Okay, so I've been thinking a lot about the 'Qualities' as discussed in the Knife & Candle hack, as well as reading the
Failbetter Games Blog about some of the design decisions behind Echo Bazaar, and I've come up with a real quick and dirty way to combine AW with 'any quality can be used in a test'.
Basically you roll+quality whenever you do something involving that quality, and keep the 10+ is total success, 7-9 is mixed success, and 6- is failure breakdown. Throw in strata if you want to have a range of values for qualities over -3 through +3.
Pros: you can create and add qualities on the fly, character modularity is extremely easy to achieve, and qualities can go up and down from in game events, making stats more dynamic.
Cons: you lose the laser-focus of moves and the clear instructions those give to players about 'things you do in the game', as well as the clear instructions they provide to the MC for 'when something goes wrong'. If you do want specific results per quality, then that's a hell of a lot of custom moves. Players may try to wrangle for using one quality when another makes more sense, making the 'to do it, do it' and 'when you do it, you do it' rules much harder to interpret and apply.
Does anybody think there's any merit in this (not for every game, obviously)? I can't tell right now if it would ever be good, or if it's a step in the wrong direction from what makes AWs moves and stats so good at what they do.