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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”

#AWFE #AW2ED

Good evening everybody!

I’m playing Fallen Empires with few friends and having a Mesmerast and a Mystic in the first session I came out with the question “what is magic to you?” so players defined according to their characters’ idea: that thing that allows them to do their “tricks”.

Now, the Mystic acts as a magician, so whenever she needs to she inserts magic and enchantments in the description of her moves’ outcome. Absolutely no problem with this, even when she declares an enchantment as her action: if this activate a move, go forth and roll that. But yesterday evening the Mystic wanted to carry with her some children she rescued from a sacrifice and who were taken away by their parents. So she said: “I perform a magic that will take the children from their parents, no matter what.”

Now, in first edition I would have had no doubt and I had her roll “Seize something by force”, but in this case – being it a battle move and being not the Mystic in battle – I didn’t know what to do. An idea could have been “Go into danger”, but there was no sudden threat. So we stopped for a while and talked about it and – even if I don’t like to do so – I suggested the player to change description and she agreed to describe how she forced the kids’ parents to leave the children and let them come to her. It was clearly a manipulate, so we resolved like this.

What would you have done instead? Thanks everybody who will answer.