kristof65 said:

But the flip side to that is that it is the same as for ability use; you start off with only a small score and work your way up. The Cautious/Reckless thing (as far as I see it) works the same. Your character could be 100% reckless, but that means something different at the start of your campaign to what it means at the end.

That spectrum looks as though it's designed to grow throughout a character's career, and that's not so different from a bunch of other character variables.

My question is how will movement along the stance meter work? Will a player be able to move willy-nilly between any two points on their characters meter or is it one space per turn? There's a big difference between the player being able to choose any point along his spectrum of choices each turn and having to travel the spectrum. If it is one space per turn, it means it might take you a few rounds to work yourself up to 3 reckless if you started an encounter in a conservative stance. Similarly, once you'd worked yourself up to that level, it would take the same amount of time to "cool down" if you wanted to revert to a conservative stance.

I can see pros and cons to either. On the one hand, allowing free selection gives the player more control (just bounded by the ends of the spectrum for his particular stance meter). On the other hand, traveling forces a player to deal with the consequences of their previous actions. If you were all out 3 reckless the previous turn, you can't immediately adopt a conservative stance, but can only decide to become a little less reckless. So using our Thief character as an example, it's quite a bit different if he's moving while hiding in shadows in a conservative stance to ensure he stays well hidden and suddenly decides to go for the totally reckless backstab (jumping from one end of his spectrum to the other on the stance meter), vs. having to gradually take a more reckless stance each turn.  In the second case, the player would have to time his character's physical movement with his stance meter movement, each round getting more reckless as he approached, possibly foiling his attempts to sneak up on the opponent.  On the other hand, it's more "realistic" to assume that after making a wild furious attack the Thief might have a harder time immediately trying to hide again.

Also, at this point we don't know anything about what other factors influence a character's stance although we know there will be some. Is this GM fiat? For example if the character's are negotiating with an NPC and the party's best negotiator is taking a conservative approach, the green dice give him a slightly better chance to succeed, but potentially cause a delay. In this case the GM may decide that the negotiation took longer than expected and what that means to the party as a result. Contrast that with the GM saying, "you're pressed for time and thus forced to be a little more reckless than you'd like. Shift right on your stance meter." Now the GM is influencing the outcome by increasing the odds that the character will not succeed or potentially have a negative effect, offset by the potential to be more wildly successful, rather than just reacting to the outcome of the dice roll.

I think it's said in the seminar that you can move one space per turn, but I'm not 100% sure (been a bit too long since I've seen the video :P).