Can some one explain how NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH works?

So it's 1 to give harm and -1 to take harm vs lone dudes as well as counting as a gang when fighting a gang. I read the book and i still don't quite get how it works.

You actually just described how it works. What specifically is confusing about that?

Its more the (3-harm gang small) at the start threw me off a bit. That and translating the gangs rules in order to work with one dude at like 2am.

Ah. Well, you count as a gang with those stats. Your weapon's damage value doesn't matter (though its tags might), you just have those stats.

So...vs. a single opponent, you do 4 Harm (3+1 for size) and take -1 Harm. Versus a small gang, you're on equal footing and do 3 Harm and take harm normally (instead of taking extra). And so on and so forth.

There's really no need to translate, because mechanically you just count as a gang for basically all purposes (well, you react to harm differently, but that's about it).

Ah so 2-harm weapon becomes 3-harm, then also +1 if he is fighting Johnny Nofriends.

Does fighting Johnny Nofriends count as being 'in battle'? If not, the move isn't triggered. If so, then yes.

Yeah, that's the important conditional on the move: You need to be in a battle for it to trigger. That's not usually gonna be the case when you're having a fight in an alley with a single guy.

On the other hand, if you're part of a giant field battle and the Hardholder's gang is busy fighting another gang and Johnny Nofriends is a serious badass on that side and you go head-to-head with him specifically...well then, yeah, you're sitting on 4 Harm vs. poor Johnny.

THE FOLLOWING IS A HACK
not cannon AW rules.

If for whatever reason you dislike how gangs / battle are rather arbitrarily decided:
I've found it helpful to rescript all gang harm/armor as number of people and the odds.

3:1 in this case would be... if you've got three times their number.
whereas 1:3 would be... if they've got three times your number.
average the results as it works for your group, or decide if a gang is half way, if they should be more
one way or other based on the circumstances, then disclaim why so the players aren't taken by surprise.

They shouldn't stand a chance, get +2 harm/armor (3:1)
You've got the advantage, get +1 harm/armor (2:1)
You're evenly matched (1:1)
You're disadvantaged in this fight, they get +1 harm/armor (1:2)
You're seriously outnumbered/out-maneuvered, they get +2 harm/armor (1:3)
You're not coming back from this one, they get +3 harm/armor (1:4+)

Now every combatant matters, you can decide by how much on the spot or ahead of time, whatever works. If people die, then the force afterwards is weaker, or weaker until the wounded get help etc.  This was helpful to me and my group because it allowed us to quickly evaluate more complicated fights. Like being able to lure you enemy into a trap (your people have more of an advantage, maybe it off-sets a numbers or just betters you by one step). In general you should not dynamically change the odds after a fight begins, (unless everyone is down with that), best to decide after when you declare the dead and wounded. I made up group harm rolls that can be made after a fight depending on the harm suffered to help determine actual dead/wounded counts, but really... we never needed to use them. Abouts as per the narrative were all that mattered.

As for Gunlugger, we handled NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH, as the gunlugger counts as 10 guys whenever he didnt have the advantage over his enemies, up to gaining the advantage. This fits well with the original wording of the move, where the word Battle just means: a fight has broken out and everyone is engaged. (i.e. doesn't fire when you jump a gang in an alley, not until after the first exchange and they're fighting too) 1v1 the npc has got 2 or 3 harm worth of life. 5 npcs have a clock with 6 harm worth of life, but no number difference for harm / armor.


flexible examples:

10 guys vs 13 guys is pretty even.
3 guys vs 9 guys are seriously numbered
50 guys vs 30 guys have the advantage.

and

the gunlugger vs 1-5 guys has the advantage
the gunlugger vs 6-15 guys is evenly matched
the gunlugger vs 16-26 guys is at a disadvantage
the gunlugger vs 36 or more might be trouble

this logic also holds true for adding the gunlugger to some guys

G and 5 guys count like 15, so they could take on like 10 to 20 and still be evenly matched (pretty good for 6 dudes vs 20)

Anyway, figured I'd toss something out there in case you and your group (or anyone else reading) wanted to have something a bit more flexible. You can cap the gunluggers bonus at evenly matched too if you want to make those single baddies really count. We called this secondary stat: BAD. Then we said enemies could be given increased bad as a special move. Let players increase their bad (including the Gunlugger) with advance move for +2 or 3. You can set the BAD granted by not to be fucked with to anything you want. You can attribute BOSSES to have like 5 BAD, and therefore needs 3 normal people to off-set their advantage. You can give the seriously scary / violent / drugged NPCs 2 BAD, doubling their effective gang size. (starting player gangs have a total BAD equal to the AW declared number of gang members) You can even increase BAD when someone is seriously high on some violent drugs.

Whatever works.

When it says "Armor according to circumstance", does that include:
Worn armor?
Armor from moves like Daredevil, Rasputin and Impossible Reflexes?

When it says "Armor according to circumstance", does that include:
Worn armor?
Armor from moves like Daredevil, Rasputin and Impossible Reflexes?

I'm pretty sure it includes all of that, yeah.

I probably would not let all of those conditions happen at once, mind you. I'd say they don't stack. +1 armor when... is the same as two +1 armors when... imo.

Armor according to the circumstances might mean just that, armor like normal. Or you may choose to read into it. Example: perhaps in your game, armor according to the circumstances means that the armor you need to protect you against that source of damage, might not protect you as well as it wouldve when its you again all those sources at once. Maybe the Gunlugger needs to also take some cover to benefit from their armor when being shot at by 20 people. I mean, standing there in the street and thinking every shot isnt going to hit anything vital isnt keeping the game very real. But its your call, its up to you, you as the MC determine what the circumstances demand.

So ask yourself. What do these circumstances demand of the gunlugger, does their armor matter given them? Either way you best tell your Gunlugger.

Personally, I would let all those factors come up at once. The gunlugger takes NTBFW, the Battlebabe move for 2-Armor while basically naked, and the Faceless move for +1 Armor when being scary as fuck? Then that one Gunlugger going through the entire hold massacring everything methodically and somehow surviving just makes sense. Look at the fiction and remember the point of being a an of the character is to think "wow! How bad-ass is this?!" When they do something cool but unreasonable.

As for the fight/battle split; yeah. A battle is any time you could use the optional battle moves, right? When maneuvers are involved, basically. So if infiltrating the enemy hold is all one sequence, where the Gunlugger rolls up to the gate, blasts the guard tower, rams a truck through the door, fights through the entire Main Street barricade and storms Harold's castle to do something, that's all one battle.

If it's just the gunlugger versus like ten other guys and all there is is this one melee or shoot out, that's not a battle. It's a fight. It's a mostly narrative tool. The Gunlugger is the line soldier like Rambo, who goes through the entire viet cong complex unfazed by how outnumbered he is... Who still gets whomped when two guys hold him down and a third wails on his face.

Just to be clear, the gun lugger can ranbo plenty without daredevil and rasputin just fine. Letting those two stack in addition might actually prevent the story from feeling real. In general, letting people breach 4-armor is not going to help, and might just force everyone to go full on armor just to survive whatever shit you have to throw at the gunlugger to make the world feel scary.

Just be careful, and make the rules do what you and your group want the world to feel like. AW shouldnt be munchkined. There are better systems for doing that.
 

Wha? No man, you're slipping back into reflexive gaming. Balance this, and even that. There is no "design something to challenge the Gunlugger", and there is no "overpower the rest of the party because of it". 4-armor is indeed too much. The gunlugger here should be pulling 3, minus any clever positioning, bad spots and size differences the opposition manages.

Stacking those two things isn't munchkining the system. It's a clear dramatic trade off; if things go very, very bad, the Gunlugger plans to be walking out of a smoking crater almost untouched. This means the gunlugger wants situations that escalate to that point, they want diplomacy to fail, they want everyone else to band up against them, they want their character to lose everything they love and deal with that loss. NTBFW is almost always going to come up when against another gang, negating the armor boost. It's all just declaration of scale.

4-armor is indeed too much.

That is really the only point I was getting at.

I no longer use AW harm, armor, or combat moves in my games, we've developed hacks that give us the cinematics that was tailored to the needs of our group. Back when I was still using this system, there were times when having 2-armor felt ridiculous in certain circumstances; which is why the rule: make the world feel real, was always given the imperative for our discussions on which side of the blade any ambiguous rulings fell on.

Also, I did mispeak, it wasn't "you have to throw at the gunlugger", but rather "that my gunlugger tends to seek out for the hell of it"