Well, there's only a Leadership roll if something is happening with the gangs, so I'll just have to disagree on that one. Splitting your gang up in an effort to extend your power has obvious fictional trade-offs, and the way the game models that kind of increased risk is primarily through increased consequences of missed or partial-hit rolls.

The question is whether that's an intentional choice or what, and whether it makes for a better or worse game that way.

Okay, come on, people. Vincent didn't accidentally move Seize by Force into a different category and then accidentally add explicit text to every move clearly delineating the consequences on a miss. It's a new edition: he changed the rules. If for some reason this is freaking you out, then you can pretend this was actually what he intended all along, and we were all playing it wrong before, and only now has he finally improved the rules text so that we understand what Was Intended All Along.

But yeah. Ebok is not offering a different interpretation, he is describing a hack. It's a hack with a great deal of historical precedent called 'I like this part of the old edition better.'

Edition wars begin.

It depends a lot on the context of play up to that point (how much time has passed, the setting in general), but in my experience there are two main options: the new character is also new to the area, or the new character is known to the area, but has been away for whatever reason. The former case is riskier, and works best if the new character has a skillset or role that has an obvious place in what is currently happening; i.e. a Brainer, when there is bad psychic stuff going down, or a Chopper if the local folks are in need of protection. Also, because hopefully you remembered about there being no status quos in AW, at least some of the other PCs should probably also have been new to the area when the game first started, which means that prior to that they could easily have a history with the new PC. You definitely need to do Hx for the new character, and depending on how they are being introduced you may even want to allow other PCs to re-do their Hx -- particularly if the circumstances have shifted enough for this to make sense.

In the case of the returning or once-local character, it's even easier to create similar connections and history, as you would in the first session -- but even moreso, because now that more about the fiction is known, the choices and answers to Hx and related questions can be even more pointed and focused on the current situation. This should make it easy for the character to get immediately involved, since their friends/allies/frenemies will want to pull them into the action ASAP in order to get their help.

I am moderately intrigued, though I have had some bad experiences with (my own) stickiness vis-a-vis play by post games. Do you run a lot of games in that space, and/or have any ideas/structures in place to encourage people to contribute reliably over time? Also, Discord is a chat server? How does that work in terms of asynchronous play, and the like?

I think this is such an unusual choice that it's basically going to come down to what you and your MC agree upon, like nomadzophiel said. You have taken a giant, immobile building as a piece of equipment -- one which, in my experience, is usually portrayed as small, destructible and portable, or at least movable.

In my usual reading, the 'close' tag would apply either to the proximity of the Brainer or the proximity of the target, or both. What 'close' means is highly variable, and I would say this is particularly true when you are talking about a several hundred foot tall structure. In the case of Big Ben, both readings could provide interesting limitations, but 'close' could easily be an entire neighbourhood's worth of distance.

Personally, I like the idea of 'line of sight to Big Ben' combined with the Brainer needing to actually be very close to Big Ben (like, inside it or touching it) -- this combines a more powerful than usual range of effect with an unusual territorial requirement. If it results in the Brainer just camping out at Big Ben that could be pretty lame, but since you are the player you can hopefully avoid that crutch.

That said, there are a lot of ways it could work, and see above about it coming down to a conversation between you and the MC -- and the other players.

For me, as both a player and MC, one of the main tensions in the 2nd Session is always between wanting to continue to create and establish setting and wanting to start actually finding out what happens next. Players have different preferences -- in terms of how much to establish, etc. -- but also often had greater or fewer opportunities in the First Session to actually say/establish/speculate about all the things they wanted to get on the table or into the game. So sometimes one player is like 'ok, I know everything about my guy, let's go' but another is like 'I didn't even get a chance to Open my Brain last session, and I have all this stuff I want to say about how the Maelstrom fits into my character' and then the MC has usually either not had time to prep or has built like six Fronts and wants them all to start moving at once.

My own preferences, and to a lesser degree the preferences of my group, tend to lean very heavily towards establishing a lot of stuff -- and folding that into new conflicts and new happenings can be challenging, because those new things might be fucking up the very things the players were excited to keep building around. But ultimately, this desire to remain in setting/building-mode is destructive to the game, because what usually happens is you are just piling in more Status Quo when you should be rushing towards the crazy new future. So I feel like the trick is to provide players with opportunity to contribute new settings things specifically in contexts where they are disruptive to what we know so far -- new information that makes things harder or more fucked up or less static.

If ever a thread should be pinned on this forum, that would certainly be my #1 vote.