I have been summoned and shall now barf-forth apocritiquita.

Highlighting stats would be a great XP mechanic in a game where there was a more reliable “roll to do stuff” move like in Uncharted Worlds

Where it fails in AW (1e at least) is that the moves aren’t general purpose “do stuff” moves. They are extremely situation/response specific.

Which means if you have play where the right thing to do (for the player/the character/the fiction) is not covered by a move, the GM just fiats it based on the principles.

This is also a fine mechanic except it clashes with the XP rule.

You may have Hot highlighted and you may be doing a ton of Hot related stuff, but if it all gets resolved by Fiat, no XP is awarded. You only get XP for doing Hot stuff if the Hot stuff fits the narrow box of what specific thing triggers a move. Then you get to roll Hot and Mark XP.

This sucked for almost every player in every game I’ve played because it means either the whole “just say what you do and if you do it do it” thing breaks, and some players got no XP (because all their stuff was resolved by Fiat) while other players got a ton (because all their stuff was resolved by roll); or you spend the entire session playing the AW equivalent of a Worker Placement Board Game — just waiting for the opportunity to play your narration worker on the appropriate move action space.

So either XP needs to be awarded for doing Hot stuff regardless of whether a roll was triggered, or AW needs a different XP system and the cool highlight method needs to be saved for PbtA games where everything you do triggers a roll of some kind.

Is that screamy enough, or should I have used more CAPS?