I asked about this on reddit a while ago, but didn’t get any answers. This community looks a bit more active so I’ll ask again here.
In a game that’s just ended, I’ve been playing a Pusher with a fun (if not very serious) concept, but I never really figured out how to engage with most of my playbook moves. My character was the frontman of a rock band, and the other PCs were the other band members (this lead to some interesting RP opportunities). I started with Rabble Rouser, which I used exactly once in three missions, though that one time it worked to great effect as I persuaded a crowd of protesters to riot. I never used Vision Thing in any significant way. They playbook may simply not have been a good match for my gaming style (and that’s OK, I wanted to try it out even though I knew it might not be a good fit).
Anyway, my real question today is mostly about a specific mechanic, not about the playbook in general. With my first advance I took Believers to create a Huge gang (our band’s Fan Club), and it was not at all clear how it was supposed to work in play. The rules for how to define the gang were easy to follow, but what I could do with them afterwards was not at all obvious.
My MC made a completely reasonable ruling that I could ask my Believers for stuff related to their tags (i.e. I could get equipment or [gear] from them since they had resources, and they could show up anywhere in the city since they were spread out), and I would always get what I asked for without a roll, as long as I was willing to help them out with some kind of complication, like the option from a 7-9 result on hit the streets.
While that seemed to work for our game (for the one mission we ran after the gang appeared), I’m not sure if that’s how it’s supposed to go. In the only other game I’ve played in that had a Pusher, the gang was smaller so the PC was the gang’s leader. That was a lot more straight forward (if perhaps borderline OP, when it came to violence).
So how are a Pusher’s Believers supposed to work? How is the gang you create different than a gang that any character could get as a contact simply by using Declare a Contact? Is the only benefit that you get to choose their tags? I’m especially interested in the larger sizes of gangs, where the PC isn’t the gang leader.