I’m trying to wrap my head around how gangs work in The Sprawl.
If the Fixer has small gang of hired thugs watching their back, are they treated as additional weapons/armor for the Fixer when mixing it up or are they treated as an NPC with their own harm clock?
If a player hires a gang of hackers in infiltrate a secure network does the player roll for matrix moves? If the player doesn’t have a neural interface/deck but the hacker gang logically does, how does that all work?
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When my players utilize gangs I focus on two things; how the players want to utilize the gang, and how I (as the gamemaster) am going to utilize the gang. Gangs in our game are all about narrative positioning (as opposed to directly interfacing with the mechanics).
In your first example if the Fixer has some thugs watching his back then that informs me of what kind of moves I’m going to use against the Fixer. I assume that they successfully watch his back, alert him of incoming trouble, and hop into the fray when trouble breaks out. In a fight I treat them as an extension of the Fixer, more or less. I might decide that Harm directed at the Fixer may take out one of his thugs instead. Any of my Moves might be directed at, or impact, one of the thugs as well. Meanwhile, the player controlling the thugs is telling me what he wants them to accomplish. Basically they are going to do what the player wants them to do until I use a Move to interfere with that.
Same basic concept with example two, the hackers will successfully hack and do the job they’ve been hired for until my Moves stop or hider that. I have no problem with the hackers doing things without dice rolls because the player invested Wealth for them (I look at this kind of like spending Hold; you exhausted a resource and get to reap the benefit of that).
Keep in mind that no one is rolling dice for the thugs/hackers I’m making hard and soft Moves based on what the players roll for their characters. In essence the gang is always “implicated” in the action because their function is to “Aid/Interfere” on behalf of the characters. At times the gang may give a character a +1 (or even a -2) on a roll when it seems appropriate.
Anyway, that’s how it looks at our table.
Hamish as previously suggested (based on the fantastic actual play podcast Friends at the Table) to do the following :
Use the Move ‘Conduct an Operation’ to represent the gang performing a task off-screen (Cred spent on the gang informs their skill and the + to the roll).
Usually I handle gangs as John Lewis suggests above, but if the team need to know the results of something like this before they act, I’ll sometimes use Conduct an Operation as Rick Sorgdrager suggests.