Derrick Kapchinsky​ the concept of highlighting stats is great. That concept being “I want to see this kind of thing / this kind of response from your character.

The implementation of tying that concept to stats, that are tied to rolls is where the breakdown is. It’s totally wrong for a game that’s supposed to be about the conversation.

Like you can totally mark my Hot, because you want to see my character like that. I can totally do Hot out the yin yang and everyone thinks that was amazing and established so much about my character and their relationships…But I get no XPs for it unless I hit a trigger for a move tied to Hot.

And that’s broken. It’s ruined nearly every campaign of AW I’ve been in. One shots fine, because “I don’t care about leveling up a character in a con game anyway” is S.O.P.

But in a campaign, with all those juicy moves right there in the playbook that you want to get…Broken. Because now for any player actively seeking to acquire XPS it’s no longer about “just talk and I’ll let you know when you’ve triggered a move”. It’s “fuck no, I need 2 more XPs what do I need to do to trigger this move”