EDIT: Thoughtless original name edited out in the title, until I can come up with something better.
This has an unfortunate name collision with “Stars and Wishes”, which is another tool that I love, but please note that is not what I’m talking about in this thread.
The idea is that, in a long term campaign, you make a metagame vote for certain things to appear or not to appear in the game, by quickly annotating your character sheet.
Sometimes, in games, we take a high score / skill value / advantage, because we want that thing to feature prominently, and show off how awesome our character is compared to others with lesser ability.
Other times, we take such defensively: I want a high willpower because I dislike losing control of my character, or etc. We take “wealthy” because we don’t want to keep track of every penny. We’re trying to bar our characters from having that kind of problem.
The gameplay technique is simple. Put a star on your character sheet next to the things you want to show off (to let your PC “star” in the game), and an X next to things you want to avoid (to “bar” them from affecting you). The GM can then look for patterns in what the players want to have challenged or featured, and what they want to avoid.
Note that “bars” are different from Veils: veils are something you don’t want to see in the game at all. Bars are something you don’t want to affect your character.
See also “Play Unsafe” for some thoughts by John Wick on encouraging the former type of play, and discouraging the latter (super-summarizing John’s ideas, so probably misrepresenting him a bit here).
