Design Room: GangBusters

Get ready for a true classic, and one of my absolute favorites of the TSR box game era, and yes, this includes Star Frontiers.

GangBusters.

Where else can you play characters like Sam Spade, Al Capone, Little Caesar (aka Edward G Robinson), Dick Tracy, Elliot Ness, Nucky Thompson (Boardwalk Empire), James Cagney (aka White Heat), the Shadow, Phillip Marlowe, Nero Wolfe, Charles Foster Kane, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and the classy dames and gents of the era?

What other pen-and-paper RPG lets you live the life of an Untouchable, or better yet, a gangster fighting his way to the top? Or a reporter uncovering corruption, or a private eye solving mysteries?

This game let you do it all, from two-fisted matinee crime busting to big name gangsters to the entirety of Noir to private eyes, and more like radio shows such as The Shadow or Rocky Jordan. This system was perfectly at home handling Indiana Jones if you were so inclined. This was one of the greats of the time, released as a TSR d00 game with much of the same rules as the other games of the time, such as Top Secret and Star Frontiers.

And this was published in 1982.

It was ahead of its time then, and it was never matched since in the 33 years since.

Characters

One of the great things about this game is it incentivized experience points. If you were a criminal, you got XP for earning illegal dough. Private eyes got XP solving cases. Cops got XP busting crooks. Reporters got XP breaking stories. This was actually the next evolution of D&D and AD&D's "XP for GP" mechanic, and it gave your character a clear day-zero motivation. You knew what you needed to do. The experience system motivated you to get out there in the world and make your own story, instead of waiting for the referee to run one for you.

You can imagine a D&D style game with this experience point system. Thieves get XP for stealing wealth. Paladins get XP for destroying evil. Clerics get XP for supporting and spreading their faith. Fighters get XP for killing things. Mages get XP for collecting magical knowledge and using magic. All of a sudden, your character motivations become crystal clear, and players are chomping at the bit to get out there and do what they were born to do.

Spiritually, the game was closer to Top Secret than Star Frontiers, but it was a lot simpler than the former. There were some derived stats, some stats on different number ranges, and also luck and presence scores. A dedicated driving ability score was used instead of a driving skill, which let everyone get in on the fun of car chases. Also, the ability scores were very well described, it was clear what each one was for, when you should make checks, how you make the checks, and when to make rolls. I don't think another game of the time had such a tight set of ability scores that were so useful (with no fluff), and also, these scores begged to be used.

Presence was a charisma-like stat based on a 1-10 score. It was off the 1-100 range because it was integral to the 2d10 NPC reaction chart, which saw a lot of use when interrogating suspects, asking questions to NPCs, roughing up someone for information, charming a pretty lady, threatening a ne'er-do-well, interviewing a witness, seeing if your boss was mad at you, or any other social interaction. If you were a great GangBusters referee, this chart saw a lot of use behind the scenes, and it was a great guide for for how you roleplayed NPCs in response to player actions.

Luck was a percentage statistic based on a 1-50% scale, and you rolled it whenever you wanted to determine if the winds of fortune blew a character's way. It had obvious combat uses like surviving death or seeing if there was a pillow truck down below to break your fall, but it also had great non-combat uses as well. Did the criminal leave a fingerprint? Was there lipstick on the glass? Did your character just miss the gangsters waiting for him at the train station? Was there a taxi nearby? Did your camera capture the killer's face? Did you win at last night's numbers game? If another ability score did not catch it, luck was used to clean up - and you were either lucky, or you weren't.

It didn't really matter if your luck was poor, as you could make jokes about your bad luck at the table. Similarly, you could work with low statistics pretty well, or accept the fact that maybe this mug's career wasn't going to be too bright and go down in a hail of gunfire. The characters were simple, potentially disposable (like original D&D), and you could always come up with a new one pretty quickly.

The skill system was also worth noting, as it let you spend earned XP on a number of specialty skills, such as safecracking, boxing, accounting, or forensics-style skills. You had to spend a lot to get good skills, and you started the game with one skill. A skill's starting level was rolled randomly on the ability score chart, which gave you a lot of variance on how good you were. You could be lousy at what you did, or a genius. Again, you rolled with the punches and played the hand you were dealt, so having a lousy roll didn't hurt you as much as you thought. You could still increase a skill by 5% every level, so it didn't sting too much, and new skills were rolled randomly, so there was always a chance you would find something later your character excelled at.

Like the original D&D, you toughed out low scores, or got your character killed so you could roll up a new one. Bad scores were not an issue, and characters had this disposable quality to them, again like the original D&D. Who cares if your gangster character got plugged on the last bank heist? Cry me a river and harden up, back in the day we didn't have this fancy thing called player entitlement. Grab your dice and roll up a new one, and have someone "know somebody" in the gang and have the new mug walk in the door. Maybe you'll get a great guy next time, who knows?

Careers

What other game within 32 pages of the table of contents tells your character how to setup a moonshine still and start brewing hooch, crack a safe, or run a racket?

The careers in this game had great sections describing requirements, what you did, and how you earned XP. You could play three types of law enforcer (fed, prohibition agent, and beat cop), a private eye, reporter, organized crime member, or independent criminal. I was always jealous of how cool this game's careers were, and it put a lot of generic games to shame on the detail and options provided within each career.

Sure, you could do this exact game with a generic game, such as GURPS or any other, but you miss out on all the tightly-designed cool things each class gets to do. This is a perfect example of how a focused design increases the experience at the table, yes there are limited design choice and options - but that is a strength of the GangBusters system. You aren't distracted by an open-ended character design system that lets you spin up a zeppelin pilot or a cowboy and expect the referee is going to have a role for you during the game. You were one of the seven classes in the sandbox, and everyone had a reason to bump into each other.

The game also let you play anything, even having a player play a cop on one side and another player play criminal on the other. You split the time and went at it. You could have a PI at the table along with a gangster and a reporter, and the referee went to each player in turn and asked what that player's character was doing today. If things needed to be broke down into hours or combat turns, so be it, and it happened right then and there. If two players came into conflict, it was played out.

Of course, you could always team up, but it felt silly to have a detective agency with four Sam Spades on the case. You could do a team of investigators, as Scooby Doo did for years, and it also begs to be said that GangBusters had some of the most fun and inventive mystery modules ever published for a roleplaying game. This game did private eye stuff well, incredibly well in fact, and no game since has come close to providing that gritty noir feel of being a private detective. Other games try, but the supporting material for criminals, reporters, and law enforcement make living in the world of a GangBusters private eye second to none, because the characters around you have motivation and clear reasons to be who they are.

You could spin up a private eye in a generic game, but your supporting cast becomes generic game NPCs, and not the cool and motivated classes that exist in this world. A gangster in d20 Modern is just that, a NPC with a couple skills and no real motivation other than, "what the referee says." Here, you know what that bad guy is up to, what he gets XP for, and the game takes on a competitive death-match type of feeling. A simpler system clears up motivations and puts a focus on the interactions between characters in this sandbox.

Vehicles

There must have been some directive at TSR after Car Wars was released where every role-playing game had to have a vehicle combat system, and GangBusters has a fun combat system for car chases and running gun battles with vehicles. I liked the inclusion of this system, and also giving every character a driving score, because it made cars and trucks matter. You just didn't use your driving score for combat maneuvers, you could tail a suspect's car, race down a twisting mountain road at night, dodge a runaway fruit cart barreling into the street, drive a long distance without a breakdown, and we found many uses for the skill other than combat.

Why have vehicles? Bootleggers of course. There is a fun, almost Dukes of Hazzard style bootlegging car combat game hidden in here, and it is a crazy and white-knuckle diversion with running road battles between rival bootleggers, rival mobs, and prohibition agents. Our games saw quite a junkyard full of wrecked and shot up cars pile up, and it was fun.

Combat

This was one of the first games we played that used a fixed damage system for wounding. Conceptually, there was little difference between GangBusters and Star Frontiers when it came to combat, you rolled 1d100 and rolled under to-hit. There were no gun skills in GangBusters, your to-hit was just straight agility.

Did we want skills you could level up, like in Star Frontiers? We didn't really feel the need, since it was possible to increase agility via XP if you wanted to, and also having a detailed character build system would have taken away some of the "random thugs and mugs" system the game thrived upon. Skills were special knowledge and not basic abilities in this game, there was this "every man hero" sort of feeling that if you spun up a character in the game, you could shoot guns, drive cars, interact with others, and do most everything in the game.

That said, combat was fast and furious, and also a bit on the simple side. We didn't mind, it just meant you could have more fist and gun fights in a session. It handled large and small battles quite well, and a good referee could improvise stunts and give hit and damage bonuses and penalties for all sorts of crazy tricks and wild actions like standing on top of a speeding truck and shooting a tommy gun.

Sleuthing

If you wanted to be Sherlock Holmes, you needed to invest in skills like fingerprinting, ballistics, chemical analysis, art expertise, forgery, accounting, art expertise, and a bunch of other very Sherlock-y skills. I loved that the design team broke these skills out instead of lumping them under an umbrella "forensics" skill, as these investigation methods were new to crime fighting, and having them in separate skills let you train them up, know you can use them, and become an expert in one or more fields.

This game did a great job at the CSI stuff decades before CSI hit the air.

That said, these skills were useful to many character types. Criminals needed accountants and people able to forge and detect forgeries, reporters needed sleuthing skills, private eyes needed them all, and the cops needed skills like this to build evidence. We found ourselves building lists of what was said and what was found on cases, just like real detectives.

Snooping around was a huge part of the game, and remember, there were no cell-phones in this world, portable radios were of limited use, cameras were large and needed flash powder, and voice recorders were these typewriter-sized things with large tape reels. Technology was primitive, so you needed to be clever to get evidence, get statements, and work at building a case. This was cool, and it forced you to work how investigators did back in the day.

Even police radios in cars in the 20's were receive only (calling all cars!), and a peace officer needed to stop by a call box to call back to the station. By the 30's two-way car radios became possible, but still the call box lived on. Phones were switchboard operated, and the only communications technology were radio, primitive fax machines, and teletypes. The limits of technology were cool in this game, and I think even more cool nowadays. Living without a headset radio, cell phone, laptop, or pocket camera means you needed to be careful about communication, find phones, and also be able to interact with others and think on your feet.

No texting. No social media. No instant access to information or Wikipedia (you went to the library, public records, tax offices, etc). No instant communication. No Internet. No apps. No TV. You got the news from the papers or the radio. No cell phone cameras or pocket voice recorders. A game that forces you to think and solve crimes without a cell phone?

Priceless.

The Dark Side

There was a dark side to this game, especially on the law enforcement side. People in the government and peace officers could be corrupt. This is realistic, and it runs counter to the Film Board's rosy view of the era you get in movies. There was a lot of money going around with bootleggers and crime, and if you played an honest officer of  the law, you could run afoul of bad eggs on your side. The drama and tension of who you could trust was very compelling and it was a brave choice to put rules like this in the game. It would have been easier to whitewash things and present the sanitized view, but to put these rules in the game (especially with TSR's old code of conduct) was a very brave and commendable move for a historical pen-and-paper game.

Of course, on the criminal's side, they did not fare any better. You didn't have to wonder who was corrupt, because you were all crooks. But in our games, the double-crosses and the fights for power in criminal gangs reached epic proportions. Some players wanted to be Al Capone, and ruthlessly eliminated rivals (PCs and NPCs alike). Some players wanted to play both sides, and rat out the Al Capones to the cops. Others got burned by injustice, and we had at least one criminal player turn good-guy vigilante, like The Shadow, and work to thwart the other player's lives of crime outside of the law.

We had some incredible games with memories that last to this day.

The 1920's and 30's

I think the hardest part of selling GangBusters is selling people on the era. If you love the classic black and white films and radio shows of the era, there is no selling, because you just jump at the chance to play a game set in this era. Oh, and by the way, the Internet Archive's Old Time Radio collection is a great place to start enjoying these radio shows, for free, and please donate and support the project if you can.

Without that background, the game is a harder sell. You need to do a little research on how things worked, and while the game has some of that in the book, I would have loved to see a more complete treatment of the era and technology so people could get up to speed. It is almost like a fantasy world now, since we are coming up on nearly 100 years passing since this time in our history. I like to look at this gangsters and gun-molls world like a fantasy world, since you can't tie yourself too closely to history, and you have to let players feel that freedom.

The research for this era is fun and well worth the time you put into the task. I own a copy of the 1920's Montgomery Ward catalog with all sorts of household items and prices. I love looking at the classic cars of the era. Watching movies set in this time is always fun, and you get the look and feel of the time. The clothes, the manner of speech, and the slang all are classic and iconic parts of our history. There is also the struggle of immigrants, the undertones of racial divides, the role of women, how sin and vice are seen, to role of religion in society, and many other topics that continue to this day that wait to be added to games, if you wish.

This was one of those games that kindled my love of history when I was young, and there really isn't a game like it that I feel is this compelling in action and content and also accessible to a wide audience. That's how I was like when I was young, this game has cool action and history to get lost in? Sweet, I am in.

What Else?

I would love to see rules for ward bosses, mayors, and other politicians. That feels like a missing part of the game, but I know it would require a lot of source material for how big city politics worked. I would also like to see a vigilante class for crime fighters, sort of like our Shadow player, or maybe a 1920's version of Batman.

It would be fun to see a classic 'magic tricks' system, something that fits in with the time, like magic tricks, Eastern magic from India, and things like hypnosis - like the radio show Chandu the Magician or any of the other sort of magic and strange powers shows they had back then. This is purely an optional rule because I love the old time radio shows so much. And yes, I know real magic doesn't fit the genre at all, but there was a lot of mysticism back then, and this would purely be for fun.

For crimes, I wanted to see more on different types of gambling and horse racing, rules for running a speakeasy or nightclub, tax-free imports, murder for hire, and other types of crime as seen in the movies. Like any good HBO show, the game needs rules for prostitution and a generic 'dope' sort of drug for post-war games. I know, TSR would throw a fit should brothel ownership rules appear in the game, but I watch enough HBO to know better. The drug angle is interesting, because the game's focus could expand post-war into the late 40's and 50's with Godfather style drama. There were some noir films that got into bootleggers and how they reacted to moving dope versus booze, and that would be a fun conflict for criminals to wrestle with.

To balance all that, I would like to see more detail on law enforcement, with details like the car radios, procedure, DAs, evidence, grand juries, tax evasion, and other 'gotchas' the law used to take down big criminals. I like the details on how enforcement changed, how state lines used to work, and other changes brought about when the mob started to get cracked down on and went underground. There is a huge history of enforcement procedures I would love to see in a future version, along with possibly the comic-book side of fantasy enforcement with radio watches and decoder rings as seen in Dick Tracy and other serials.

I would love a 1945 to 1965 time frame in a New York like city as an alternate Noir-style setting, with the possible involvement of Las Vegas and LA as satellite settings. There is another fascinating shift in criminal activity during this historical period, along with a dramatic change in technology and law enforcement techniques and agencies. I would love to see this grim and gritty period covered and explored in an action-driven GangBusters style.

Focus

The game knew what it wanted to do, and every rule focused in on that fact. Some games, such as Traveller, provide you with a generic framework of rules to cover sci-fi adventures, but they fall short on giving you things to do. You end up with a game that does everything, but doesn't do anything. It's a great simulator, yes, but where are the parts of the game that call you to action? Do Traveller scouts get XPs for each new system discovered? Do mercenaries get points for successful contracts? Do navy officers get points for defeating enemy starships?

GangBusters is a game that limits your freedom, as you can't be everything. You can't be soldiers, boxers, movie stars, zeppelin pilots, or African explorers. But what you can be is so well done you don't care. Everything is there, ready for you to jump in and start playing, and your motivations and how you get ahead in the game as the class you pick is abundantly clear.

Contrast this with today's game's, which are character building games or games more focused on stories told by the dungeon master and finding hooks for your characters to be a part of them. Some games are simulators, and others are entirely story based. They want to do everything, be infinitely expandable, and take most of your time and resource to play and think about.

They are all-consuming, and they demand their fans to be as well.

Where are the toy-box games? The ones you pull off the shelf and have fun with for a night, and you don't need to learn a 600 page rulebook to play? They don't demand the system is the only thing you should learn or play, and they were built to have one sort of fun in mind. GangBusters is focused in a way the old Dungeon board game was compared to Basic D&D. This is a box full of fun pieces to play with, little gangsters and federal agents waiting to be pulled out and used, and private eyes and mystery men to criss-cross in the dark shadows of the next great mystery.

Also, this is one of the few games that openly put player versus player conflict as a center point of the game. West End's Paranoia would come later, but this was one of the first pen-and-paper games that openly embraced the idea that players would be in conflict with each other. Top Secret, D&D, Star Frontiers, and the other TSR games of the era? They all followed the "adventuring party" model of play with one group of players working towards a common goal.

Here, players could be working with or against each other, and there was this wonderful break from the party mentality where one player could be a private eye in one part of the city working on a case, and another a small-time thug working his way up through the ranks in another. It was a wonderfully non-linear and open model of play that followed each character on a story thread, let them meet, come into conflict, and even cooperate as players seen fit and fate thrust them together.

The Game Today

While you mugs are out there on the Internet, check out the original designer's blog, Rick Krebs, and show the guy some love, why don't you. It's not often you get to speak to a legend.

You see, the rights to the game reverted to Mr. Krebs, and he runs a little corner of the Internet devoted to the game he helped create. You can't buy or legally download the game in PDF, you have to hunt down a used copy somewhere and play.

It is my dream to see this published in PDF form somewhere and someday so countless generations can play this game. I akin this to the preservation of the films and radio shows of this era, and how better to keep the spirit of this time alive than to let people listen to the radio shows, see the movies, and play their own versions of these tales with about the best system ever written about this era.

I would love to see the boxed game come back. I would love to write a game covering this era as well, or possibly the 45 to 65 Noir post-war era. There is just so much here that is cool, even today in our modern and instantly connected world, and this game still speaks to me as a model of where we came from and how things have changed. It is, in its heart, a simple adventure game, but in another way it is more than that.

This is a game that took a conflict which brewed in society (crime, vice, immigrants, and law and order), and presented it in a fun and accessible form. It let us play out our 'cops and robbers' fantasies and it teached as well. It let us play Sam Spade, and for the first time in mass-market pen-and-paper gaming, it put down the +1 longsword and made us pick up a magnifying glass to look for clues. We had to roleplay, to think, to interact, and to judge character. It was very much like Vampire: The Masquerade in a way because it also dealt with factions and conflicts that needed to be roleplayed.

And it was, most importantly, fun. Let's raise a glass in your honor, GangBusters, for being one of the true pioneers in the pen-and-paper genre that set the stage for so many great games which followed.