What does this move do that the existing Seduce/Manipulate move doesn't already handle?

I anticipate that your answer will be "it guarantees they become members", or something similar, but... Why?

If you find a crew and you convince them to join your gang, maybe you gotta beat them first, maybe not, whatever. But you find this crew, you say "hey, join me, work for me, we're gonna kick ass and steal and stuff" because that's what chopper gangs do – they roll into town and take everything and dare you to stop them (see the move Fucking Thieves, which establishes that chopper gangs take things. They just do.) and you roll a 10+, great! They join up!

But what if you roll a 7-9? They want proof, right? So you gotta offer them some of the spoils. And later, if they don't like how little they're getting, they can leave. But guess what?


So can the chopper's default gang.

No status quo. Nothing is sacred. The chopper doesn't get niche protection. If chopper is a total wad and his gang hates him and leaves )or beats her up and kicks her out), oh well for chopper. Same if she gets them all killed.


This custom move only exists to get around the fiction. That strikes me as a bad custom move. Am I off base?

That probably should have been my first sentence, really. I couldn't pare down the content or tone that I wanted. The mishmash above was my best guess at conversational voice while still having a point worth making.

If you've moved on to better hacks, kudos! Harm doesn't quite seem to do what I want, yet, but I'm going to play a few more games to get the feel down. I'm still learning AW. That's a decision for when I'm fluent.

Personally, I would let all those factors come up at once. The gunlugger takes NTBFW, the Battlebabe move for 2-Armor while basically naked, and the Faceless move for +1 Armor when being scary as fuck? Then that one Gunlugger going through the entire hold massacring everything methodically and somehow surviving just makes sense. Look at the fiction and remember the point of being a an of the character is to think "wow! How bad-ass is this?!" When they do something cool but unreasonable.

As for the fight/battle split; yeah. A battle is any time you could use the optional battle moves, right? When maneuvers are involved, basically. So if infiltrating the enemy hold is all one sequence, where the Gunlugger rolls up to the gate, blasts the guard tower, rams a truck through the door, fights through the entire Main Street barricade and storms Harold's castle to do something, that's all one battle.

If it's just the gunlugger versus like ten other guys and all there is is this one melee or shoot out, that's not a battle. It's a fight. It's a mostly narrative tool. The Gunlugger is the line soldier like Rambo, who goes through the entire viet cong complex unfazed by how outnumbered he is... Who still gets whomped when two guys hold him down and a third wails on his face.