Marking experience for beginning-of-session moves?

How do you like to handle experience and beginning-of-session moves?

Last time I played AW, I was a Quarantine with a permanently-highlighted weird. We decided to mark experience for the beginning-of-session roll+weird move.

However, since it wasn't triggered by anything in the fiction, it felt funny to me to be getting an extra experience mark every session for no apparent reason.

Similarly, if you write love letters, and the characters roll highlighted stats in those, do you have them mark experience?

I'm running a game where I gave the hardholder a beginning-of-session love letter based on hard, and then he rolled his Wealth move, as usual. With hard highlighted, that's two experience ticks right there. The players looked at me funny when that happened.

I'd love to hear your arguments for and against!

The way Monsterhearts (for example) handles it is that you only benefit from one highlighted stat in a given scene - perhaps the pre-game rolls count as a single scene (or not really a scene at all?). Technically, each roll comes with a risk, right, so putting your hand in a meat grinder twice may be worth the experience? YMMV.

As for solutions: if the other players feel it is unfair, they can always choose to highlight one of the Hardholder's (or the Quarantine's, in your case) other stats, and then it is the GM's option to then highlight something: if the GM opts to highlight the Quarantine's Weird or the Hardholder's Hard, the GM is making the choice to level faster, not mix things up.

Yeah, they mark xp. No big deal.

What John said.  Except, marking xp is awesome; bring it!

Vx has said a few places that he didn't worry so much about balance between playbooks the way that other games might construe balance between PCs. So having characters marking experience at different rates seems, like, whatever, to me.

Yeah, AW is not really concerned with balance.

And marking XP is awesome, agreed.

One possible disadvantage, though, is that it affects our highlighting choices pretty strongly.

When it comes to marking xp I don't worry about balance between players, my concern is the march towards what feels like end-game, or at least the end of the characters path. Once a character gets deep enough into the advances they feel powerful and like they stop progressing to some extent.. which from my experience makes the game feel like it ought to be near an and, or a significant event.

This is my concern where xp gain comes in, how it drives the feel of the campaign. Advanced xp leads to character retirement, new characters, and very powerful ones. Shifts the tone of the game at least.

None of this is bad even, it's just not something you always want to get into very quickly

All this thinking about it? Crazy! I highlight what I think it would be neat to see that character doing. If that means they get a zillion xp, cool.