#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”