Most and least popular playbooks?

Playtest rules campaign: Angel and Brainer for the full run; plus a Battlebabe for the first half and a Chopper for the second half.

Published rules campaign: Battlebabe, Savvyhead, and Maestro D', plus a Chopper showed up temporarily, and a Brainer and Operator through advances to get a second character.

North American Bug Tour: driver turned battlebabe, savvyhead, chopper, gunlugger, brainer introduced half-way in and hocus introduced quite late in the campaign.

Burning Sunlight: hardholder, savvyhead, operator, hoarder, battlebabe

The Chateau: hardholder, savvyhead, brainer, driver, gunlugger, skinner (new player half way through) and angel and quarantine were introduced as second characters later.

The Menagerie: faceless, brainer, gunlugger, hocus, battlebabe, operator, skinner

The Hulk: brainer, savvyhead, hardholder, angel, quarantine

The Island: touchstone, chopper, hocus, brainer, angel, battlebabe

This has SO much to do with the cover photos.

From my experience, Operator is the least used.

From my experience, Operator is the least used.

Yup.

Which sucks, 'cause obligation gigs are like my favourite AW game tech!

From my experience, Operator is the least used.

That's why I've restricted the playbooks usable at my Origins game next week to the following...

The Hardholder
The Operator
The Savvyhead
The Angel
The Gunlugger
The Skinner
The Faceless

... so I only have to write 7 love letters.  It's the closest thing to pre-generated characters that I'll ever want to generate with AW.

No Operators?  Weird!  The Operator is the playbook I've seen taken the most often.  I think I've only played one game without an Operator.  (I find this slightly odd as personally I'd choose Hardholder over Operator any day.)

After that Brainer is the other predictable choice that someone always wants to play.  (No argument here from me, I'm waiting for my chance to give this one a go.)

The playbooks I haven't seen in play are Angel (a pity), Driver (really dull) and Touchstone (I don't even have).

My personal favourite is the Hocus.  There should be more Hocii.

My players were all newbies and picked: Gunlugger, Angel, Driver and Savvyhead.
Notice how none of them picked anything that establishes a lot of setting or comes with a lot of hooks attached. Our background is mostly Call of Cthulhu/DnD so that might have something to do with it.

I think most showed some interest in the Driver. The class has a nice cool shine to it, but as an MC I kind of thinks it sucks in play. (Mobility makes NPC triangles harder and when a front goes bad driving away is more often resorted to.)

Games I've been a part of:

Chat, with a couple of online friends: Hocus and Touchstone, in the ruins of New York. Those two went 'zing!' together - it was glorious.

PbP, set on a partially terraformed Mars, where I was a player: Quarantine, Chopper, Gunlugger, and Hardholder. Died a sad death due to GM busyness, but until then, everybody was riffing off each other and it was a thing of beauty.

Most games I've been in there is always a direct character like a Faceless or a Gunlugger. Brainers and Hocus playbooks are snatched up often. The least used I've seen are Drivers and Angels. Skinners, Savvyheads, and Operators are infrequent.

My first experience with the game was a one-shot at last year's GenCon GoD.  I grabbed the Angel because I'm a sucker for clerics.  The other PCs were a Driver, Operator and Skinner.

The game I ran last year included a Hocus, Gunlugger and Chopper.  There was also a Skinner, but the player was in only one session.  The guy who played the Hocus likes spooky/crazy characters.

I'm playing a Skinner in my current game, and the other players are a Savvyhead and Maestro'D.  I was tempted to play an Operator, since I like having "anchor" characters to whom it's easy to connect the other PCs as followers, gang members, etc., but the Maestro'D took care of that.  If we had gotten our hands on the Hoarder earlier, the Savvyhead player would probably have grabbed that.  This is the same guy who played the Hocus.  Weird is his thing.  The Maestro'D's recently turned into an Operator, since his establishment has slipped through his fingers.

My Skinner's will probably have enough advances to consider a playbook change soon.  Not many other playbooks focus on Hot (I think just the Maestro'D?).  The character could go a few different ways based on the current fiction: Hardholder, Maestro'D (there's an opening now!), Battlebabe.  Kind of depends on what kind of trouble he gets into for killing the NPC holder at the end of yesterday's session.  Storm really needs to work on impulse control.

My first experience with the game was a one-shot at last year's GenCon GoD.  I grabbed the Angel because I'm a sucker for clerics.  The other PCs were a Driver, Operator and Skinner.

No hard, no weird, how did that play out? Strikes me as a group of Apocalypse World's nice guys, but hey - They could be total assholes for all I know. :)

No hard, no weird, how did that play out? Strikes me as a group of Apocalypse World's nice guys, but hey - They could be total assholes for all I know. :)

IIRC, we didn't do anything with the Maelstrom.  There were various NPCs that fit the Hard and Weird archetypes who provided the adversity as we tried to collectively survive our first day.  Lots of uncomfortable conversations with pushy powerful people, and a climactic car chase/gun battle.  There's an alternate universe where a group of players chose Brainer, Hardholder, Chopper and Gunlugger, and fell afoul of the Sharp, Cool and Hot machinations of the local whore and medic, and the travelling pimp and his chaffeur.

Game One: Driver, Hocus, Hocus, and Saavyhead
Game Two: Driver, Hocus, Battlebabe, Faceless, Angel, Tombestone, Hardholder

Operator, Skinner, Brainer, and Chopper seem less taken among my friends