#AW2ED
Question about highlighting stats: say one player has a Battle Babe with Ice Cold, would you highlight Hard on that character?
Ice Cold more or less make Hard irrelevant to a Battle Babe and the choice probably goes hand in hand with a fairly low Hard score. So from a purely mechanical standpoint highlighting hard is telling that player: if you want xp, you have to suffer a major penalty.
On the other hand, picking Ice Cold does make Hard a “dump” stat for Battle Babe and highlighting it is a good way to reverse that.
On the narrative side, highlighting a stat is (as far as I understand) a tool for encouraging a player to approach the story in a certain way (possibly one that their character isn’t very well suited to). Given Ice Cold however, highlighting Hard doesn’t change the space of move the Battle Babe wants to use (yep, still combat) but punishes the player (either they are good, or they get XP).
On a related note, do you feel that there should be significant fictional difference between battle moves rolled with Cool vs Hard?
To summarize this already too long post: given a Battle Babe with Ice Cold, highlighting Hard feels to me like telling the player “I see you want to play a very good combat character, so I’ll give you XP for being crap at combat”
Actually my wife and I changed the rules on that and it worked well. You gain XP for using the move on the stat not the stat itself. This way it encourages people to use hard moves while still getting the bonus of XP
This exact question came up on Barf Forth Apocalyptica a couple of weeks ago. My position is that it’s not cool to highlight a stat that a character never uses in standard moves. In first edition, though, an Ice Cold Battlebabe still uses Hard for Seize By Force, so it’s legit to highlight it. I read the message as one of two things: either “you’re advancing way faster than the other PCs and I want to slow you down a little” or “I want to see you fighting desperately to defend/recover/take something even though you might lose.”
The latter can be a lot more interesting than pushing the I.C.Bb. to Go Aggro on every poor bastard they see.
I’m with Keenan Kibrick. It cannot be right that, by selecting Ice Cold, the Battlebabe gets to effectively have two stats highlighted at once (Cool means you get XP from all the battle moves and act under fire and go aggro). So an effective houserule would be that you highlight the basic moves that fall under a stat, whether that stat happens to be rolled or not.
I agree that it’s not cool to highlight a stat that’s never used, though, and in fact I think the 1e rulebook says not to do this. (Even though I would query “never”. What about custom moves?)
Using highlights to punish a character is a great way to break the “Be a fan of the PCs” principle 😉 Just highlight Cool instead.
Getting to use a custom move is its own reward; it doesn’t need a highlight.
Here’s how I highlight stats: in the first couple sessions, I’m going to highlight your strong stats to see what you do with them and give your character some running room. After a couple sessions, once there’s enough player interaction and Hx and such that folks are sorting out how they want to highlight each other’s stats, I’m going to highlight your stats to tweak those, like if your buddy the Chopper is always highlighting your high stat, I’m going to go lower down the line to see how you can expand your PC.
If I notice one of you is running away with the Xp and advancing much faster than the others, and it’s being a headache for me for any reason, I’m going to highlight stuff you don’t use so much to even things out a bit. If I feel like you’re being a one-trick pony, or I’m just curious what your PC looks like when they Go Agro, I’m going to highlight a different stat and see if you can learn a new trick.
I think it’s kind of boring to just always highlight the Battlebabe’s Cool. So I guess my answer is: sure, sometimes?