Chopper's uniqueness - or lack thereof

Hello Again - thanks for responses in previous post.

In one of the campaigns I'm playing in AW, I joined group that played quite a bit - Hardholder, Angel and Battle Babe - characters have pretty large number of improvements.
I picked chopper, and now I am feeling that my character is kind of redundant.

I knew and expected that he will have less improvments then others, but issue sprouts from something else. I get feeling, that everything my character can do - someone else can do better. I have large Hard, but Battle Babe is superior in this - better weapons, better moves. But that's fine - Chopper's essence is his gang. But - BB has gang (bought with one of improvements) which is the same size, and has similar stats (and was additionally armed and equipped for barter - so they have cars).

So I guess my question here is - why choppers gang is not better. Other characters can take holding, but hardholder has the best, they can take a cult - but hocus has the biggest - but in case of chopper, only serious difference is his move. But to be honest, if you have character with Hard +3, Leadership only fails if you roll 3, so that doesn't make all that difference.

What do you guys think about this?

If you are going to look at which playbook which is the best in pure strength i guess a non-improved character is weaker and as you describe. But I choose playbook after what is cool to play.

I'll try to find some pros with the chopper in relation to the playbooks you describe:
* You have armor and a stronger man-on-man character than the hardholder i think. Your weapons are more powerful. Especially if you have the drop on him.
* You have a much higher hard than the battlebabe so your gang will be easier to control than his.

right? wrong?

Well, the point is not in strength in itself, but in fact that my gang doesn't feel that unique - and that's supposed to be whole point of having one archetype per team, isn't it?
I have move that is just a bit stronger, but apart from that - my gang is exactly the same as the one that everyone gets if they improve - whereas hocus and hardholder have unique "specials", everyone else get weaker holdings or cults when they buy improvement.

Why don't you make your character unique by being, you know, unique. My Operator always kept her word and developed a rep for it. She cared about her crew and always treated them fairly. The game wasn't about whether she was more hard or more sharp or had a better gang. The game, for me, was about Proust and what she was willing to do to keep her word intact and to protect her people, even when they were being annoying gits.

Well, that's what I'm doing. He is pretty unique.

But when I entered play, after reading rulebook, I went in with this feeling that my gang will be the most badass of them all - after all I am Chopper - I am my gang. And there is only one Chopper, yeah?
So discovering during the play, that actually no - it's not exactly like that, kind of stopped me in my tracks.
I don't think it would be the issue with Brainer or Hocus, they kind of operate on different level. But when you have gang which is savege and has no fucking discipline at all - then strength is pretty important point in game. I mean - that's what they basically do.

Don't get me wrong, I am having fun, I like my character and gang, I have fun during play. We had lot of interesting situations with my gang, and I like it. There are cool NPCs in it, they have their own flavor - but there is underlaying feeling or redundancy, which I am surprised by, as rulebook makes pretty strong point about uniqeness of various character types - other characters can have holdings, but there is only one Hardholder etc. And rules seem to be constructed in a way, that is supposed to ensure that this is indeed the case when push comes to shove.

So I'm wondering whether anyone else stumbled upon cases like this, or thought about this from point of view, of how the game is designed. Maybe I am missing something important, maybe I'm looking at this archetype in a wrong way.

Fucking Thieves.

Ok, FT indeed changes a bit - are there any limits on this move? Besides the size? Or can chopper just generate barter from thin air with this? I need to pay for something, so I turn to my gang to give me something valuable, and voila?

I had situation in which Angel demanded medkit supplies for her services - could I just use FT to get them?

I was under impression that it's more for 'situational' items, but I'm starting to rethink this now.

If it's small enough to fit.

I've had the Chopper use Fucking Thieves to generate medkit supplies on demand before.

There is always the risk to miss a roll. Missing a roll is never pretty. :)

And don't forget: sometimes having the gang or gang member hand whatever it is over to you is in the gang's nature or in its best interests, and sometimes it isn't. For the latter case, there's Pack Alpha.

Charles

There is also the fact that the Chopper gets, in addition to a gang, a fleet of motorcycles—by default! Another PC may take a gang, but any transport provided is completely at the generosity of the MC and can be taken away just as swiftly. The MC wouldn't fuck with your motorcycles outside of the occasional breakdown or roadblock.

Also, the battlebabe's weak hard score means he or she isn't as powerful a leader as you are. Their gang will follow them and obey orders—to a point. But when given an order they don't like the looks of, a leadership roll will be called for and there is much less chance for success.

The uniquiness as I see it is this: The battlebabe can have a gang, but the chopper IS HIS GANG.

The playbooks have lots of uniqueness baked in to the beginning of play, but they're designed to become less unique over time as characters advance, presumably because the characters are growing more unique in the fiction as they develop and don't need the niche protection any more.

Or to put it more concretely, as the game progresses it's less about the gang and more about the chopper's relationship with Balls, his overzealous 2nd, and Millions, the young hotshot who is gunning for him, and etc.

I agree with what noclue is saying; I think the most relevant bit here is that your character is joining the game late. NOT because that means you have fewer advances, or are 'less powerful' or something -- just because the fictional space for 'violent gang leader' was not reserved for your PC, as it would have been if you started the game with the other players. If the Chopper is in the game from the beginning, then when other people get gangs, those gangs are almost always responses to the Chopper's gang. The Chopper's gang becomes the context -- they are different in this or that way from the Chopper's gang, the other PC acquired the gang because the Chopper had a gang, etc.

But because the Chopper wasn't there, that baseline wasn't established, and so your gang will have to earn its fictional space in a way that it wouldn't otherwise. So it's really up to you (and the MC) to show how your gang is different from the Battlebabe's gang -- how you are different as a leader, how the gang is different in effectiveness (fucking thieves being a perfect example), and how they're different in personality. As a basic guideline, the Chopper's gang should be significantly more loyal, invested, relevant, etc. When people say 'the Chopper IS his gang' that's about how much everybody involved CARES about the gang; the Chopper is more intimately connected with his gang, and vice versa, and this makes the members of the gang more relevant as well. They just matter more, fictionally, even if they aren't better at killing stuff.

Fucking Thieves is the main thing that makes the Chopper different from the other playbooks. Unless another PC with a gang takes that move, that's the Chopper's thing. If you want your Chopper to be unique, you need to lean on the things that set him or her apart. Use Fucking Thieves all the time, it's like free shit. If somebody highlights your hard, you should be throwing items around left and right. Also remember that even if you failed, somebody stole it, so now you have a reason to track down a thief. Go rough some people up, you're a bike gang.

Another point of difference is that the Chopper's gang isn't tied down to a holding, the way the Hardholder's is. There is no necessity for them to feel loyalty to anything other than their gang and the Chopper. You can use that to your advantage when you describe what your gang is like. Make it different from the hardholder's. Don't let the MC throw the same problems at both of you.