Gangbusters is one of my favorite systems that I rarely played as a kid. I love the era, the genre, the cops and robbers theme, the private eyes, the violent Noir setting, and the artwork. We rediscovered this game and it still shined through with its ease of play, simplicity, and pure pick-up-and-play value.
No cell phones. No TV. No computers. No Internet. You wanted to do a records search? Have your secretary go down to city hall, the newspaper office, or the library. You read the newspaper and listened to the radio, and no, there wasn't 24-7 news either. Air travel? Very, very limited and not commercialized. You took a boat to Europe or Asia.
The 1920s and 1930s Noir era is as close as we will get to a fantasy setting for the modern gaming. This is still all about your name, who you are, and your reputation with others. Legends, like Elliot Ness, can still exist. A city can live in fear of a criminal gang, and it will take a crack team of a few incorruptible G-Men to save the day. This is a fantasy setting with guns and cars.
When we did revisit this later and play the game, it was still as wild and violent as we left it. This almost played out like a Batman movie with the criminals getting more and more outrageous with their plots and schemes, and the good guys of law enforcement fighting a daily war against pure criminal anarchy. And our love of radio shows came through in these games, with some players adopting the shadowy identities of masked vigilantes to fight the rising tide of lawlessness. Players mimicked The Shadow, the Green Hornet, and other crime fighters, modified their Packard Sedans to become armed crime fighting vehicles, and waged shadowy wars on the streets as the gangsters increasingly became frustrated with their shipments of alcohol getting blown up by the good guys.
Booze is the Vice
And booze was the vice of this game, so it was a more innocent time and you had this "screw the rich" theme going on. This wasn't crack cocaine or human smuggling or some dark crime in the corner of the Internet with a tragic human and societal cost. This was a sort of innocent vice being cooked up and smuggled in to feed the excesses of the rich who ignored the law, and the poor who had to suffer and live by different rules.
The gangsters were working as violent proxies for the rich flouting the law, and the good guys were the average working folk trying to enforce the law equally for all. So the more booze you busted, the more the rich suffered, and you chalked up another victory for the working class and equal treatment for all. There still was this notion of "right is right" based on working-class principles and the common person in this genre.
Criminals were either tools of the rich serving a need for contraband, or using death and violence to get rich and join that club. When corrupt, law enforcement was a tool used to protect the rich. At its ideal and most chivalrous state, law enforcement was the guardian of the working class and its "what is fair is fair" values - and in essence anti-wealth. The press played into this as well, exposing corruption and taking down the scions of power and influence through public outrage.
Contrast that above paragraph with today's world. If you go into this game with "today's assumptions" about wealth and power you may not see some of the core conflicts in the game. I feel you do have to go back to your traditional fantasy tropes about good and evil, fairness and wealth, and frame the conflicts in this game against a simpler time.
Figures like Al Capone were the "dark wizard" corrupting all which they touch and the rising tide of darkness threatened to overturn a just and fair kingdom of light.
Make the Era Yours
That said, the era was one of massive racial and gender inequality, but you could make this pretty color and gender-blind and let everyone live out their fantasies in this era. Again, this is fantasy, and if players were uncomfortable with an exact historical recreation of the time, just ignore history and make the game your own. Any game set in in the pre 2000's modern era is going to have this issue, and how I deal with this is to know my players and deliver the fantasy they want to experience.
We are here to have fun.
I know it is in vogue today to say a game is a reflection of a past we should forget, but in our young minds at the time, that past never existed. The game, as written, is mostly color and gender-blind with fun and opportunity for all. If you did a modern version of this? Tweak the art, add some iconic female characters, and say this is how things are in the game and this world. Warhammer FRP did this with the art direction of the new game and I feel this is a good way to include more players in the fun.
I can't sit at a table and tell a player she can't be a female Elliot Ness, Sam Spade, or Al Capone, or a player with a skin tone that wasn't reflected in the time they couldn't be that either. Are you serious? I would be a dick GM to pull that crap. To me, those character archetypes sound incredibly fun and I want them at my table.
Otherwise what you are doing is transposing the biases on the past onto the players of today. If your group is okay with a period-accurate world and wants to experience the time, sure, explore that, but the core of this game is pulp, fast action, cops and robbers gangster shootouts and deep-shadowed Noir fun. Everyone should be able to see themselves in that world and enjoy being a part of the fun.
Fast Characters
The TSR d100 systems were incredibly fast to create characters for, and Gangbusters is no exception. These games simplified play by having most of the common checks covered by ability scores.
Muscle, Agility, and Observation were the game's three primary ability scores, rolled on a weighted d100 scale. These were checked directly for combat and all actions, and Agility covered gun combat and melee to-hits. We always ruled it was Muscle for melee to-hits as a houserule to keep agility from being so important, and to keep the "muscle is for feats of strength" theme going.
Presence was a charisma like score rolled on a weighted d10. For all intents and purposes, this was just like a d100 score divided by ten, and the unique range was more of a reaction-roll thing to keep this score unique and apart from the others.
Luck was a d100 roll divided by two. This was an innovative score and it answered a lot of questions in the narrative simply and easily. Did the nearby farm have a working phone? Luck check. Was there a an empty taxi waiting outside the newspaper office? Luck check. Did the killer leave an important clue at the scene of a crime? Luck check. Did the warehouse have guards posted tonight? Luck check. This score did more work during our games for narrative fill-in moments than I can ever count. Top Secret and Star Frontiers were jealous of this ability score, and it just sped up play and defined options incredibly.
Hit Points, Driving, and Punching were derived scores - and Driving was the only derived score that was checked against.
There were skills in the game, but they were more like generic "areas of expertise" like fingerprinting or art forgery. The rules for creating a character could fit on one page of the book, but they use two here to provide examples. Even if you had those "skills" you would use your ability scores to make rolls in them. Spot an art forgery? Have the skill and roll Observation. What mattered were ability scores, not formulas, and not skill levels and tertiary chances of success. Contrast this with Rolemaster's pages long lists of skills and formulas for calculating the success chance of each one. How much easier could that game be if a skill was a simple "unlock" for performing tasks and your ability scores (and possibly a level) controlled chance of success?
Story > Character
A lot of games today state that, "Our rules are more important than your character." When you give a character simple stats and leave the rest up to the player you empower the player a great deal. The "game" isn't figuring out the complicated puzzle the game designers left for you in "optimizing your build" and "min-maxing" for the highest chance of success and damage output. Honestly, this is what Pathfinder and D&D 3.5x felt like for us, figuring out the best build in the complicated mess the game designers created. And the rules needed to be long-winded and complicated to conceal the best strategies.
With a B/X style of character creation, where as little of the game is as hidden as possible, you get a more solid player to gamemaster contract. I am not some "keeper of the secret tome" of "the best way of playing" - I am here as the storyteller, and the players are here as participants. The rules are the same for everybody. Your ability scores do most of the work for you. The game is more about your decisions in the story than your decisions in the rules.
Do I like diving through complicated rules systems and figuring out how they work? Yes, a part of me has been doing that for 40 years playing these games. I enjoy depth, but I also enjoy the game getting out of the way of the story. But a huge failure of games promising depth is they always end up broken and needing a new edition to fix things all over again. Until the next edition.
When a game goes out of print and unsupported, then the profit cycle stops. The community can come in and clone it and make it a timeless classic. This is where we are with B/X. I really hope the TSR d100 games follow suite, since there are some timeless classics here.
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