I thought I remembered Vincent saying that he wanted to make it into a playbook to give out at GenCon but that after that it would be up to Bret what to do with it.

Well anyone could put together a playbook for personal use. I'm pretty sure I could lay one out, but having the time to muck with that is an entirely different question, and without the fonts and graphic elements it wouldn't look like the rest of the playbooks.

Y'know, a blank character sheet would be useful. Fill in the character type and improvement lines, and we wouldn't need playbooks for custom classes like this…

Vincent,

if that's the case, I'm confused again.  Consider the following system:

"Whenever you make a move, mark improvement.  When you fill your 8th bubble, select an improvement option."  

Could you explain in what way the current system improves on the hypothetical?  

Think of this angle: Who's job is it to hand out experience in AW?

The MC? No, they just highlight a stat. The other players? One of them just highlights a stat. Yourself? No, you gotta work to earn it by doing what others have highlighted.

The end effect is: "Here," say the MC and another player, "We're going to give you experience for doing this stuff. Except we're not going to give it to you: you give it to yourself."

So instead of having a GM that awards discretionary XP according to their taste and their vision of the game, you've got a negotiation. The MC and another player are going to declare their taste, and you're going to make a statement in-play about what you think of their taste. Rinse, repeat, and you'll find play and advancement awards converge into the sweet spot of the group, while staying dynamic enough to keep things fresh.

Asking questions is pretty awesome, and is the thing I think I'll be importing into any game I run. I don't think I couldn't import it, at this point.

The hardest thing about being MC, I think (and not having done it yet, mind), is avoiding trying to own the game like you have to as GM. I think the best antidote for that is to lean hard on "ask questions", and "play to find out what happens". I think "be a fan of the characters" is the explicit principle telling the MC not to own the game, but I think those other two are the direct method.

To be honest, I hadn't actually grasped that insight until I came into this thread and started writing, and then you named it. So: awesome!

Except the structure of 4E doesn't support me nearly as much as AW's structure in this regard (is this true? why is this?)

The kind of player-priority flags that Burning Wheel contains (and 4e lacks IMNSHO) are there to make GM plots and player agendas compatible.

MCs are not allowed to have plots, so they don't need flags to tell them where to modify their plots to accommodate player agency.

Y'know, the skinner doesn't have to be removing things in a sexy way, either, to be arresting in a sensible way in the fiction.

Picture a dapper violin-cello player whipping his battered top-hat off with a flourish; the last lounge singer removing and hanging up her shawl with an "I own this place" attitude; the skinner whipping off his trademark ankle-length leather coat and flinging it over the back of the chair as he enters/interrupts the meeting. Consider that such non-sexy uses of the move might be the only way these skinners ever invoke it.

You can have lots of fun with this interpretation of An Arresting Skinner if you fully embrace the colour-first ethos of the game. Go ahead and make a skinner that isn't about the sexy; don't worry about restricting the move with your character's colour. Leading with the colour is way more interesting than leaving every mechanical use of the move open.

Moving slightly back on topic: Imagine an NPC brainer starting from the Skinner as a template. They command attention where-ever they go, everyone does what they want, and they can just call people to them like nothing. And everyone will swear up and down that there's no psychic mucking about going on… they just happen to want to do whatever this NPC suggests. That's almost creepier, standing on the outside looking in, than if they were an obvious brainer analogue running roughshod over people's brains.

Yeah. Idle hands…

[…everything…]

Yeah. This! This sounds like the AW Way.

Sweet. I'll point my MC at this if he hasn't already been by.