected. Yeah, I kind of want to force a lot of it, but actually, my players are never too concerned with xp so I’m not sure how much this will influence their behavior.

  5. According to page 14, the stats are Cool, Hard, Hot, Sharp, Weird and Hx.

    Page 105, with the rules for highlighting stats doesn’t say that you can’t. It just tell the players (and the MC) to highlight the stat that interest them most.

    I don’t get why you couldn’t highlight Hx.

  7. I suppose you could write a custom move for being able to highlight during character creation, or you could just tell your players that they can highlight HX, but then you’ll get questions like “So I can highlight HX and it affects all of my history with everybody?” or “Where should I mark that?” or you could just fudge it and write a move that adds it to the game (see OP).

  9. Kasper Brohus Allerslev That’s a fascinating idea, especially for support characters, and literally speaking you’re not wrong.  Hmm.  Patrick Henry Downs Highlighting HX wouldn’t “affect history” with anybody.  It would simply allow your PC to get XP for helping or hindering someone.  That’s still less likely to work out well if your absolute Hx is low with that person.  But yeah, you’d have to stick a circle on the splat somewhere.

  10. If I wanted to foster fighting, I’d just mark hard and not talk about it. If a player can position themself within the fiction to do it, they could help or hinder any potential action, not just murders.

  12. Mechanically the big difference is what happens on a fail.  For basic moves, 7-9 is partial success and <7 is an MC hard move.  For helping or hindering, 7-9 is "expose yourself to danger" and <7 would be likewise.  So a help/hinder roll is risky for the player who's helping or hindering and there's no such thing as "partial success", but at least she won't bear the brunt of an MC move if she fails the roll.  That just might be a totally fair trade-off.

  13. I tend to announce future badness when a roll+HX hits 7-9. It’s the softest of moves, but it pushes the moves snowball too.

    If a roll+HX misses, I tend to turn their move back on them and flip the results.

    Given how HX is used to determine who highlights stats and how it’s described on pages after the stats breakdown, I’m gonna say that under the normal circumstances of play that no, you can’t highlight HX.

  15. Just running with Kasper’s idea now.  During highlighting, the person I know best can say “I want to see you getting involved and messing with people’s rolls tonight.”  Maybe secretly he’s saying “I want you to help me tonight”.  But even so, that doesn’t guarantee that I’ll actually do it, and he hasn’t stopped me from trying to help (or hinder) other people either.  So metagaming it (if that’s what you’re worried about) doesn’t really have a huge payoff for him, I might just decide to help/hinder other people instead.  I don’t have to succeed to get the XP.

  18. Christopher Stone-Bush The pages I referred to in the book really does seem to indicate that you can. It’s the lack of a circle on the sheets that seems to imply otherwise.

    I distinctly remember Vincent Baker saying that you could do it, but I can’t find the thread.

  19. Kasper Brohus Allerslev the game effect is to gain xp when you roll the highlighted stat

    I don’t think because HX is referred to as a stat automatically means that you should be able to highlight it, that’s a leap of logic that I’ve never seen applied to the game by anybody who has played with me or knew about the game before I did. Furthermore, nothing in the rules leads me to think that you should be able to because of the way highlighting and HX are both described later in the rulebook, plus the playbooks don’t include the option to highlight HX.

    I mean, it seems rather obvious to me that you normally can’t highlight HX and that was never intended by the rules as written.

  20. Even if the book doesn’t say it, it’s still a totally plausible idea.  In fact, I’m gonna do it.  I’ll make sure my players know it is an option, and I will report back here with our results.  Thanks Kasper Brohus Allerslev!

  27. No, we only play about once a month so it’s hard to keep secrets when I design every session like a one-shot. I always have to give a little recap and my love letters are usually charged with some ways for players to butt heads or interact directly. Next session is going to involve 3 to 4 small gangs all settling in the same area around the Maestro d’s place of business so I probably won’t have to do much to make things interesting. With howling & haranguing a lot of players have +0 or -1 HX, I said this above but it could have been missed, so I’m hoping people look for opportunities to help one another but I’m expecting a greater number of missed rolls. However, as I also said, my players don’t really care about xp very much,so they might just ignore that and do their own thing.

  29. Are your players staying ay that level of hx? If so why not use the end og session move where all players decide which character knows them better this session, andthat character gets +1 hx

  30. I always assumed that the secret learned when the HX rolls over was about the character concerned.  So if Joey has Hx +3 with Mike and that goes up by one then Mike must tell a secret about their character.   This has worked really well in games I’ve played. Since it is end of session the person often takes the time until the next session to come up with a suitable secret.

    In the games I’ve played people use the Help move often enough.  We allow the decision to Help or Hinder to take place after the main roll is done and this means any time a move which is important to more than one person gets a six then someone is likely to try and help.  It’s far less likely to happen on a result of nine.  

    Part of the issue is probably that for the majority of results Help/Hinder don’t make any difference.  If you are exposing yourself to danger when most of the time even if you succeed it makes no difference then people are not likely to do it.

  32. Submitted for anyone who wants to use it, here is my alternative version of Johnstone’s “tell a secret” rule:

    When your Hx with someone rolls over to +1, select one of the below questions and both of you create the answer collaboratively:

    1. What did I just learn about you (either shared willfully or discovered secretly) that no one else knows?

    – OR –

    2. What did I just see you do (either to me or to someone else) that totally changed my understanding of you?

  33. Progress Report: HX only got rolled three times during the entire session, so it didn’t end up being a very useful carrot on a stick.

    Also, when I posed the possibility of highlighting HX during the start of session a nearly unanimous consensus of negativity was expressed from “The player who does that is a dick.” to “Then if you want to get improvements you have to hang on another player’s actions and act like a follower, that wouldn’t be fun.”

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