Barrier.

For the last 3 campaigns, we've been using the version that goes

Tell them a secret, a habit, or what you think about something they care about.

Habits are *great*, by the way.

Umm... one secret I revealed was that Kim, my Driver, kept a drawn photograph of her parents in a secret panel of her submarine.

It turned into a whole crusade about parenthood--setting up a home for all the orphaned kids around.

I was playing with a move that isn't exactly that, but it's recasting a negative as a positive (which is also what you're doing):

When you take advantage of the hold's hospitality, roll+numberOfDebilities.  On a hit, they'll feed you for a while.  On a 10+, just about everyone really believes you deserve it.

Oh that's really cool.

A houserule that my table plays with (harvested from someone else on this board) is that when you highlight a Battle-hardened character's Cool, you're actually highlighting Act Under Fire. So when he Acts Under Fire, even though he rolls Hard, he gets an XP because Cool is marked. It keeps stat-sub moves from messing with what I think is the best part of highlighting, which is incentivizing behavior, at the cost of being slightly less intuitive.

I've played both with this variant and without. I think I prefer it.

It's ripe territory for a custom move, too:

Tactical: "When you relay useful information to another PC (say, gained from reading a situation, or else-wise), they take +1-forward to act on that info."

Something like that, sure.

Wait, isn't that _exactly_ like using Hx to help?

Did you fill out the first session worksheets? I find they help to nail the PCs to the world.

[Advancement Options, XP, and Manipulate]

As far as the XP goes, that is addressed in this thread; Advancement Options, XP, and Manipulate. Basically you can tinker with the number of XP required to buy an Advance if you want to prolong the "lifespan" of your characters. I'm of the opinion that Monsterheart PCs just have a set lifespan though, and you're not going to do epic, five year long (real time) campaigns with this game.

It's not about prolonging the "lifespan" of the characters; the character's going to stick around to the end of the season: retiring is a season advancement.

It's about having to change the rules to have experience mean anything for the character in season 2.

The game has a reward system, and it seems to break.

Isn't the Faith whatever your particular Dogs say it is?

A while ago, I ran Monsterhearts; the intent was to podcast it. We did, for the first few sessions. (http://heliumbuffalo.tumblr.com/)

Mostly, the game worked very well. But it fell apart at the end of the season, and it left me wondering if the game itself was flawed or if our group/play was incorrect for it.

A few things came up that indicate that perhaps the game wasn't optimized for multi-season play.

In particular, the fact that there are only 9 advancements available for each Skin; this means that if your character hits their 5th advancement (triggering the end of the season next session) and then takes something other than switching playbooks for their Season Advancement, the character will only have four slots left for advancement. This seems like it could very easily leave a character in the second season with no advancements to take midway through.

Similarly, we had a great deal of trouble with the timing of the season finale. The game said that things should be wrapping up in the world by then, so I kind of figured that, you know, they would be. But they weren't, and the season finale felt very awkward and forced; we HAD to resolve all these conflicts RIGHT NOW. In the words of one of the players, it wasn't feral at all, and it kind of made everyone mad.

We elected not to make public the final session.

Maybe some sort of advice on how to handle these things might be useful?

What would you say are the main differences that would arise playing AW like this?

Do you think a game that has been running for awhile with a single MC could survive transition into this?

Have you done this?

The 10+ option of FUVS doesn't do anything to NPCs.

There are rules for it in the book, I believe.

The new character does their "on your turn" stuff to everyone. They can use an "on their turn" move if they have any unused ones.

The other characters each can do an unused "on your turn" move, or just give them the value they give to "everyone else".

Existing characters are likely to have unused Hx moves if they have changed playbooks.

Man, is every member of this gang okay with their leader being extorted?

Is Go Aggro always basically coercion by threat of force? Is the only difference between Go Aggro and Manipulate the difference between physical force and some other kind of force ("out of my way or I'll knife you" vs. "out of my way or I'll tell Duke how you've been sleeping with his girl")? Either way, with Go Aggro or Seduce/Manipulate, there's always a "choose A or B" element to it, where you're sticking somebody with a tough choice?

Yes, Go Aggro is coercion by threat of force. One of the key differences between Go Aggro and Manipulate is that, when you Go Aggro, you can't be bluffing; you always do the harm you are threatening to do.

Is the consequence of a move ever another move? (i.e., if I Go Aggro on someone to try to bully them into giving me a case of supplies, and they decide to force my hand and suck it up, can I decide that my consequence is, instead of inflicting harm or whatever, to Seize the supplies By Force? Or is that stupid, and I should have just skipped directly to SBF if that was going to be my ultimate intent?)

You do the harm, but I think you could just do another move to Seize By Force afterward

What about situations where a character wants to use violence, and that's it-- no ultimatum like GA, no motive to acquire something like SBF? If Tom's a psychotic bastard and somebody needs to put him down, and I decide that somebody's got to be me... what's my move? Am I Seizing (his life) By Force?

There doesn't need to be a move every time. Though in situations where you don't want something from them and you're not in any real physical danger from them, I like to use Act Under Fire to get away with it clean.