Sure, thanks for that clarification. I think I’ve got what you’re saying!

I don’t specifically disagree but I think a couple real-world things (can) ameliorate that effect:

* You’re not really voting for Hot, you’re voting for Hot mooooves. It’s very meta, very authorial. Not sure any player who understands the advancement is really thinking “okay they want to see me be generally hot.” But maybe, baby.

* I feel like maybe you’re discounting the incentive to the player to engage in fictional-positioning authorship type stuff. Like…nudging the fiction toward the moves that’ll pay. Your battlebabe player who wiggles his ass at the guards is playing poorly if he wants to chase XPs. Battlebabes are all about in-your-face engagement, which is why they’re good at seduce/manipulate and fucking great at go aggro once they take the must-have Ice Cold move. Which I guess gets back to bullet #1, which is that highlight hot doesn’t mean “be hot,” it means “make hot moves.”

Although I’ll also totally cop to, even last night, my players (at least) shorthanding all that. Someone highlighted the battlebabe’s Sharp because they wanted to see him be smart and not just sexy. Which, yeah, strongly implies the thing you’re talking about but really it’s more meta, more “please make some Read A … moves and put that shit to use.” Which is maybe distastefully meta! I know it is for maybe…two of my players.

Again, not specifically disagreeing with anything at all that you’ve said. Just ruminating.

Actually I think I do kind of disagree with the general thread of “gm fiat” running through your critique. I totally get that that’s some ugly-bad stuff in trad play, but practical MCing is so off-the-cuff and improvisational! And if you’re actually for-reals “playing to find out” and trying very fucking hard to be principled about your prep and the fiction, is that reeeeeally “fiat?” Really? Fiat to my mind has a very heavy “because I said so” feeling of arbitrariness and maybe abuse of trust to it. Which to my mind mischaracterizes the role. But I may be reading my own biases about that term into what you’re saying.