So Moonlighting gigs depend on establishing:
1) a paying customer
2) you or one of your crew who can do the work
3) the opportunity and the handshake to actually do the work.
The games I’ve played have made 2) and 3) the primary issue. As long as I can recruit and keep the skill needed to work the gig, and I’ve got time to arrange the gig, then the Operator can keep the gig.
What hasn’t been pushed much is 1). Customers seem to come and go from gig to gig, less essential to keeping the gig. (That may be an artefact of scale of the game setting, with larger populations, prolific advanced technology and the presence of Cities.)
I’m getting a feeling others have a different focus. Like holding 1) more centrally to concept of a gig so that a gig means an ongoing thing with a particular person or group. So that if that person or group leaves, dies or runs out of barter, then the Operator loses the gig. Do people do that?
And do you roll the Moonlighting at the start of every session? In my games, the start session roll depends on 3) the Operator being unoccupied and in a position to actually arrange the gigs. But I wonder if that’s an artefact of thinking of gigs as one-off jobs rather than ongoing arrangements.
Haven’t thought this out that much, but seems to me my take on it prioritized any two of those three wouldn’t be half bad… all depends on the sitch & style of your operation.
If the Operator wants a more stable gig with reoccurring arrangements, you are right in making the priority 2 & 3 while spreading 1 out over more traffick.
If a more focused potential for higher payments is desired on an open-ended work-site gig, then targeting higher paying but a smaller range in customer(s) would be more important… 1 & 2 would be where the Operator might prioritize then.
if it is a truly illicit or dangerous gig to the regional customs, with narrow windows and clean hands of prime concern for all participants, then the Operator will likely want to be be negotiating a one-shot gig-of-opportunity between one customer and some appropriate maestro of skinny means… which makes 1 & 3 the priority.
Great question!
I let the operator roll for gigs at the beginning of the session, usually, or when there’s time during the session (or if we skip in game time I let him roll again, but that’s how I do it).
The player I had playing an operator most of the time had done works for different employers every time, but if they usually work with someone that suddenly isn’t available (dead, or has left permanently/temporarily or else) they have to find someone else to work with.
And yes, the operator has to be able to work on the gig. It’s not something that happens just iff screen. If he is out in the wasteland for some time doing something he probably can’t roll for gigs unless, lets say, he can’t arrange something.
Also, based on what the player says, I may tell him that the specific kind of work he wants to accomplish may require some time to complete.
Long story short:*for me it’s all about context.
The Customer was a primary focus for my Operator’s gigs. They were either established NPCs or new one’s that were immediately named and made human and became part of the threats and fronts that surrounded our characters. Like the town doctor who kept trying to get the Savvyhead to leave my crew by offering him enough resources to realize his dream of fixing an airplane and flying to Hawaii.
Negative impacts often seem to relate to lack of market. Impoverished, shut out, entangled, etc.
The more adventurous ones are more like consequences of the work itself.
Oli: in that particular game – for a while there all your jobs were mostly done for people on my PCs shit-list – which was the MC trying to do the triangle thing… I think we just failed to take the bait mostly! Also we have definitely hit that size point now. (see also our chat last week on gigs vs. rackets etc. The Operator is big-time now!
I think the game SAYS when it is right to Moonlight. The start of the session might coincide with the necessary conditions.
I see the Operator as a hustler, not a magnate. You have to keep moving moving moving. Maybe there are ongoing arrangements that have been hard won… but that sounds a lot like a status quo to me and we all know what happens to them!
Doesn’t have to be a magnate to be an organizer.
Deal makers, smugglers, middle men, and job brokers…
equatable to Fixers and Facemen…
…like Lieutenant Templeton Arthur Peck from the A-team.
Real McCoy • Operator (Special Snippet))
The Hardholder is an obvious Magnate the definitive Don for a given community, the Operator is more likely Made as Lieutenant within such a community, or perhaps just a free agent without protection or fealty.
Shiloh – Operator (A Girl Like Me)
Of course, I don’t see any reasons an Operator couldn’t be clean, and specialize in more up-front enterprises… arranging labor crews for more legitimate tasks… however, just arranging double-blind transfers of high-end lux can be risky business, even if it is all legitimate.
Sade – Smooth Operator
Yeah, the playbook says; downtime & between sessions.
You roll, and either it is a payoff or pitfall… deal with it in the next scene as appropriate.
You loose a contract for honest work, ok… well I guess that requires you to feed your crew or contacts, while a new job is negotiated on a different site… or layoff your crew, leave your contact holding the debts, and wrangle yourself up some new crew and contact for work at a different site.
Sure there has to be another field of grain, lux brewery, ruin renovation and construction, or domestic repair job, and the crew and foreman for the task… somewhere.
I don’t think it is the MCs task to completely shut down the gig that you are already known to be able to organize…
Just set-up & stay consistent for the sitch. What do you do?
Totally agree about the distinction between the Hardholder and the Operator. Also agree that no one playbook has a lock on organisation – just that organisation is hard in AW.
Not a lock, but some lend themselves to the challenge more readily.
A Skinner could just sleep with 100 Souls (or a key 25 subset of them) to attain their loyalty, and inspire their social cohesion. But a Battlebabe would need to make near daily aggressive social threats in appeal to logical fears, ethical pragmatisms, emotional communalities.