With apologies to all, I began veering dangerously off-topic in the thread on Colin’s PBP Facebook game. Let us continue here, if there is any juice left in the discussion.
We had the brave, and very forgiving, +colin spears agreeing to trial a mark-experience-on-failure (ie roll of 6-) as occurs in Dungeon World. My prediction is that it will encourage risk-taking among MH players, and since risk-taking is most of a teenager’s job description…
This is (technically) a rules hack.
Is this once per scene or every failure? Is this in conjunction with the two marked stats or not?
Not really a fan. Highlights drive the game very very well.
The Singleton Rule, as Chris Stone-Bush mentioned, allows a stat to mark XP only once.
I think it might actually work better in MH than in DW. In DW, your characters are heroic archetypes, which makes it weird when system-gaming players seek out failure in order to grind XP. On the other hand, you’re right: experimentation and risk-taking are essential parts of the teenage experience, so failure-chasing is probably a useful hack.
That said, it might speed up the rate of advancement too much. That’s an easy thing to measure, though, and you can always tweak it to your liking.
A further hack you might want to try is that you can only mark XP from each stat once per session. So, failed your Dark, take your XP, but now you’ve got to try to fail Volatile or Hot, etc. That goes further along the line of encouraging risk-taking.
I agree with Tim. Highlighting stats provides extra incentive to seek out other players in game and interact with them instead of just the NPCs who you can manipulate to your hearts content with die rolls.
I also think failure fits better in Dungeon World where you are learning from mistakes (which helps mitigate failure also). I don’t really think much teenagers actually learn much from their failures that’s why they repeat them so often.
I also wouldn’t judge a mechanic’s theme based on how Powergamer/Munchkins abuse it to gain advantage in a system, because they always do weird things in any system to gain that advantage.
Also constant failure can wear on someone even if they are getting a reward for it and drastically impact the enjoyment of the game. This might not be true for someone who is already enamored with the game, but I actually had a new player join a game where he made a few poor decisions for his character that I was not aware of which resulted in a near stream of constant failures mitigated by only the occasional partial success. It was really frustrating for that player and killed the enjoyment of everyone at the table. (I should mention that the stat he was insisting on rolling was basically always marked by myself then another player, so he was gaining Xp for these at the rate this rules hack would produce)
Furthermore I don’t think that players in this game need any more encouraging to take risks, with hos the system is built everything is already pretty risky but in a much safer and enjoyable way, the whole idea of their being a range of “partial success” means there is risk involved and even a success might cost you more than you want.
Basically the only risk that it might encourage is rolling the stat you are low in. Simply marking that stat at the start of the game does the same thing, and for a much more dependable reward. In truth I think the long term consequences will be punishing players for impriving characters as failure will get less and less likely as will the gaining of stats. Suddenly the +1 to a stat looks like less of an enticing offer if it mean it will limit your ability to gain XP (and it will limit your ability to gain XP)