Gangbusters: B/X Edition

https://wizardtowergamesshop.com/products/gangbusters-core-game

Seeing the B/X version of Gangbusters get a new edition is nice. I loved the original, and the B/X version is worth it. They are having a special on a combo softcover deal until the end of May, and a limited amount of the hardcovers for the signed main rulebook.

Head on over if interested, this is a fun game, with a fun setting and a 1920s and 30s gangsters genre.

Tunnels and Trolls: Solo Play

This is probably as legacy of Tunnels and Trolls' solo adventure legacy, but everything for solo play is just easier here. With combat there is no positioning, deciding which monster does what and attacks who, no special monster abilities, no special character combat options, and nothing to decide on either side of the die roll. Just what you are doing (melee, ranged, magic, saving rolls, or fleeing) and the dice matter.

With exploration, there is no "are you standing in front of the statue" positional GM traps, nothing hidden by the referee, and if you need to adjudicate a situation - finding a trap, dodging a rolling boulder, seeing if you are lucky enough for fortune to happen, sneaking past enemies, climbing a wall, knowing an arcane piece of lore, surviving poison, running away, or anything at all - the saving roll is your answer. Come up with a test, determine what happens on pass or fail, and roll.

No referee is needed, no solo play system is needed, and this is how the game is designed.

Tests and Saving Rolls

Flying Buffalo back in the day made its name on selling solo adventures by mail, and T&T was the system you used to play them. They found a niche in the early days of the hobby and went for it, and the rest is history. D&D went down a different path - they needed a dungeon master, and their entire game was designed to rely upon hidden information a dungeon master.

"Are you standing in the doorway when you pull the lever?"

"Are you searching the room?"

"Who is first in marching order?"

You get this wonderful puzzle-element going on with great dungeons, where the players are unsure of their actions. Truly great dungeons and referees key players into danger subtly, with little things here and there in descriptions that clue the attentive in on certain doom.

"There is an oily smell to the room."

"While the rest of the dungeon was dirty, this room is perfectly clean."

"You see a number of indentations in the wall ahead of you on the right side."

Wait. Stop. This could be something or it could be nothing. This could be nothing, and in our investigation we will find the real threat -something else entirely - with further questioning. I love this style of play, and it captures the intense feeling of danger and threat that a great dungeon is supposed to provide.

This is also a part of my problem when I tried running the first Dungeon Crawl Classics adventure as a solo experience. There are many traps in that which rely on character placement, so I found myself house-ruling ability score checks to "see if they know" the obvious things I knew. It is important because player eliminations depend on these gotcha-moments like a shark in the water, so I have to roll what are essentially stupidity checks for my zero-level characters. I kid, but in a way this is how I feel - they are less heroes than they are balls in a pachinko machine.

It is a lot less fun than poking and prodding around in the Tomb of Horrors against a live referee, so I can see why in solo T&T adventures they either trip the trap on you and roll to avoid, give you a chance to detect (and have it be a directional stop), make a luck roll to completely avoid, or just deal with the trap up front without hiding anything. The next challenge is an atomic pass/fail event, and it never is something unknown.

The saving roll mechanic in T&T does this well, and it supports every ability score so you can roll heavy boulders out of the way with strength, avoid jets of flame with speed, figure out ancient runes with IQ, survive poison mushroom spores with constitution, walk right through a minefield with luck, or charm a cranky old wizard with charisma. And the ability rolls scale with level, have a chance of always failing, and cover every out-of-combat situation elegantly.

Luck is the Referee

Having a luck score helps too, it is a catch-all for solo play for so many answers. This was the case in Gangbusters too where they had a luck score, and a detective character could roll luck to see if a criminal left a clue in a room, or someone who knew the suspect was in a speakeasy at the same time the investigator started poking around there. Did a character survive certain death, like those car crash scenes at the end of 1930's black and white serials? Is there a land-line phone nearby in a world without cell phones? Is there a taxi waiting on the curb to, "follow that car?" Did the killer leave a matchbook with the name of a bar on it? Luck was the X factor in a modern urban environment, and let you trip your "Film Noir Tropes" with style and ease.

Coming out of D&D it helped us a lot to have luck answer questions, and it took a lot of pain away from the referee. Take the taxi and "follow that car!" If this was a luck roll, things were fair. If a referee denied this because he or she felt there were no taxis present, the player could feel the referee were being punitive, or there was some sort of other railroaded answer around there the players had to take.

Luck enables creativity in solving problems by enabling the player's approach with a random roll.

Same thing in T&T, this score answers a lot of the questions a referee would have to answer. Is a needed item available at a shop? Did making that noise awake a sleeping dragon? Is there a change of shifts with the tower guards happening right now? Did the rope break? Is there anything in that box? Did the key you pilfered fit the lock? Did you happen to bump into the right person at the right time? Did you walk right by that arrow trap without setting it off? Is there a ship at the port waiting for passengers to take you where you need to go? Did the thief you are chasing get stopped by the guards? Is the weather for the mountain trek good or bad? While traveling did we bump into someone helpful, find berries along the side of the road, or somehow gain an important resource?

A luck score does a lot of the work that a referee would have done, and gives a solo player quick and easy answers to all sorts of in-play questions as a "missing referee ability score."

When in doubt, roll luck and get an answer.

Solo Design

The notion of always having a referee finds its way into many of the rules of B/X, even in obscure and roundabout ways. This is sort of like operating system design, where personal computers have the notion of needing a "system administrator" account to manage the machine, versus a phone where there is an "owner" but no notion of an "administrator" in the personal computer sense. Thus when you are to install a program, bang, admin rights needed, and then on a phone or tablet - it just installs.

Because T&T had to support no-referee play, every rule has to support that concept. Though you can play it with a referee, I get the feeling the game's primary mode of play, and its primary design goal is as a solo play game.

There are a lot of hidden places in many pen-and-paper games where the rules assume, "The referee with handle this part." You will be reading through a spell and, "the referee will determine..." You go to a shop and, "the referee will determine prices and selection." You are in combat and, "the referee controls the monsters..." I love B/X, but the amount of times I have to stop and roll for "phantom referee interaction" gets tiring and slows the game down. Add to that rolling for stupidity for my characters and while yes I am playing B/X, I begin to miss a referee and wonder if the mechanics alone are enough to keep me.

Coming Home

So I keep coming back to T&T for my solo play sessions and enjoying the elegant simplicity of letting the dice handle all the referee-required wargaming and rulings in combat. Does it devolve into "a bucket of dice versus another?" Well, the same could be said about B/X, it would just mean there are more types of dice and a slower bucket procedure with all sorts of rules interspersed.

Could a B/X solo-focused game be designed? Most likely and I have not found one yet, because applying the solo-play design theory to a game is a complete rework of the rules - and a lot of B/X assumptions and structures have the DNA of a referee built into them. I feel you would be slaughtering a lot of sacred cows if you attempted such a thing, and rethinking huge systems.

So with T&T and even MSPE, I have a lot of my solo-play options covered for both fantasy and modern games. I still like B/X and my other collection of strange and unique systems, but for everyday play where I sit down to have fun, there work very well and I have a fond remembrance for them as a part of my gaming history. There was a point in time that we ran this seriously for years, and I was the referee, so I am used to the system and how it works. It does a good job and I love the game, which checks my boxes and gets me playing.

Retrospective: Gangbusters 3rd Edition

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.

B/X Gangbusters

 Oh, here is a fun one. This one has a lot of heart to it. Read this intro:

This is the spirit of B/X. I love something and I want to make my own game. I am going to put the work in, despite the world working against me I am going to make this dream happen.

The "I can" is larger than the "I can't."

He even had to stop and wait. He went to conventions. He got feedback. And he has a game in print and for sale. And it happens to be a genre I love too. Hats off, amazing effort, and this to me goes beyond the simple dream of having a game, and using B/X to make a dream happen.

B/X? I Know This!

One of the beautiful things about a B/X rules set is you know how 90% of the game works before you open the book. There are probably one or two things unique to the implementation, but they are nothing that will take you months to read and figure out.

Yeah, I know, says the guy who is halfway through Rolemaster Classic and starting on Zweihander.

But B/X? I can take my gangster and have him fight a basilisk from another B/X game if I want. The AC works. The rules work. The damages are on the same scale. Things for the most part work together with very minimal effort. Needs some evil fish-people to walk out of the surf to attack a town in a moment inspired by Lovecraft? I am sure I got something in a B/X book around here that will work.

Campaign Choices

The game gives you the options of criminals, detectives, law enforcement, reporters, or strange mysteries as campaign types. It is suggested everyone play the same type of character at first, and not to have some characters play gangsters while others play beat cops. While we did that a lot in the original Gangbusters back in the day, it is easier for a group to have everyone working together and on the same team.

After a while our Gangbusters games became death-matches that rivaled Car Wars games in violence and complexity. Cops versus robbers with TNT, tommy-guns, and double-barreled gunfights leaving city blocks shattered and war zones behind them as the ultimate battle between good and evil manifested in a biblical Apocalypse of crime versus law and order.

Yeah, we were strange kids.

Class Choices

There are four classes in the B/X Gangbusters game: brutish, educated, connected, and street smart. Brutish are your tough guy "fighters" while educated are your specialist "egg heads" with skills like safecracking and accounting. We have "connected" that covers people who know people, and this seemed like a slightly odd class to me, since I feel this is more of a RP thing than a class thing. Finally "street smarts" are the rogues and thieves.

The hit dice are a little strange, I could see an educated having a d4 hit die and the street smarts having a d6. Yes, that breaks B/X and gives a thief a d6 hit points per level. I can see the argument against it, since you want "smarts" winning out over "combat," but for someone used to life on the streets I think a tougher cut is needed. Educated? Nah, they should fold like a house of cards.

Levels are limited to level 6, which is nice and caps the power level of the game and balances combat.

The choice of classes for Brutish and Street Smarts feel right, and I like Educated. I would have liked some more special powers from educated in those areas that level up, like a locksmith knowledge that levels up into safe cracking, key making and reproduction, and vault cracking. Similarly, accounting could start there, then graduate into cooking the books, check fraud, and other financial skills. Forgery could have a range of level-ups from documents to counterfeiting. Give me something to look forward to!

Connected seems like an odd choice for a class, but in a modern game I suppose having someone who knows someone is a huge advantage. They have some level-up bonuses and they can pull favors, which is cool. I would like some more level-up options here as well, instead of just giving a bonus, the levels mean you work your way up the influence ladder. At high levels, you are getting favors from the mayor and governor instead of the local ward alderman.

This system feels better than having dedicated "lawman", "reporter", and "criminal" classes, since the conflicts are between people who are essentially cut from the same cloth - just on different sides of the law.

Action!

Once you have a character, the rest of the book has specific rules for the campaign types, how to recruit a gang, run a business, be a lawman, handle an investigation, run combat, handle NPCs, and run adventures. We even have a section of B/X style "monsters" for the various NPCs in the world, and bonus points for including a certain type of close-minded and bigoted "hooded foe" in this list that can be used as the game's slow-witted orcs. Very brave choice and thank you for this bit of historical accuracy that would be endless fun to have them show up to be attacked and abused in so many ways. This is why we have TNT.

No One Can Hit a Sharp Dressed Man

There is an odd rule with the quality of clothes giving a higher AC. This felt a little artificial to me, almost like a cinematic rule where better and more expensive clothes give better AC? To be more B/X I feel just give normal clothes AC 9 and be done with it. Maybe AC 8 for heavy clothes and 7 for leather jackets - but that is pushing it and breaking the Noir narrative because this isn't the 1950's with biker gangs. Otherwise fine clothing, even a party dress, is going to be the game's plate mail. I get what they are going for, a more cinematic feel where a mafia don can walk through a hail of bullets unscathed, but it feels like it breaks B/X just a little.

If that is the case, then just give each level a +1 AC bonus and leave clothing as AC 9. Same cinematic effect, and it makes low level thugs more cannon fodder. Otherwise everyone is going to be wearing a suit and tails with a top hat, putting on the Ritz and blasting all the crooks.

This is B/X, and I can houserule. I get this feeling in more mainstream games if you houserule you somehow fall outside the mainstream. I paid a lot of money for this mainstream game! Please let's all play by the same rules! In B/X, the entire core of the game is built upon a houseruled framework and you can do anything you want - and it is encouraged since the changes we make introduce new rules and ideas (DNA) into the B/X system, and this sharing makes the game better and stronger in future iterations.

What Do I Want More Of?

I would like a few more weapons, with maybe pictures, such as bolt-action rifle, lever-action, and the like. I want pictures of the cars and vehicles, and maybe classify these on types for easier understanding, like a 2-door convertible sports coupe.

I want more of a description of that world and the eras and what may or may not be available in the 20's 30's and further on  till 1950 rolls around. Like when direct dialing started, police call boxes, one-way "calling all cars" vehicle radios versus two-way where the cars could call back, and when various laws and powers were available - like the crossing state lines thing to avoid being arrested and when that ended. Also the powers of the Prohibition Bureau and the Feds changed during this time dramatically, and those would be fun to cover.

Also some more flavor on transportation, when flights were common and how far they went, train and ship liner travel, and a table of typical travel times of major routes - like how long did it take to get from New York to London? London to Paris? San Francisco to Hong Kong? LA to New York? How much (roughly) did it cost? What were the options for passenger versus luxury travel?

What was nightlife like? Dining out? Clubs? What cities were hotspots and what was going on? How did the Great Depression affect things? What sorts of films, music, and entertainment were popular? Perhaps a simple timeline would be nice, but I know you can get that on the Internet and you risk bloating the game with too-much. But I could see this game going to a nicely-illustrated 120-page experience with more art and a lot to sink your teeth into easily. I love the era and the genre.

Oh, and add a bullwhip in the weapons lists and tell me when those certain "bad guys" start showing up. We need an endgame to this era, even though it is slightly out of scope. Perhaps not for investigation games where rival teams working for foreign powers start competing for the strange artifacts and phenomena the players find.

20's and 30's = Fantasy Genre

There is a part of me that feels the 1920s and 30s is moving into a realm where it can be considered a fantasy genre. We are so far removed from that world, it is so alien to us, and the culture and mannerisms are more of a mystery than something known by everyone. We get our information about this time from a few movies and some TV series long lost to the past.

So we have cars that rarely break 50 mph? No cell phones? The first car radios only go one way? Very little air travel? No jets? No Internet? You had to use an operator to make a phone call? There was no direct dial long distance? Police had call boxes? Criminals could flee over state, county, or international borders to avoid being arrested? The powers of the federal government in law enforcement were severely limited, and some agents were only allowed to carry guns for self defense? All radio programs were either live or someone playing a record, again, live and in a studio? No television? The newspaper is where you got the news? You could buy tommy-guns over the counter at hardware stores? Primitive fax machines existed? The telegraph was still a thing? You had to wait 6 months to get a divorce? Dinner clubs had nightly big bands that showed up to play live music?

You are kidding right? Who came up with this stuff?

Overall? B/X Gangster Time Fun

Overall I am happy with this one. There are some cinematic rules, but those are nothing that can't be easily houseruled. This is a cool sort of B/X game that creates an experience (and also has a nice list of source material) that is a labor of love to attempt to recreate that "gangster era" experience I loved. Very nicely done, and I would love to see this game continue on and expand.

B/X is cool.

It lets dreams come to life.

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.