I've been running into this too, and from what I can tell the answer is just Fingers in Every Pie. It's clearly meant for particular pieces of gear, but you can always just ask for oddments worth X barter. I figure then a 10+ is a couple barter, and 7-9 is just one?

Anyway, running the establishment is a (more than) full time job--there's probably not much of an opportunity for gigs on the side.

also i found out in the pdf an error in the page count.
we havent page 135 (there is a jump between 134 and 136)

There are a number of missing pages. For the print book, they will be blank pages in between chapters (so each new chapter starts on a right-hand page) but I believe they have been removed from the PDF for convenience.

I just wrote and deleted a pretty long post where I started out disagreeing, then talked myself around in a circle to a point where I pretty much agree with you. Of course you can Read A Sitch by aggregating various scouting reports with your own tactical understanding, and so of course you can say "I send out some Scouts, then use their reports to figure out what's really going on" and trigger RAS.

I think the important thing is that this does require direct, but not necessarily physical action by the PC. Sending out scouts and listening to their reports is not enough to trigger the move--the important thing is combining it with your own knowledge, intuition, and experience.

EDIT: So, to bring it back to the original example that spawned this discussion, sending people out, having them check out the situation, and then running in and poisoning the water when they see an opportunity would not trigger RAS, since the PC doesn't enter into it at any point. Sending people out, having them check it out, then report back to you would trigger RAS as you used the new info to reformulate your plans.

My instinct is that if you're just telling your people to go do something, then they (probably) go try to do it, and succeed or fail at the MC's discretion, same as any other NPC thing. I think using your gang as a weapon for violence moves is the exception here, not the rule. (Per the 2e final preview, "When you have a gang, you can sucker someone, go aggro on them, or make a battle move, using your gang as a weapon." Nothing about any other move.) If you send some scouts, they'll come back and give you a report on what they saw (at which point you can ask your followers for updated advice), but I don't think the rules support you Reading A Sitch through them.

Go Aggro by poisoning, either directly or through a gang, feels a little off to me. I think I'd be inclined to make the part where you get to the water supply the interesting part, if you were doing it yourself, which would probably entail Doing Something Under Fire. Then once you get there, you just dump the poison in and the effects of that play out predictably and fictionally. If you're sending a gang off to do it for you, then that just happens off-screen. But I think an argument can definitely made that you'd be Suckering Someone (with a chance to miss) by doing this, so this one is more of a personal interpretation thing than a rules thing.

If they both succeed, then surely she invites them both to bed?

I don't have a page reference for this at the moment, but my recollection is that bonuses from different sources stack, but you can only get one bonus at a time from any one source. E.g. if the Gunlugger has sex and then is Aided, he gets +2. But if he has sex twice in a row, he only gets +1. If you can find a way to make a whole bunch of +1 forwards apply, then you deserve the full bonus. (And since forwards and ongoings rarely come from the same source, they also stack with each other.)

EDIT: From what I could find on a cursory skim, the rules just say, "+1... forward just means you add 1... to your very next roll." That's it, no complicated rules about when that does or doesn't apply needed. In almost all cases, if you're getting multiple overlapping effects, then you're putting in effort to get that and probably giving up something else or putting yourself in increased danger in exchange anyway.

Remember, the workspace rules don't actually allow you to tell the Savvyhead he can't build something he sets his mind to. You can, if you really want to, put such heavy restrictions on it that it can't be completed by the time you stop playing (but that doesn't sound like being a fan or making their lives not-boring to me!), but flat-out refusals are not permitted. So even without taking the improvement, he could build a robot! That's the Savvyhead's whole deal, he can build *anything* with enough time, jingle, and parts. Now, if he's willing to "pay" for his robot(s) in the form of an improvement, I'd go even easier on the restrictions.

I think I might be inclined to have him make the first robot, sort of a proof of concept, using the Workspace rules as normal. Then, once he's made one, he can easily make himself a gang of them offscreen just by taking the improvement. But you could certainly do it a number of other ways.

Not sure why that's so illogical. If a bunch of people are all shooting at everyone in their immediate vicinity, and they all have big weapons, and the most powerful people around are all actively trying to increase the number of casualties... doesn't seem too impossible to hit that "few survivors" tier at 5-harm, fictionally speaking.

Also, make sure the PCs are fictionally doing something to add to the chaos. If everyone's shooting each other, then one more gun in the fight isn't going to make a difference--they need to actually escalate it somehow. And when you've reached the point of multiple PCs escalating an already dangerous and chaotic situation, you probably have hand grenades and real big guns coming out, making widespread fatalities all the more reasonable.

Ultimately, though, I think that possibility is mitigated by the likelihood that PCs will not want everyone in the vicinity to die. Presumably if they're there at a fight between two or more gangs, at least one of the gangs is made up of people they care about. If they really do get into a situation where they all want to work together to make sure almost everyone goes down, and they all roll well enough to make it happen, I don't see why it wouldn't be reasonable. But I'd bet that most of the time, at least some of them will want to calm things down, not escalate them. Especially if they don't want to bank on all being able to roll well enough to protect themselves.