Help me understand the logic behind advancement?

Adam, Age 11: What's baseball?
Calvin: It's a game, son. I can explain it pretty easily. See, there's a pitcher...
Adam, Age 11: Oh, like a painting.
Calvin: No, a pitch-er.
Adam, Age 11: Like one of mom's?
Calvin: No. There's a man who throws the ball to a man who has a bat.
Adam, Age 11: Oh! The nocturnal flying mammal?

you're playing your character "naturally," which in this context appears to mean "without specifically trying to roll or not roll your highlighted stats".

It also includes not specifically trying not to try to roll or not roll your stats. :)

In other words, I think everyone's looking way too deep into this. If, as a player, you want to roll your stats to maximize your improvement than you do. If not, then fine. It'll happen "naturally". That little bit of game is there for the players who like it and doesn't interfere with the ones who aren't interested in gaming like that.

Personally, I'm still confused about why that would be, as the extra effort involved in my "8 bubble" system seems to be less than the effort saved by skipping the highlighting procedure from start-of-session.

I don't see any of it as "effort".

"Hey, Hotrod, you got the highest Hx with Poppy still, right? What are you highlighting?"

"Uhh...let's see her hotness."

"Sweet. Mark it and add in Hard."

That's it. It's not rocket surgery.

Johnstone, my personal hangup is not about "does advancement make sense in the fiction" - a primary pleasure of RPGs for me is the process of making unexpected sense out of nonsense - but "do the criteria for advancement cause me to think about things that feel intrusively different from thinking about what my character wants to do next."

Thinking about the example of D&D makes me realize that although most of the time I don't get this disconnect, I do when the player-knowledge that I'm only 100 XP away from leveling up causes me to want to take more risks than my character normally would. I'm fine with that because a) it happens infrequently and b) the rest of the time I've internalized a way of making sense of the overlap between player & character motivations that comes naturally to me.

Vincent, you're quite right that my issues here are ones of how things feel to me & I won't really know that until I've played with it for a while, and Johnstone, your suggestions for how to think of what advancement means to characters may well help me internalize it when I do. Thanks!

Cool man, I hope it helps.

I just want to be clear(er), though. I wasn't trying to explain how advancement makes sense in the fiction. You can explain how reading four people and opening your bain once makes you NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH just as well as me or anybody.

I was trying to say that the game itself doesn't necessarily make those highlighted stats intrusive when you are thinking about what your character wants to do next. For me, I've felt that they really help crystallize my character's immediate goals and especially what methods he feels will be most productive. If I make decisions as a player, against what my character wants, it's because I choose to do that, not because of which stats are highlighted. So I know that it can be done.

If they continue to feel obtrusive in play, to you, then yeah, of course you'll want to try another method. And I'll be glad to offer suggestions. It's less work if a simple change of perspective does the trick, but if not, hack away, right?