[Jason]

Thanks everyone for the input. These comments pretty much get at the central issue here for me: I want the story to feel on-theme, but I also want to make sure everyone's having fun. If I wanted to just tell a story by myself, I'd write fiction. I tried thinking of what might take advantage of the fact that this is collaborative storytelling, and realized that I don't have a specific storyline decided upon going forward. It occurs to me that a good compromise might be to think about what kinds of roles my players want to play, and come up with a story that lets them fill those roles. As long as he understands that his character is going to be seen as more than a bit rebellious (and we talked, and he does), at least we'll be on the same page.

So, I suggested to my player that if he really would rather have an extra Force instead of a distinction, that might be a step slowly toward grooming him for a Word that might fit his character, his Superior's Word, and the Word of War, a Superior he's also worked well with: Rebellion. (Also, I didn't tell him this extra bit, but that would fit nicely into a story idea I was considering, with the Demon of Insubordination getting "promoted" to the Demon of Rebellion to reward/punish him for thwarting Malphas's attempt to engineer a premature apocalypse.) My player is rightly wary of this, seeing as how he's seen more than one Word-bound angel go nuts, so it's definitely a mixed blessing as rewards go. We'll see if we go that route. He's a little sheepish about his character being such a focus of the story going forward, but I figure we'll have plenty of opportunities to shift the spotlight among everyone who had a role in averting the apocalypse.