142. Changing Highlighted Stats

At the beginning of any session, or at the end if you forgot, anyone can say, “hey, let’s change highlighted stats.” Any player, and you can feel free to say it too as MC. When someone says it, do it. Go around the circle again, following the same procedure you used to highlight them in the first place: the high-Hx player highlights one stat, and you as MC highlight another (163).

Like the session end move, this move is a rule of play rather than something triggered by the fiction. There’s something so clean about presenting rules of play in the same format as the fiction-driven moves that I find exceedingly satisfying. They have triggers, when-then structures, procedures to follow, and they read like any other move. It’s a brilliant way to give weight to a procedure, a way of saying this rule is as important as any other move in this section. This is not a suggestion for play, but a rule to follow, one that’s important to the proper functioning of the game. Of course, this particular rule is categorized with the peripheral moves, which means that you can bring it in or not as you remember it and enjoy it. You can hear that lax presentation in the rule itself with the casualness of the phrases “or at the end if you forgot” and “feel free.” The hard and fast part of the rule is that when someone remembers it and suggests it, “do it” – there is no hemming or hawing in that part of the move.

When you’re highlighting stats, highlight one that you genuinely think will be interesting – and you can tell the players this, it goes for them too. If the character never rolls, or can’t roll, a stat, it’s obviously not going to be interesting to highlight it, so don’t.

That first sentence is super important to the way highlighting stats is designed to work. Remember, highlighted stats are inspired by fan mail in Matt Wilson’s Primetime Adventures; they are there as a tool for everyone to be a fan of everyone else’s character, a means of telling another player, I really dig seeing your character act like this. It needs to be genuinely interesting to you to have meaning. I see a lot of people talk about not highlighting bad stats because it’s not fun for the player to have to lean into a bad stat, but that shouldn’t be your motivation, as is made clear by this passage. Don’t highlight a bad stat if it’s one the character never uses because nothing interesting will come of it. This is why, in the final paragraph of this section, the Bakers talk about open discussion and negotiation during stat highlighting:

As a group, you can negotiate highlighted stats as explicitly as you like. “Hey, would somebody highlight my cool? I’m sick of having my hot highlighted when I’m not into anybody that way.” “Oh, yeah, sure thing. And I think we’re about to get serious with Dremmer, so MC, would you mind highlighting my hard?” “Nah, but I’ll highlight your cool. I think you’ll get to roll it just as much.”

Just because highlighting is a way of signaling what you want to see doesn’t mean that those desires can’t be explicitly stated as well. The designers don’t want you to be coy with each other; they want you talking to each other, and the rules around highlighting stats is designed to get you doing just that. I think it is precisely because this rule is important to communication between players that it gets written up as a move rather than shuffled into the text where an inattentive reader could easily miss it. This is something that should be a part of every game. Of course, if your game is humming right along and everyone is in the zone, then you might forget the move, and there’s no problem with that because the purpose of the move is already being met. But when the game falters, and you’re irritated that your hot is highlighted when you want to be going aggro and seizing shit by force, then the move is there to help you have the conversation you need to have with your fellow players. That is some sharp and considerate design.

The last thing I want to focus on here is Vincent’s (at least, I’m assuming the “I” in this passage is Vincent, so Meg, forgive me (and correct me) if I’m wrong) “personal rule” for “highlighting stats so that they can shine”: “unless I have a specific reason to highlight a specific stat, I highlight sharp, weird, or their best stat.” Picking the best stat makes a ton of sense because presumably that is the stat that the player most wants to be using anyway. Highlighting sharp and weird lines up with other comments in the text, such as “It’s fine to give her what she wants, much of the time – after all, you want everybody to be opening their brains, you don’t want to chase them away from it” (148). Hot and hard both give characters a way to proactively engage the world around them, but sharp is how characters understand the state of that world around them and how to purposefully and effectively engage with it. Reading situations and persons create all kinds of textures and details in the fiction against which characters can play. The more players have their characters trigger those moves, the more information the table has to know what is happening and what is at stake. At any time, then, and especially when the situation is uncertain, play is sharpened by characters reading the world around them, so when you aren’t interested in seeing a character do anything in particular, highlighting their sharp is a great way to make sure interesting things are happening and being discussed. Opening your brain works in a similar way, dealing with the matters of the maelstrom rather than the physical world.

In a game that is fueled by the desires and actions of the main characters, encouraging the characters to analyze and take in the world (and its psychic maelstrom) around them is central to driving play forward.