I’m still toying about with my soap opera hack, Liquid Soap, and I’ve come up with an alternative to the standard stat highlighting system to mark experience:
– When you roll with an unchecked stat, check it and mark experience.
– Uncheck all your stats at the start of a new episode.
So, instead of being encouraged to emphasize a particular set of moves related to one stat, you are encouraged to show many different facets of your PC by rolling with as many different stats as possible. Has this or anything like it been done in any other PbtA game? What are the upsides to it?
Dunno, but I like the idea
Somehow looks like how Urban Shadows deal with this, and I like it, so it might work.
As Pierre said, it is similar to Urban Shadows. That grants you XP for interacting with the various different supernatural factions around town. Once you tick off all the factions, you get XP and clear the ticks.
It doesn’t wipe them automatically at the start of a session though, and you have to tick them all to get XP so the pace is different and you can’t avoid doing one of the things by just waiting it out.
Just thinking through it…
It seems like, at the beginning of the session, you’re incentivized to do anything and so you can do what makes sense for your character or whatever the fiction demands. The order in which you check the boxes each session will probably be kinda random based on where you left off in the fiction at the end of the last session. As the session progresses, the number of potential moves that would allow you to gain XP decreases, diminishing the expected return on taking action on the whole and increasing the relative incentive for triggering a specific set of moves attached to a random unchecked stat (so you might be taking actions that feel kinda forced in order to check your last box or two and reset to a less constrained and more [xp] rewarding state). So, it seems like it would work well as an xp timer but could be kind of noisy in terms of the extent players are encouraged to trigger specific moves. In contrast, hitting highlighted stats may feel similarly noisy as an individual player but your highlighted stats are not random, they’re directly related to [another] player’s intent, and are consistent throughout the session, repeatedly revisiting your character’s expression of the highlighted stats.
Not saying it won’t generally work in play or when looking at the session as a whole, just that this might be something going on in the background.
I think it will be interesting in this game because stats are used as your motive, not your action: that is, there is a lying/bluffing/hiding move, but the stat you use depends on the motive behind the move.
If you you lie to protect your family, you roll+love; if you lie to strike a business deal, you roll+need and so on. So you can can still get a full range of moves no matter which stat you roll with, you just need to think about showing another side to your character’s motivations.
James Mullen That’s a feature of the Smallville RPG that I love. The base dice for any roll are a Value (Truth! Justice!) and a relationship (Louis Lane! Lana Lang!)