Gangs for Battlebabes

Hi guys,

Just started a new game and I've got a battlebabe who wants to take a gang but doesn't want to suck at Leadership. Do people generally let their battlebabe use the Ice Cold move with Leadership? It would seem to make sense, but I don't want to be wrecking the balance of my game. Would appreciate the input.

Well, by the book, ice cold is for going aggro, full stop. Stat swapping moves explicitely say for which basic moves you can do it, it's not "use cool instead of hard whenever it's convenient". Expect your battlebabe to suck at leadership — hard is their dumpstat.

(I feel it's kind of the point. Battlebabes are free and unburdened but don't handle responsabilities well, stick them a gang and things go sour — unless they get their shit together about that, maybe by changing playbook.)

Now, you can micromanage your gang. Manipulate them, go aggro on them, seduce them, talk them into it, whatever. Leadership and pack alpha gives you, say, macros you can use some times (when your gang fights for you, when they as a whole don't do what you want) and they make things easy for hard people, but you can manage without.

The way I see it, the battlebabe's gang ends up looking like a bunch of fucking opportunists who will help the battlebabe as long as things are going their way, but abandon ship if they get bogged down in actual combat. Much like the battlebabe hirself. You can still use the gang as a weapon when you go aggro, but they won't make any hard advances or die to the last.

One move I can recommend to help balance out your idea a little bit, and this is totally credited to one of my MC's was a moved he called "Queen Bitch" in which case the female battlebabe could substitute their Hot score for Hard when using leadership but only as long as her gang was exclusively women. This may or may not work for your PC but it might inspire something similar. And if you do something like this, then you make sure to throw out AMAZINGLY useful NPC's who want to join the gang but are the wrong gender/race/believer/whathaveyou. That way they are forced to choose which is more important to them, the stat or a cool ass gang. :D

No way can they use Ice Cold for that, no.

Your Battlebabe may also want to invest in Perfect Instincts, and spend a lot of time reading situations concerning their gang and imminent combat.

Or you could write some other sort of custom move that lets them use +Cool or +Hot or whatever for Leadership, if there's something that makes sense for the character.

Or they could just suck it up and raise their Hard.