Gunlugger = best playbook

The New York Red Box, which typically does sandboxy D&D stuff, is playing some Apocalypse World.  I'm the Gunlugger, seeking spiritual purification among cannibal cultists.  (It's not going well.) 

The Gunlugger is a pretty fucked-up class, he said admiringly.  In a typical RPG session, I usually try to overcome obstacles by means of the least risky option, gradually taking on more risk as the safer options fail me.

But with the Gunlugger, murderous violence is almost always the safest course of action.  For my character, talking to people is the danger zone.

For a guy who often plays bullshit-artist Operator-style characters, it's a refreshing and pleasantly disorienting change of perspective.  My best alternative to a negotiated agreement is to kill you and take what I want.

This was definitely my experience in the first AW game I played.  I was the Gunlugger, and at the beginning of the campaign I played my character, Max, as a guy who could probably beat you up, but preferred to use violence as something of a last resort.  Unfortunately for him, that meant that he spent the first few sessions of the game failing miserably at everything he tried to do.

Then he finally caught on.  He wanted to gain some independence from the cult he was working for.  Some other guy had a gang, so Max made up a flimsy pretext to pick a fight, stabbed the guy in the eyes, and took over the gang.  Things got a lot better for him after he started knocking heads. Eventually he was the only character who got retired to safety (I believe the other PCs got cannibalized).

So yeah.  Now when I run AW, I always tell the players to look at what they're characters are good at, and run with it.  It's the character's hammer, and to them the whole world sure looks like a nail.

In my experience, there's a die-by-the-sword tendency for Gunluggers.

In a game I ran over the winter, our Gunlugger, Rue, progressed steadily for a while. I think it was when Rue got attacked on foot by a dozen bikers and won that he finally lost all caution about using violence.
A siege, one melee, and two shoot-outs later, Rue finally pissed off the tenant farmers badly enough that about fifty of them picked up rocks and pelted Rue until he collapsed. He had 2-armor, but a miss on a 0-harm roll is still bad, and when he hit the ground, someone took his gun away and shot him.
I think it's no accident that Rue's home was inside a drainage pipe (which was chosen by Rue himself) - social interactions are dangerous, but too many interactions that end in violence is pretty bad too, so it's better if the Gunlugger can get away from it all once in a while before s/he ends up burning down the town.

I see MCs shy away from Gunluggers. It's a crazy powerful playbook that yes, turns every problem into a nail they can hammer. Conversely, playing the reluctant warrior is also filled with it's own pitfalls, namely you're forsaking most of the moves that make your character so awesome.

What I want to see in every Gunlugger (or other walking heaps of awesome) is a terrible responsibility they carry on their shoulders (that only they can carry) that weighs heavily on every action they take (violent or no). I guess I want every Gunlugger to be Dog! (from Dogs in the Vineyard)

When Vincent says that the Gunlugger doesn't have much to do when things are going well, he wasn't kidding.  I spent nearly all of last session itching to fight things, just because my character was good at fighting. 

I've been trying to add the, "Oh but I'm sick of fighting, I want to find a better way to live" shtick into my role-play, but mainly because otherwise I'm worried the playbook would be too one-note. 

Oh, and that point about losing your gun is well-taken.  I wasn't planning on taking Fuck This Shit before, but I did last night . . . just in case.

The Faceless runs the risk of falling into the same trap.

New Gunlugger move:

"I've got balls of steel": When you have a gun on you, and it's clearly visible, roll +hard instead of +hot to seduce or manipulare them.

Yeah, that move literally means that, if they take away your guns, they take away your balls. They don't call it "compensating" for nothing, you know.