outnumbering in combat

What would I miss if I used an alternative to the system with gangs from AW, say maybe stating that being outnumbered several times, tenfold and fifty times or more would have consequences for harm and armor similar to the way gang sizes do it?

My reason for doing this would be to make the system scale easily with bigger numbers, for a setting where a military force could be hundres or tens of thousands of soldiers. Plus that I'm uncomfortable with the gap in AW proper between 'a guy or two' and a small gang, making me unsure how to handle one person surrounded with like five guys in a fight.

I'm not totally sure where there's a problem.  If you wanted to extrapolate, you could call "a guy or two" (or five) like a micro-small gang, then go to small (15), medium (30), large (60-100), and go one "size" up for each doubling or thereabouts; 150, 300, 600, 1200, 2500, 5000, 10k, 20k, 40k...  A fighting force of 5000 with assault rifles would do 1-harm to a force of 10k with 1-armor (3, minus 1 for armor, minus 1 for size), while the 10,000 guys would do 3 (3 minus 1 plus 1).

Oh, no, there is no problem. My main question is, if I do it like this:

When you inflict harm on an enemy force that outnumbers you, the harm you deal is reduced by -1 (a few times), -2 (tenfold), or -3 (many tenfolds).
When you inflict harm on enemies you outnumber, the harm is increased by +1  (a few times), +2 (tenfold), or +3 (many tenfolds).

...would I miss something, compared to the way AW proper does it?

And, on a related note, how do you guys handle a fight between one PC and four or five NPCs?

4-5 guys can count as a small gang against a guy or two. They can also count as a guy or two against a small gang of 15, if that's how you want to treat them.

Don't consider the starting gangs in character creation to define the gang sizes. They're examples, not definitive.

Oh but since I'm here: your proposal is already how it works, except that I don't care to define precise numbers, so yeah, no problem. If you DO want to define precise numbers, those are as good as any.

Fighting isn't done by a monolithic force of 10,000 guys. It's done by 1,000 groups of 10 guys.

I think if you extrapolate a move to "roll to see how the battle of 20,000 guys goes," then you're going to end up with a meta-move not rooted in the immediate and visceral fiction. It becomes abstract, in other words.

The core AW system can handle many things, but it doesn't do abstract.

In fact, a "meta-move not rooted in the immediate and visceral fiction" is how I did it for my Conan hack. "When you send your armies to war..."

There are certain consequences on play. When you screw up your "send your armies to war" roll, the consequences are bad, but they're not immediate. It can be tricky trying to handle the delay between the roll being made, and the consequences being felt, because it's such a different time-scale to the other moves.

Simon: To keep it from being a meta-move, make it about what the commander is doing. They send their army to war... okay, how? What do they do? Same thing with the outcome of the move. What new fictional circumstance does the commander find herself in because of the roll?

(maybe it already does this, I don't know)

Like wealth, or fortunes, or gigs, it's fine to have moves that happen over time or over a larger scale, but the good ones are still focused on the personal circumstances of the PC who made the move.

Yeah, it basically already does this.

You're right that it's the same as wealth, fortunes, and gigs. They're sometimes a bit tricky to fit into the fiction, because "between sessions" can be almost any amount of time. I'm tempted to change them to be "whenever you jump ahead in time a ways" instead.

Vincent! Thanks for that input, I feel silly now. :) I actually thought the numbers I saw at one place ("a small gang is 15 guys") also applied where it says "when a small gang fights" and so on. But of course the combat rules are about relative numbers, I see that now!

John, good point!