The Operators Gigs

So I get the idea of profit gigs, they are things that the Operator can do on or off screen to make some barter but what I don't follow are obligations gigs. The obligations gigs have down side but if you don't complete them but I don't get when I should enforce the downside or when the obligation gig is in play.
To give example my friend playing the Operator chose Maintaining my Honor (you keep your word and your name / you cross a line) as his obligation gigs. So is the idea here that if he says no to helping someone or doing a job then he isn't fulfilling his obligation or is the idea that he has to go out of his way to say he working towards that? Help would be much appreciated.

The Obligation gig is one of the coolest parts about being an operator. You've got a guy that's always juggling 20 things at once and still keeping all the balls in the air, this obligation gig might be anything, but its the one they just cant shake. The business deal gone wrong, the hardholder with a grudge, The mystery left unanswered. It could be a good guy thing like: you've promised someone that you'll track down that serial killer, or maybe one of those I bit off too much at once things like: I owe the Logger Gang a shit load of jingle because I lost their cargo to so an so because I was late to the meeting due to a gunfight with the Brooming Bros.

The key is, the obligation gig should play into that characters main story, their personal narrative, it should have a cool effect on their back story and help the player define who they are and what they came from. If your player doesn't like their obligation gig, maybe you and they need to sit down and figure out something that would be very cool and very relevant for them.

Most players of operators should WANT to do their obligation gig. But not doing it just means you've a nice looming vulnerability for them you can push the tension on or announce complications with when they miss a roll or you need to announce some badness. Basically, the operators personal history can keep cropping up into the game play, a history they had the largest role in crafting. It shoudn't be seen as a punishment or a de-powering choice. It has the potential to be the best job on the list, because this game isn't about winning or losing, its about telling the coolest stories you can. I love picking one of these of these and then knowingly not working it, just because I know if I need to aim for the piles of cash I've got this cool story on the side that'll start pushing into things. I work it only when I need that story to sit down and let me focus on something more demanding.

To sum up:

Obligation gigs...
...are personal character narratives with far reaching effects.
...provide the MC with opportunities to bring that personal history into the game play.
...function like the downsides on gangs, vehicle weaknesses, or hardhold vulnerabilities.
...Are used to create tension and coolness to break up the status quo
...Will eventually resolve, and other ones will develop through gameplay

Direct Answer
To answer you question more directly. If an Operator chooses maintaining my Honor as their obligation gig. And they WORK IT SUCCESSFULLY, it means that despite lots of people thinking he is a crook, or some other pressure on his reputation (maybe a rival smearing his name, a hard-holder official trying to kick him out of favor, or some gang trying to frame him for crimes)--He comes up of some crazy escapade with his reputation in tact. If he WORKS IT and fails, then something goes awry, maybe there was a morally gray choice involved, maybe someone framed the operator for something, maybe he just got fed up with some bastard and he shot him in the street to keep him from doing something else--despite promising someone he wouldn't. Hell maybe he promised someone close to him that he cared about that he wouldn't get hurt, and he got shot anyway.

Generally choosing this option assumes and demands that the Operator is trying to keep his reputation clean UNDER PRESSURE. He is signing up for some heavy smears of his character and a constant struggle of both promising the near impossible and needing to keep his reputation clean for REAL reasons. These reasons can vary massively from character to character and story to story, so this is something you should work on with that player.

When you DON'T work the gig, then it means they have a vulnerability this session. Any time they fail a roll or an opportunity presents itself, make them make that hard choice. Have npcs forcing the character to make hard to do promises, or easy promises which you suddenly make much less easy. Have his relationships hinge on his ability to keep his word, thus fucking up might cost him an ally, a customer, or open up an opportunity for a new rival.

PASS: The gig is fine and everything is settled right now, don't screw with the gig right now.
IGNORED: The gig gets tested on screen during game play, things become more complicated, more tense. Think of it like: bad things could happen but he can use game time to make them not. As opposed of things going badly off-screen and starting his day off with balls falling all around him.
FAILED: Well shit, something BAD went down, figure out what the repercussions of that badness is. Start from there.

I generally give +1juggling for an obligation gig, per obligation gig, and if it resolves then the juggling boost goes away. I'm 90% sure that the operator already has this bonus factored into his class. Moonlighting without an obligation gig is -1 juggling (like when someone takes it from another playbook). Don't be afraid of letting the Operator get more Obligation gigs in game when it makes sense, and don't be afraid of letting them resolve either (it should MATTER if it gets resolved). Just remember, the +1 juggling is assumed to focus on that thing--it is suppose to represent that they SHOULD have time enough for MOST things, what will they ignore this time? Juggling, remember?

Great answer, to which I have very little to add other than a rules bit:

The +juggling every time you get a new gig is built in to Moonlighting, it's not Operator-specific -- but obligation gigs are gigs like any other, so should definitely come with that +1. Resolving a gig is also a possible Operator advance, and is therefore functionally quite similar to a permanent +1 to juggling.

Okay so when the game says you get +1 juggling for getting a gig does that refer to getting a gig in the improvement section and/or when an important obligation gig comes up? Cause I assume that every time time you do a quick paying gig you don't get +1 juggling cause that would get ridiculous.

About Gigs
Gigs are not one off jobs, they are things you do for a living. So just cause a guy hires you and your boys to deliver these trucks full of scrap metal to the guy on the other side of the bandit ridden wastes--doesn't mean now you're a transporter. You might be, if people know this is what you do and you got guys coming all the time to ask. But if it's a one time thing, it's not something you're juggling off-screen.

Your Answer
Juggling is really about how many jobs you aren't doing. Not how many you are doing. If you have too many things you're trying to do, but can't well, that's like having every weakness on your hard-hold. There wont be enough time in a session to have forty things going wrong all the time without literally consuming every moment of game time. That's why you've a limited number of things that are weaknesses, and you push one on a partial or the few on a miss.

For the Operator, they have a +2 juggling and start with 4 gigs. So they're always leaving two of them off the table, but can choose to leave more. If they only work one, then on a partial, that one works and nothing goes wrong. This is playing it safe.

To make things interesting, the obligation gig is risky to ignore. (otherwise it would be a rather dry and mechanical, pick your jobs see if you get paid or what). So the Operator is choosing between two paying jobs and some risk, or keeping the obligation gig out of the picture for less possible reward. This choice is important to the character, its The Challenge.

Now lets say your operator is Easy on the Eyes and has a thing for the Ladies. So he's sleeping around, with like five different women. Of course none of them know about the other ones and at least two of them are wed to some pretty scary dudes. But that's just the Operator's thing, juggling. To make this even more tense is the fact that each one of them is now a gig in and of themselves.

5 girls, means five different obligation gigs, means +5 juggling. Now this does mean that the Operator has a +7 juggling. Sure. but what two things is he not going to try to work, and how will that impact the game. If he is money starved... does he risk letting his eyes off one of the girls while he goes and cleans something up? What if he hits a partial? What gig went WAY WRONG. Did a girl figure him out, is she bring some "hell hath no fury" to the table? What did she learn, how did that blow up. Is the gig DONE because he fucked up bad? Or is she fucking pissed, knows he is cheating and STILL want him for herself? ... what if he is working all the women, and rolls a miss... and all of the go belly up? What could that do to him, how many husbands might be coming at him? How many might be hurting the women, what the girls doing to each other, what are they doing to him? The answer is they're probably all doing something different--but in a climatic failure like that, most if not all those gigs will be resolved here.

The only way for them to remain is actually if they fall into a new pattern of tension that can co-exist. Since the girls know he was cheating on him, and probably know each other, and the gigs are still around so they're still seeing him... Well, there must be tension. Maybe they're ground rules, made they're working together, maybe his life just got turned upside down. Maybe he had to make concessions to them, or maybe he's working to keep their wrath at bay.

See if the juggling didn't increase, or got limited somehow, all of a sudden there would just be too many things going on during the session. Total failures being the exception here, because most of them are final. Some gigs are like "protect this person" and a failure means that person is dead. That's pretty final. Most obligation gigs work this way, if they trigger, the shits hit the fan.

Clarification
Every obligation gig, or normal gigs gained through experience, adds one juggling.
Every obligation gig that's resolved forever removes one. (except the advance)

The reason this is allowed to happen, is hitting a 10+ can only be as +3. So partials are very likely. The more you work, the more might go wrong. You hit that miss though and you were working 13 jobs? lol.... You've probably got every gang, every powerful figure, every mad husband in the world coming after your ass and ending you. It'll be messy and very little will be there when you come up for air, excepting your skills at those things mind you. Time to start up somewhere else, or hold that thing you do ransom until someone decides to give you another go.

Response to Daniel
I'd go as far to say that you can always earn more obligation gigs, as clearly shown in the operators special. Resolving them can happen during game play. The advance is letting you resolve one of them DESPITE game play. Obviously you dont want to go too crazy here, you and the player are juggling these things too. Dont overwhelm yourselves.

To put it more simply...

The more gigs someone is doing the more that can go wrong. The more that goes wrong, the harder it will be to recover from it. It could be like the MC making 5 or 6 simultaneous hard moves on you. Shit gets real and it might not go back together. The thing is, the Operator is the guy that tries to put it back together anyway.

The gigs they have are the gigs they have, it tell you about the characters skill sets. The improvements improve the characters skill sets as much as open up opportunities. If you've been doing murders for Rath, and that went belly up, maybe Rath is dead or maybe he's coming for you now. That's a new issue on the field not counting the people you didn't kill and might be coming after you too. That doesn't mean you're done doing murders, it just means you're probably not doing them for either of the previous parties.   

Obligation gigs are more... final. They're very specific and they don't change characters involved because of a failure. They're probably over now and you're stuck dealing with whatever fallout that is. Maybe the NPC involved isnt just gone, maybe the gig remains but differently. Maybe you go from Sleeping with the Girl (keeping her happy/hell hath no fury) to Paying off a debt to the girls husband (you keep him happy/he comes for your head), and hell just for fun... maybe she's not over you yet. The gig changed forever with that total failure, but they don't always just resolve. Resolved obligation gigs have to be done in a final type of way, or through an advance followed by a narrative of how that got resolved offscreen.

So what I am gathering here is obligation gigs are based around story and narrative events and paying gigs are stuff that is always on going because the operator has spread the word that he does these things for people. As the MC I am trying to figure out how to deal with the concept of the Maintaining Honor gig. My operator was a cop before the apocalypse hit so course he would what to keep up appearance as cops would want, so if I say there is someone slandering him then that would mean he has to try and go out and fix this issue of being slander. Then if something else happens on the way he gains a new obligation and +1 juggling but takes care of it so it and the juggling is gone. Is this a correct assessment, just a need a yes or no.

Yes.

Make sure you share a mutual understanding of the gig and your players narrative. Its best to both be on the same page, when things things happen, they make sense for both parties. Don't just give more obligation gigs, and don't just resolve them. Give both events a sense of importance.

One thing which I feel might need to be made explicit is that 'gigs' and 'juggling' are only used for the move Moonlighting and the move Moonlighting is a beginning of session move that is only used to determine things that have happened off-screen. If you are just telling the Operator about this slander and then the Operator is going to deal with it and you are playing all this out in the actual game, you just do that as normal.

The Moonlighting move exists to create situations that the Operator will get to deal with in play -- especially in the case of a missed roll or partial hit. But once those situations are being dealt with in play, you just play them out. Then, maybe after they're done, you think about whether they have had some impact on the Operator's gigs, obligation or otherwise -- but in order to do that you need to keep in mind that gigs are a thing specifically about what the Operator does offscreen as part of their everyday life.

Resolution of gigs and acquiring new gigs, obligation or otherwise, will most likely happen in play -- or through the player spending an advance, which should then get reflected in the fiction -- but in order to determine whether or not something constitutes a 'gig' (as opposed to just a job) you need to think about whether it is now an ongoing concern above and beyond the immediate task. Delivering a package for Twice in exchange for first aid supplies is not a gig; an ongoing agreement to ferry the mail between Twice's holding and the outpost on the Frozen Wastes, though -- that's a gig for sure.

By the same token, a character who just gets upset when somebody calls them a liar to their face -- in play, when it happens to come up -- does not have an obligation gig to defend their honour. That's just their personality, lots of people are like that. But if that same person is constantly going out of their way to pay back minor favours, fulfill promises, take on unnecessary promises for the purpose of fulfilling them, etc. -- and they're doing that even when the camera is not on them -- then that's the obligation gig.

I mean, I think that specific obligation gig is one of the trickier ones, and Ebok is 100% on point that you need to talk to the player and make sure you both have the same understanding of what the gig means: what does 'their honour' look like, what things count and don't count, what sort of activities do they undertake beyond the purely reactive ones in order to 'defend' it, etc. It's easy to imagine the gig as purely reactive -- you can't defend something if it's not under attack -- so it's crucial to establish why it is under attack, or from where or by whom, and what that looks like as an ongoing thing.

--

As to the conversation about the advance and gaining obligation gigs, obviously you can gain as many as make sense. And that advance is much like other fiction-based advances (getting a gang, gaining Moonlighting in the first place, etc.) -- it can work both prescriptively and descriptively, as has been discussed in a thousand million threads.

I think the Operator (and gigs in general) is one of the cases where the PC is most likely to gain or resolve a gig purely as the result of changes to the fiction, but the presence of the advance helps model how that should work, mechanically. Most crucially, the advance doesn't say 'you lose 1 juggling.' So a character who has taken that as their first advance, say, and has not gained any new gigs, has 2 juggling and 2 gigs. It seems quite possible -- though quite boring! -- to end up with an Operator who has more juggling than they have gigs. Of course in that case it will be in the nature of the Operator to simply acquire more gigs post-haste, rather than waste their precious Moonlighting roll.

One possible point of confusion here for the player might be that they want their character to be known as an honourable person -- but that's absolutely not what taking that obligation move means. It means their character is by default doing things that would call their honour into question (or has some specific group or person or situation that is sabotaging their good name), and they have to make an effort to counteract that pressure.

A character who wants to be known as an honourable person -- as a secure, established thing -- would take the 'Reputation' move.

In his example Daniel, he was referring to possible consequences for the Obligation gig "Maintaining your Honor" if they didn't choose to work the gig. If they did choose to work it, then off-screen or during downtime shit already went well (so nothing is cropping up during game-play) or very badly (so he's already facing severe fallout during game-play).

I agree with your points that said. Though I think we might be scaring him.

So what I am gathering here is obligation gigs are based around story and narrative events and paying gigs are stuff that is always on going because the operator has spread the word that he does these things for people.

For the most part. But don't forget the narrative power of having a paying gig go badly. In our most recent campaign, the Battlebabe took Moonlighting and 2 paying gigs as an advance. The number of times she botched "infiltration" was epic. A number of sessions started in medias res with her trying to blast her way out of a bad situation (often with the "help" of the Faceless, who had a lopsided, mostly unrequited thing for her and whose player had hilariously opted to take the move scent of blood). The fallout from these encounters fueled much of the narrative as the campaign progressed.

Quote from: k2i3n4g5 on May 22, 2015, 10:00:26 AM

So what I am gathering here is obligation gigs are based around story and narrative events and paying gigs are stuff that is always on going because the operator has spread the word that he does these things for people.

For the most part. But don't forget the narrative power of having a paying gig go badly. In our most recent campaign, the Battlebabe took Moonlighting and 2 paying gigs as an advance. The number of times she botched "infiltration" was epic. A number of sessions started in medias res with her trying to blast her way out of a bad situation (often with the "help" of the Faceless, who had a lopsided, mostly unrequited thing for her and whose player had hilariously opted to take the move scent of blood). The fallout from these encounters fueled much of the narrative as the campaign progressed.

Oh yeah I'm of that part of the Operator, I am waiting for that too happen so the fun for me can start lol. I have only had two session so far so haven't been able to get into that yet.