Something I’ve not been able to figure out in the Enemy Within podcast is the use of “style points”. From the raw audio, what I can tell is that the players seem to award or deduct style points from each other any time something particularly cool or, well, styling is done. For example, at one point a player writes an NPC a threatening note, and when it’s read out loud the message while very clear is delightfully subtle, and one or two of the other players agree that the guy who wrote the note deserves a style point. And then I think it sounds like they write this down. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the GM involved in them, it appears to be purely for the players, by the players.
Are there any mechanics behind it? I can’t say I’ve ever heard anyone applying the style point value to any kind of dice roll. Is it a joke? Perhaps, but if so it’s a shared joke that all the players are fully bought into. Perhaps just a clever way for the players to acknowledge each other when they do something cool. Maybe at the end of the podcast they’ll declare a “style winner”.
Has anyone else every played with style points? Is there more too it, or am I over-analyzing it because I have so little to go on? If anyone reading this has played with something like this, please let me know, I’m super curious.
Closest I ever had was tallying up XP at the end of a session, I would ask players to nominate each other for cool stuff/in character stuff. Partially because I can never trust my memory.