Help me out with "NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH"

One of the players in my recently started game of AW is playing a gunlugger and, despite being a small (excuse me, "compact") young girl, this gunlugger is apparently NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH!  Now, I've got no problem with that, but both he and I have been stumbling a little over exactly how the move works.  It's one of the things that seems more obvious on paper than it really is.

So far she has only been in fights with non-gangs.  That is with one to a few enemies.  Does that she does one more harm than normal and suffers one less than normal, in this situation?
Can she choose not to act as a gang?  All of the weapons she possesses at the moment are 3-harm weapons, but what if she had one that did more?  Could she use its stats or does she HAVE to use her gang "weapon" stats?  This is the main point that confuses me a little.  Gangs have harm, size, and armor, but they don't seem to (mechanically speaking) have weapons with the various weapon tags.  So am I supposed to be taking things like weapon tags into account with a gunlugger who is NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH?

So far she has only been in fights with non-gangs.  That is with one to a few enemies.

The move states that she counts as a gang in a true battle, not in every little fight. One to a few enemies doesn't sound like a battle to me, so no gang stats for her.

And if she gets a weapon that does 4-harm, and she's in a battle, then I as MC would let her either have the 4-harm or the gang stats (which would generally be better in a battle, which is why you'd choose NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH in the first place), whatever she desires, but not both.

Well, the exact text is "in battle, you count as a gang . . ."  In most games and their rules "in battle" just means "when combat is going on" and that's what it meant to me, and certainly what the player was thinking when he picked the move.  If it's intended only to work this way in large scale "true" battles, that's cool and all, but I totally didn't get that from the wording and I'll probably need to give the player an option to switch it out if he wants to.

Do you have the final version? I didn't get it just from the move description either, but here, page 225, in the in-depth moves chapter:

"NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH: in battle, you count as a gang (3-harm gang small), with armor according to the circumstances.

This is true, but going aggro on someone or acting under fire or even seizing something by force doesn't make it automatically a battle. It has to be a battle."

Yeah, I always figured 'in a battle' just meant 'if you are using the countdown timer' -- but I think if you were for some reason dealing with a similar-scoped fight in a single roll, that could work too, at the MCs discretion.

Personally I would let the Gunlugger use their full weapon stats in addition to the gang part -- they must be an exceptionally well-armed gang, that's all.

The way I do it is that, when NTBFW is in play, you:

1) Do either your weapon's harm or "gang" harm, with weapon's harm being counted from an individual and not a gang (so gang harm takes precedence unless you have a 5-harm+ weapon).
2) Use tags from whatever weapon you're using.

So if you're using a grenade launcher, you'd do 4 harm (either from the individual weapon or the gang harm + gang size modifier), and the 'area' tag would also apply. If you're using your fists and whatever furniture around that can be lugged, well, you still do 4 harm, but your foes have to be at hand range for it to be effective.

The mechanical effect of the other guys taking 4 harm is the same in both cases, but fictionally, you're doing two different things - blowing stuff up from a distance while laughing like a madman versus beating up anyone who dares get close enough.

Do you have the final version? I didn't get it just from the move description either, but here, page 225, in the in-depth moves chapter:

"NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH: in battle, you count as a gang (3-harm gang small), with armor according to the circumstances.

This is true, but going aggro on someone or acting under fire or even seizing something by force doesn't make it automatically a battle. It has to be a battle."

You know, as much as I love AW, this is an example of one of the reasons I'm not sold on the layout of the book.  I don't always remember to check the in-depth moves descriptions, and we certainly didn't while making characters.

This makes sense.  I'll have to bring it up next time.  Personally, I still think it's a badass move, and probably worth it just for the added defense if you're up against an ACTUAL gang, but my friend may disagree if he thought he'd be able to use it every time his gunlugger was beating down some punk.

A battle isn't a mechanical thing, it's a thing in the game's fiction. Fnord, it'll almost always be obvious to you when the gunlugger's in a battle vs when the gunlugger's just being violent. When you aren't certain, you can safely go with "sure, this counts as a battle."

Everybody -- the optional battle moves, including the battle countdown, are for when (a) there's a battle, plus (b) you want to use them. You can have battles without them. I almost never use them and we have battles all the time.

For purposes of inflicting harm, the gunlugger's gang stats supersede the gunlugger's weapons. For purposes of joining battle, the gunlugger's weapons totally still apply. The gunlugger has only a knife? She can't, then, join battle with a gang at long range; she can fight with them only when they're right there with her. In other words: what DWeird said.

This means that there will occasionally be circumstances where the gunlugger could already inflict as much harm without NTBFW as with it. However, NTBFW always gives her the benefit when it comes to suffering harm herself.

-Vincent

Thanks for the feedback, Vincent!