The year is 23xx.  Megacorporations eclisped the state as the powers of the world and expanded their territory until the world was divided by 4 powers.  Universal Standard, decadent masters of Space and the Americas.  Hevezda Unlimited, leaders of the warrens and gulags of Europe.  Patala Investment, brokers of wealth and life in South Asia and Africa, and your home, the glorious Empire of Daybreak Industrial. 

In Houston they built the great Pattern, a space-beyond-space which facilitated storage and shipping through matter-gates.  In Dubai, they programmed the Rings, a revolutionary information network that coded access and account ID into the human genome.  The powers of Eurasia entered a biological arms race, uplifting animals to sentience, breeding great beasts for war and labor, and reifying the superiority of the Executives in blood.  Though rapid transformation left many behind, it looked like the dawn of a golden age, until the treacherous Turtle Clan unleashed the Shadow.

Now the locked vaults of past seep into the present, and the annals of the internet have come alive, drowning this human island in a tide of chaos and blood.  The metaphorical sea is metaphorically fucking rising, but that's not your problem.  Your problem is the bastards in charge of this island.  You aren't going to play by their rules. 

The Stats:

Earth: Earth is your attentiveness, your grounding, your receptivity. 
Fire: Fire is your energy, your impulse, your creative spark.
Metal: Metal is your hard edge, your discipline, your competitive streak.   
Water: Water is your flow, your cool, your tranquility, and your mystic mojo.
Wood:  Wood is your flexibility, your elegance, your social fucking grace. 

The Basic Moves:

When you pull something from the pattern, roll+Water

10+: As below, but add it to your Account. 
7-9: Choose 2: You get what you wanted, you get something quality, you don't take 1-harm(ap), it's not loud

When you look into the rings, roll+earth

10+: you see it
7-9: Choose two: you see what you wanted, they can't see you, you don't add a new spirit threat to the current front

When issue a challenge, roll+metal

10+: You don't take harm, or you harm something [big]
7-9: trade harm, but you get one possession, or one favour,

Note: "harm" in this game is frequently not actual harm.  You'll have weapons like "Stalking Tiger Style; harm: You collect a blood sample.  Or Sittar of Somnolence; area loud harm: target falls asleep." 

When you invoke your authority, roll+wood
10+: NPCs do what you want, PCs act under fire
7-9: one of the targets is a ninja

When you whip up a gadget, roll+fire

10+: Choose 1: it works right away, it isn't [dangerous]
7-9: it's [dangerous] and it takes a while

Note: The basic moves list is definitely incomplete.  These moves replaced Seize by Force and Open Your Brain, but there will definitely be an equivalent to Acting Under Fire and Reading a Person/Sitch.  Probably Going Aggro and manipulate, too. 

Daniel, Thanks so much for taking the time to post your experiences.  I found them an interesting and mostly reassuring read. 

Vincent, your point about the uselessness of "session" as a rubric is well-taken.  I guess I was treating "session" as a unit of playtime rather than and individual meeting, I guess I care less about improvements/session than improvements/45 minutes of spotlight.  (that's the same as per-session for a 4-player, 3-hour session.) 

I also especially like your formulation of the problem as advancement vs. development, and I think that's really the heart of my concern.  It takes time, or perhaps a better way to phrase it would be, it takes moves to set up a character for an improvement to be fictionally appropriate, so the question becomes, can you justify a stat-substituting character's improvement in the potentially as few as 5 moves it takes to earn that advance.  I can certainly imagine a number of five-move sequences that could leave the fiction wanting an improvement, but I'm not sure yet how often moves will be spent "dithering". 

I also realize that I've assumed that the game ends at the same point for all characters, but it sounds to me as though you're suggesting that characters can phase out one by one as theirs stories end.  I guess my only concern with that is whether it's practical to introduce a new character if you know practical constraints will limit the lifespan of the group. 

Thanks so much for taking the time to look at this, and I regret the adversarial tone I ended up taking. 

John, you're the fourth person, AT LEAST to step in to tell me "nothing to see here, move along."

First of all, I don't care how many playtest games you ran unless you can tell me that this game has been *destructively* tested.  

Second, while I really have no reason to doubt your word, I also don't see why not one person can spare the time to tell me

"In our game we averaged N improvement per session, with the fastest characters achieving N+M.  Characters with stat substitution moves advanced faster/slower/the same as character who took their playbooks' more unique abilities.
 
The introduction of new holdings and gangs had a positive effect/negative effect/didn't happen.  When the game ended, approximately X improvements had been handed out and the characters' power level caused the game to end/had nothing to do with the game ending."  

If you've playtested the game hundreds of times, there should be piles of this kind of thing lying around unless you didn't bother to actually collect data.  

Motipha,

You make an interesting point, and one I definitely intend to take to heart.  It's definitely a big part of the answer.  But consider: all RPGs can be said to take place somewhere on a continuum between reader's theater and improv theater.  

At one extreme, you go in already knowing who lives, who dies, and who has sex with whom.  The only thing the players provide is their rendition of the script, the depth of emotion or witty ad-libbed line that makes the character yours.  This can still demand a lot of a player--we swoon over Jacoby's Claudius or Tennant's Hamlet, right?  but many people do want more control of their fate.  

In traditional tabletop gaming, I'd say this is most closely represented by D&D, where the adventure is written out ahead of time and it's generally assumed that the bad guys die, the PCs live, and the balance is restored to the force.  Or for another example, I'm currently running a game of aWoD which is basically the players living through a story I wrote.  I came up with the plot, wrote all the PCs (with some feedback from the players) and gave them their interconnected backstory.  

At the other extreme is improvisational theatre, where any participant can introduce new characters and elements at whim and there's no pre-arranged goal or endpoint.    This area is explored by some games like Munchausen (reportedly, I haven't read it).  The downside, quite simply, is that coming up with interesting new material takes effort and the more you allow things to deviate from a track, the more effort you spend inventing things on the spot, and the more things you came up with ahead of time get wasted.  

Now it's pretty clear to me that AW trends toward the improve side of things, and that's fine.  But it's also clear to me that AW is not intended to be some kind of ideologically pure expression of improv.  After all, you fill out a worksheet full of threats ahead of time, right?  And you spend time between-session working up a cast.  If the characters somehow managed to kill off your entire cast of named characters during a session, you'd have to stop and make new ones, which would slow play and get exhausting.  Same for if they solved all the threats you had planned; you'd need to send them home early or think really fast.  

So I think the guideline of looking through crosshairs is a good one, but it's gotta be tempered by human fallibility.  At the rate at which PCs kill named characters, solve threats, or acquire improvements goes to infinity, the game *will* become impossible for a human MC to run.  The question becomes, "what is the highest rate of turnover a typical MC can accommodate", and "do stat-substituters push games over the edge."  That's an empirical question for which I don't have the data, but I'd be grateful to hear from anyone who does.  

NilsH,

You and Chris have both emphasized the importance of the MC not predicting anything.  Could you explain why you feel that way, and why its importance outweighs real-life scheduling concerns?

Also--It's possible and even likely that the rule has been tested and found good, but if that's the case, it shouldn't be difficult to show me the money.  As a reminder, my assertion is that:

1: A character with multiple stat-substitution moves will earn improvements dramatically faster than other characters, and

2: That this will lead to an undesirable result

All Vincent, or anyone knowledgeable, needs to do is disprove one of those statements.  Either tell me that those characters have been played and did not earn improvements especially fast (preferably accompanied by an approximate breakdown of where Xp was coming from) or by saying they've played successful games with rapidly advancing characters and explaining how it went. 

NilsH-- I have several thoughts on your post, but to begin with, I flat-out disagree with the notion that the MC shouldn't try to foresee anything. 

I go to a college where each academic session is 11 weeks long.  Assume that one can't organize anything for the very first weekend, and that people want the weekends of reading period and finals free for studies.  Assume further that I got away for the weekend once per term.  That means that there are 8 weekends available for gaming.  Finally, assume that I play RPGs mostly for the character development that happens one your basic situation is set up. 

What happens if the game comes to end with the 6th session?  We make new characters?  We'd only get to play them twice; that's hardly satisfying or a good use of my time.  I think in this situation I have a compelling interest to make sure my game runs for exactly 8 sessions.   

Well the question is, when you're interacting with the sun-people, what's the biggest challenge?

Is it that you can't get them to do what you want?  Or that they are mentally infectious? 

Since you phrased the move as "when you try to get them to build defenses", I assumed that the defense were the focus of the moment rather than the weirdness.  It seems to me that if the challenge is motivating them, Hard, Hot, or even Cool might be appropriate.

If on the other hand it's not a question of whether you can get the cultists to work, but whether you run into cultists or normals, than Sharp or Weird makes sense.  Or if the Cultists cheerfully work, but try to infect you, then Weird makes sense.

Finally, you could break it down into two moves, I guess--make the custom move a Weird roll JUST to determine whether the player gets infected, then force them to actually Go Aggro or Manipulate to get the work done.