Apocalypse World – Rules Question
One of my players is a high-level Gunlugger. He has a gang and a battle vehicle. He also has Not To Be Fucked With, so he counts as a small gang during battle.
He uses his gang and his battle vehicle to Assault a Secure Position. The position they’re assaulting fires back with an rpg, which has the Area and Messy tag.
With all these elements in play:
If the gang is Small and the Gunlugger counts as a Small gang, does Not To Be Fucked With not take effect (thus making them a Small gang) or do they stack and they become a Medium gang?
When calculating harm, does the Gunlugger have to decide between using his car-mounted weapons (3-harm) or his gang as a weapon (2-harm)? Is it both?
After taking harm and doing the harm move, do the harm move’s effects happen to just the Gunlugger or his gang as well? Is that MC choice?
Any tips would be welcome.
Approximately in order:
If they’re acting together, I’d stack them into a Medium gang.
I feel I would tend towards majority rules and use the gang’s harm, but then again, I’m a fan of my characters and I look through crosshairs so what the heck, 3-harm it is. That said, a car-mounted gun is less agile than a bunch of armed wackos, so there’s an effect on the fiction there. Play it up.
If the gang is close enough to count as stacking, the harm gets shared. You get a shrapnel wound, and you get a shrapnel wound, and so on. I feel that’d be fair. Remember fiction first!
This is a common question in my experience, but a gang and not to be fucked with do not stack as part of standard ruling. The way I think about it fictionally, is not to be fucked with uses pretty unfriendly tactics, shit like spray and pray and liberal usage of grenades. This is great when you have everybody around you, but when you care about those around you, these tactics are as likely to hurt your friends as your enemies, so if you’re cooperating with a gang, you can’t kill have of them in the process. That said, everything in AW stems from fiction, so if the fiction makes sense that the two stack, then there you go.
Likewise, for weapons, when fighting with a gang, it’s the gang that’s the weapon, not the implement you’re using. It’s really all about the swarm, not the individual with gangs. That said, area weapons are a great response to gangs.
Yeah, NTBFW is akin to having your character get a forehead tattoo just reading:
messy
It’s more than just a bonus from a move.
I think the best thing to do is to not look at everything as a packet of rules and look at how they affect the fiction.
What’s the core action? Is a dude in a car charging the secure position, while surrounded by cronies? Or is a gang of people doing it with a car in their midst?
In the former, use the car as the main actor. The gang is fictional positioning and would be useful to explain the outcome of the action (“after the car rams into the wall and rips a hole open, the gang flows in, killing some and taking hostages”). In the latter, the gang is the main actor and the car is window dressing.
Also: I don’t think NTBFW would apply when driving, but that’s just me.
Thank you all for your input!
In first edition, it was clarified that Gunluggers operating ALONE or with a ‘friend’ (i.e. “a guy or two”), in A BATTLE counted as a small gang. If already part of a gang, the size didn’t change.
Off course, you could have your medium gang and the gunlugger (counting as a small gang) perform a scissor tactic, for a benefit that might affect effect.
We’ve yet to try it in 2nd ed, but I still like the “I work better alone” part of the character choosing that move, so even if it’s different in 2nd ed. I’d advocate different.
Toby Sennett put it evocately!
(Remember, moves are decriptive AND prescriptive. Bloodcrazed isn’t simply a +harm. Our bloodcrazed gunluggers avoid violence, as they’re likely to kill anyone by just pushing them. We’ve yet to have anyone pick ‘Merciless’.)