I recognise your problem, Paul. And the way I see it, the hard truth is this: the recovery times set for how long it takes to get better blissed out on chillstabs suppose that the recovery time on your own, "like everybody else", is way longer. It's like, the rules say "3:00 or 6:00 harm goes away by itself" and we immedately jump to the conslusion that it goes away by itself with no side effects and in a time that allows for PCs to keep "adventuring" at their leisure.

If you want to use the stated time intervals in the Angel playbook, you have to make ordinary healing very un-heroic and (sorry) taking characters out of the action action for looong stretches of in-game time. I have a friend wo damaged her arm somehow when lifting over her capacity. I can't imagine any MC would have set that to more than 1-harm. But she couldn't use her hand properly for a year, and was thus out of work. That's reality, and make it seem real, right?

I know the feeling, sitting with the Angel playbook, telling the player "great, you spend the stock and they're on their way. What does it say, more exactly?" They read aloud, and everyone goes "huh" because your ordinary "hey, why don't you all erase one harm from last session, it's been a couple of days" has been way more lenient.

I know that if I want to keep the rate of background healing I've been doing so far in AW, I'd have to buff up the Angel.

You're right that there is no specialised "when you sneak or hide…" move. What you do is listen to whatever the player wants to do, and see what move that would be.

Sometimes it will fall under "Tricks of the trade": picking pockets is listed, and I would allow the player to let that DEX roll cover the entire act of sneaking up to someone in order to pick their pocket. Sometimes it will be Defying Danger: if you're hunted by goblins down the corridor and you want to disappear into the shadows, you're defying the danger by getting out of the way, so roll+DEX.

Say you enter a castle through the window using a grapple hook and want to make it to the throne room without being noticed. The GM might simply decide, depending on how often the guards patrol, that it's no problem for you as long as you take it slow and stick to the shadows. Or they might say that everything's fine until this one moment where you turn a corner and catch a glimpse of the light of a guard's torch before you duck back behind the corner, what do you do? As in, most of the sneaking is okay but there's this one time i's put to the test.

Or maybe they just say that you're obviously spending a moment to survey this dangerous area, so roll+DEX for "Trap sense". "Is there a trap here and if so, what activates it" works perfectly well for patrolling guards. "What else is hidden here" might find you a good hiding spot that means you don't have to roll to hide there – you just do it.

In general, quite a few situations with sneaking are pretty binary in that either you have a hiding place or safe path to sneak on, or you don't, and the skill of the sneaker lies in finding these, either beforehand (trap sense, discern realities) or just when needed (Defying danger by getting out of the way, acting fast, or quick thinking, i.e. DEX or INT). And the thief wants high DEX, so they'll be good at that anyway.

We played a long game where horses were the standard mode of travel (apart form walking) and the biker gang roaming the wastes was a Big Deal They had bikes, dammit! You couldn't outrun them! It worked well. There were a handful of horses in the holding, so befriending the hardholder meant the Operator and the Battlebabe could borrow them when visiting another holding.

I just want to chip in a situation where go aggro made sense that isn't "I put my gun in your face and tell you to do x". My gunlugger Doberman was outside the pallisade training this kid Bullet how to shoot with a rifle (she was about eight years old so we figured it was time) when we were surprised by this gang of crazy mask-wearing cannibals stalking the forest edge. They took down Playboy, a guy nearby watching his sheep, and it was obvious they would be all over the two of us in a minute. Doberman draws his magnum and starts shooting into their gang, it's a bit too far to hit anything reliable with that kind of weapon. I roll for go aggro, and what I want them to do is not come closer. I roll a 10+ and they choose to suck it up, meaning they break into a charge out of the woods and Doberman picks two of them off before turning around and rolling for Fuck this shit.

The roll here was done when I had already said "I start shooting" and the point of it was to determine the outcome of that shooting. Because of what I asked of them, most of the 7-9 options wouldn't make much sense since barricading in and backing off calmly was pretty much what I wanted. Giving me something I wanted might have worked – I don't know what it would have been, but our MC is good at coming up with that kind of things. Also note that it was hardly a question of whether they would suck it up or back off, since my harm as established wasn't very much to a bloodthirsty band of lunatics – I didn't have the fire rate or effective range to take out more than one or two of them before they'd be all over me.

Just to add about the countdown nature of the Touchstone sex move: in a hack we're playing now, about urban fantasy god-type beings, there's a playbook for the Mimic, an infiltrator who wants to end the world. His sex move goes like this:

"When you make love to another character, ask yourself whether you could live with killing them. If not, scribble out an advancement option you haven't yet taken. Don't scribble out "Change your character to another playbook".

I imagine the kind of move goes well for different types of "going native" scenarios.

(The funny thing is that the Mimic in our game has killed and taken the place of the God of Love...)

It doesn't really matter, when you think about it. Those rolls are going to be made every session regardless of what the player wants. Highlighting serves two purposes:
- dish out the xp
- tell the players what the others find interesting in your character right now

For the first one, it doesn't matter as long as you're consistent. If you change to hard from something else right before rolling Wealth, that means next session you'll have to change before rolling Wealth. If you re-highlight after rolling, it's... well, the point is it adds up to the same amount of xp regardless.

For the second reason, it doesn't matter. They won't choose to roll Wealth depending on whether the other players name Hard their interesting stat – they can't choose not to roll.

Yeah, pretty much. It snowballed out of the 5-minute game design challenge on story-games. Now I'm skyping with an american late nights talking about playtesting.