Dragon Age: Inquisition Playthrough - Tough Going Early On

The early part of Dragon Age: Inquisition is a tough one. We had one of those throw the controller down moments last night, and it wasn't because of a high difficulty. We got caught searching zones, running around the desert, exploring the coast, and generally wandering around an empty, boring, lifeless world.

The rest of the game can't be like this, can it?

We did the first forest zone, the swamp quest, the entire shoreline zone, the city thing with the Templars, and we are delving into the desert area and...and it feels hard to want to continue on. There is nothing going on, no threat, the quests we send advisers out on feel minor and petty, and there's no threat to anything.

The world, the Inquisition, rifts opening up and consuming the the world, the urgency of anything feels like it is out to lunch here in the beginning of the game.

We have one quest warning us if we support the Templars that's it for the mages, yet no option to do anything with the mages, so we are avoiding that quest in lieu of looking for an option.

And then we started searching the desert zone, and I just felt a strange sense of deja-vu, like I was wandering around this single-player MMO collecting herbs and mining rocks. Event the zone fights, once cleared, never came back, and we were wandering empty canyon after empty canyon doing collection quests. We had this feeling on the coastline, once all the fights were done, it was endless running around on foot doing make work.

Even the normally compelling dark fantasy elements in the game felt strangely removed (from the first two), like a team of politically correct writers redid Game of Thrones for a mass audience.

Where is the threat to my existence? Where is the world in danger? Where is the war between the Templars and the mages? Why do I even need a fort? For all our preparation and posturing, it feels like we are building an army to face nothing. I have not seen one Templar vs. mage fight for hours, and that storyline seems to have vaporized. I would at least be expecting towns and kingdoms at this point to be begging me for help against either side of this what appears to be a quite civil war.

It doesn't feel like a war, or even a rift invasion at this point, it just feels like a slow, sloppy, unfocused start.

I was reminded of the old games like Sega's Shining Force series, where you played a rag-tag group of rebels and warriors on a quest leading you into tactical battle after tactical battle. If you lost a battle, that was it, game over. But the consequences and stakes were huge. You were fighting for your life in every battle, and making allies mattered - you needed them for the next fight. Your backs were to the wall, and there was this sense of drama and urgency.

That is what I want to feel. I want to be gathering allies because we desperately need them. I want to fight battles that matter. I want to have our backs pressed to the wall. I want to be this world's last hope. I want the forces of chaos to be constantly pressing from all sides, destroying good lands, and the clock to be ticking down to doomsday. I want the war between the mages and Templars to matter, with battles happening on the map, and us watching (and possibly intervening) on the side of our choice for the common good.

I want a situation that forces me to be the hero of my choosing, or the best hero I can be at the moment.

We need to take a break for a while from this and play something else. I love the characters, world, and greater story, but the boredom and MMO-quests of this installment just got to be too much to take.

Basic Fantasy Podcast and Game Design

Check this one out:

http://saveordie.info/?p=1265

Save or Die has a great podcast with the creator of Basic Fantasy, Chris Gonnerman. It is fascinating podcast as Chris talks about his design choices, and what makes a 'perfect' game for him. Four races and four classes, with no alignment, a simple spell list, and rules which are surprisingly different than the basic edition of the 'world's most popular' roleplaying game.

He talks a lot about the evolution of the game from first to third edition, and how things were added along the way that people wanted, and also about the things that weren't included. It is a great look into how a designer pares a game down to the essential pieces, and throws out the edge-cases and lone-wolf gotta haves that creep in and add cruft to a game.

I see the game in a different light now, like a search for the truth in 'what's fun' for him as a designer. It is easy to parrot the rules and feeling of a source game and create a retro-clone, but Chris in the podcast says that the Basic Fantasy game today has fallen out of the current definition of retro clone. The game has evolved, streamlined itself, adopted new rules in places where they were needed, and became a different game. It shares the same inspiration and concepts as earlier games, but it is evolving into something different and unique.

It is a cool listen, and also one that fascinates me on a game design and 'product vision' level. His goal is to write 'the perfect roleplaying game' and he uses this 'golden rule' as a yardstick to measure a rule's effectiveness, simplicity, appropriateness, and if it should be included in the game. There is a vision there, and it is more than just 'to make a better retro clone.' Because with retro-clone, you don't typically add rules, and you also mimic imperfections in the original design.

Here, the imperfections are being fixed in unique ways, and rules are being added that fit the vision and not necessarily the original game's feeling and design spirit. The rules are being crafted to fit a unique design goal, and where the retro-clone parts don't fit to that model, they are being changed and improved upon.

This is fascinating stuff, and a worthy podcast to listen to. Excellent job to the guys and gals over at Save or Die, and please go check this out.

Basic Fantasy: Seriously Impressive Value

Did you see these? Amazon has the Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game 3rd Edition for $5.

Five dollars.

This is a complete game book for five bucks. Yes, it isn't 1980 anymore, this is 2015, and this is a seriously great value for such a great retro-clone old-school game.

Did you see the monster expansion for Basic Fantasy?

Oh yes, and this one is 180 monsters in the The Basic Fantasy Field Guide for under four dollars.

Seriously, what in the roleplaying world is going on? Four dollars?

Ordered.

For those of you in the know, Basic Fantasy is a retro-clone that keeps the best parts of D&D 3.5 and throws the rest of the complicated parts away. It uses a D&D 3.5 style rising AC and target number where the monster's AC is the to-hit target number, yet clones most of the original D&D spells, feeling, and flavor. It is a seriously cool game that gets back to the hobby's roots, is simple, and most importantly...

Look at those prices.

You can download the PDF of the main rules for free, so this game is great for groups that want to play something yet not invest a lot of money in expensive books. Does it bother me that this isn't D&D 5? Not in the least, and in fact, I welcome a return to the old days in spirit and feeling, where dungeoning was deadly, your ability to pry room descriptions out of the referee in real life gave you a better chance of survival, and you didn't need rules longer than an IRS tax form. I love the old-school rules and feeling of freedom in both refereeing and playing.

Your real-life wits mattered, not your character build.

Best of all, the old-school rules this was inspired by came before the influence of videogames and MMOs which tainted our hobby. It is purist, it is old-school cool, and it is cleaned up slightly with some sane compromises that old-school D&D should have had.

Think of it as a sort of classic-retro Monopoly sort of game where you are playing the game as it was meant to be and you'll get it, and can sell it better to players.

You know what's better?

I picked up six modules for under four bucks each in my order. Take a look at these:

Morgansfort, a starting base adventure module for under four bucks. This reminds me of the old "Keep on the Somewhere" style modules that gives a party of adventurers a home base with some intrigue, inns, shops, NPCs, and other necessities that allow the party to have a home when they aren't out dungeoning. Seventy pages too, which puts it just a little under the size of a Pathfinder adventure path installment.

The Chaotic Caves, a sandbox style starter module that mimics some of the old 'pack in' starter modules of the old D&D game. For under four bucks you get a starter module that gives you that 'just starting out' experience.

How about Adventure Anthology 1? Four dollars for fourteen short adventures? Or Fortress, Tomb, and Tower: The Glain Campaign a three-adventure campaign for under four dollars? Or Tales from the Laughing Dragon: A Dragonclaw Adventure, another three adventure complimation for under four dollars? Or even Monkey Isle, a savage-island style wilderness exploration adventure for under four dollars?

Eight books for about thirty dollars? Mind you, most of this is content for the game master in 352 pages of adventures and campaign locations, and there is a 170 page rulebook (with free PDFs) for the players. About 70 pages of the basic book are monsters (with the rules being about 100 pages long), plus an additional 84 in the monster expansion for about 154 pages of monsters. All this for a grand total of 606 pages of fun for the price of one D&D 5 or Pathfinder rulebook is a great deal.

Considering all the play time you will get out of these, it is like picking up a classic retro game collection on Steam and having months worth of material to play with. Yes, you need players that are interested, but sometimes a deluge of releases like this at these prices can attract an interest all their own.

This is what I like to see, the old-school community seriously stepping up and putting great stuff in stores like Amazon at prices that shock the customer. This is how old-school competes with the thirty-dollar (fifty retail) art-book games that continually try to redefine what the original editions got right in numbers, simplicity, and feeling the first time.

Who would have know that 2015 was going to give us some very cool old-school gaming surprises such as this? This is very cool stuff, and worth supporting and playing.

Somebody Finally made a Better d4

Did you see these?

Set of Unique 4-sided Dice in Five Colors

They look like...they look like...

You can actually pick them up!

Two sets ordered, because I know DarkgarX is going to try to steal my set.

These would actually make Savage Worlds playable again at low levels. I know part of that game is leveling past a d4 in the skills you actually need, but this actually makes a d4 skill...bearable.

It's taken 40 years, but someone has finally made something to improve the lives of roleplayers everywhere.

We live in remarkable times, my friends.

Dragon Age: Inquisition Playthrough

We hadn't got around to playing through the latest Dragon Age game, so DarkgarX and I decided to play through Inquisition to get us up to speed on the latest lore, and more importantly, the feel of the game.

I can feel this was worth it, because one comment DarkgarX had about the pen-and-paper game was that, "I want a game I can care about, that feels real to me and is serious."

Bioware does great work, and we have been playing their games a while and can spot some of the campy and somewhat 'Bioware' things they do in the games, such as the multi-cultural approach, some of the twisted fiction plot-lines, and they have their own unique 'take' on fantasy in general that is say different than, Game of Thrones. If you can imagine a Bioware-made Game of Thrones game you know what we mean, things wouldn't be 'Martin' they would take on a distinctively Bioware feeling and approach. It's not a bad thing, it is just different and sometime a mix of campy and serious.

Tyrion Lannister may be talking about his chest hair in the Bioware version, if you know what I mean. I love the tounge-in-cheek aspects of the Bioware games, and I also feel they have a more balanced approach when it comes to presenting a more-inclusive variety of fantasy that doesn't focus as much on angry white men as history and pop-culture has the past 2,000 years. Don't take that the wrong way, but you know what I mean, and I like things a little different in my entertainment and gaming.

I thought it would be fun to highlight the more campy, Bioware-y, and multi-cultural aspects of the videogame, but he felt otherwise, like he wanted a more serious and dramatic approach. Watch the video and you'll get what I mean. This was an interesting shift in what he wants from a game, and as a good game master, I picked up on that and will be running the game a little differently than I had planned.

We will get back to that later, but there is another facet to this discussion I wanted to bring in. Dungeons and Dragons is a lot like comic books and what I would like to call "tribute fiction." Tribute fiction works like this, if Hollywood comes out with a new Alien movie and it does a blockbuster summer, you can bet three months later comic books will have Alien-like creatures rampaging through them, roleplaying games will have xenomorphs in them, and video games that give you the Alien-like experience will start to appear. It isn't bad, it is just the normal echo of pop-culture through itself over and over again, and it is the reason D&D 4 warlocks were teleporting Nightcrawler-like heroes out of the X-Men. It isn't really original, it is just like a best-of remix of various pieces of pop-culture in fantasy and also cool things people like.

But really, all fiction is a form of tribute fiction, since everything borrows off the consciousness of what came before. Some fiction though, is more tribute than others.

It is like Dragon Age versus D&D. Dragon Age does borrow from pop-culture, and so does D&D, as they are both part of the fantasy pop-culture continuum. Dragon Age is a specific implementation of a fantasy idea, where D&D is more generic. Watch the trailer again, but this time think of it two ways:

1. This is something that makes me want to play Dragon Age.
2. This is something that makes me want to play D&D.

It works as a generic D&D trailer as well, in that you have medieval trappings, magic, dragons, castles, and "things you see in fantasy gaming." It works better as a Dragon Age trailer, because the trailer is tightly tied into the specific implementation of the Dragon Age idea. If Dragon Age is the Southwestern restaurant, D&D is the generic buffet where you can also get Mexican food. It is the reason why D&D pulls in a huge list of inspirations in the 5th Edition DMG, such as Game of Thrones and Middle Earth, and really any other fantasy source material. It is by its nature, more tribute fiction than is either of those specific implementations of the fantasy idea.

If I want to play Dragon Age or have a group of people who love Dragon Age, I will either play the pen-and-paper game or the videogames, because I will get the full experience.

If I have a group of people that want a more generic experience, I will play Pathfinder or D&D, because they do a lot more different and varied things. They are not the best at doing a specific thing, they just do a lot of things well enough that people can hook their idea of 'fantasy gaming' on the D&D train and ride along.

Now, D&D has specific settings in the form of Grayhawk, Faerun, Dark Sun, and other places. To those who read the Faerun novels in the 90's, that place is as much of a Dragon Age as Dragon Age is to people that are fans of that setting. It is unfortunate that D&D has gone under such seismic shifts in rules and setting lore, because there was a real feeling that Faerun and other settings could have broken out from D&D's shadow and 3rd through 5th Edition rules-turmoil and been stronger worlds with a more Middle Earth feeling to the lore than just as 'settings to play D&D in.'

Again, it is an interesting comparison with Dragon Age in focus, presentation, and feeling. With Dragon Age, it feels like the world comes first, and the rules are a secondary concern. With D&D, it feels like the rules come first, and the settings are secondary concerns.

It is a good thing to know as a game master, does my group like the lore of a specific world better, or are they fans of a specific set of rules? This is part of the appeal of Pathfinder admittedly as well. In any case, finding out what players want and focusing on that will get you a better sense of enjoyment and fun, and success for your gaming time.

First Impressions: Dragon Age Rulebook

My Dragon Age Rulebook came in the mail yesterday, and wow, I am floored by this one. Full-color throughout, stunning drop dead gorgeous art, and over 400 thick paper stock pages make this one a true gem on my shelf. Green Ronin took out all the stops when putting this together, and I am seriously impressed and happy with the book.

The art deserves special mention, I feel it is on par with D&D 5's art clearly, and it keeps going on an on page after page. It truly is an amazing piece of work.

I feel I just stepped into a truly vast and amazing world. Yes, this is based on a videogame, but it is every bit as detailed and full of lore and history as any book I have seen. I feel this one does a much better job at setting a sense of place than Paizo's Golarion guide books just in the layers of background and history. It does not have as many pictures of cities and lands as that product, but it does a much better job at creating a nified world that works and feels like it belongs together than your typical theme park setting.

If only Wizards could present Faerun this way, and I don't mean a stand-alone worldbook. This is rules plus worldbook, and surprisingly, the rules only take up the first 150 pages of the game. Following that is 50 pages of world information, 150 pages of GM information, and about 100 pages of adventures in the back of the book. But throughout the book, the rules are mixed in with world information nicely, and you get a feeling for being in the world with every page. The core rules and mechanics of the game are really simple, taking only 12 pages of understanding to grasp.

But yes, I wish D&D could be presented like this, with a focused setting-specific worldbook and a complete game in one volume.  The world information is just gravy here, a treat to those who played the computer games, and it does a great job at setting that sense of place and tone. It is a different presentation than D&D to be honest, and it focuses on the world first and the rules as direct support for the world. I like this style for a 'world first' game.

That said, I wish other "world plus game" RPGs could be done like this, such as World of Warcraft, Everquest, Final Fantasy (pick your favorite), or others.

This game does have the potential to be every bit as 'player nuh-uh' problematic about lore as traditional settings, such as the fiction heavy Faerun, which may be a minus for some. The game does a great job walking that tightrope though, presenting a game-neutral setting that you could pull in lore from any of the three Dragon Age games, the books, or none of it at all and get playing. The rules do say 'it is your game and world' once you get the ball rolling, and they also say 'as much of the lore from what you want to pull in' is okay' so there is cover for having played little or none of the games and still have a game that is useful with a colorful setting.

I like that concept though, "use as little or as much as you like." They don't lay out the events of the computer games blow by blow, yet they still support that lore should you want to do that. It feels like a skillful way of handling lore and referees and players with differing experience levels in the game's huge volume of lore.

I could see playing this as a straight D&D replacement where you are adventuring and not paraphrasing the games with your every step. The game is strong enough and has plenty of non-game support that you could make this your own world without too much trouble or player complaints. I would just call it My Dragon Age: The RPG and begin some epic tale using all the Lego-like pieces in this box

You could play this by picking up your favorite hint book for your most-favorite entry to the series and play along with that for guidance, and I am sure this would please fans of the computer games. It is an odd feeling, but if you want to pull in places and characters from the game, you could use the computer game book as your guide and run from there, and I am sure you would please fans that love these elements quite easily, such as replaying Dragon Age: Inquisition as a pen-and-paper game with more freedom and options.

This actually feels very compelling for me and it would be something I would love to try GM-ing.

I am impressed, and it is going to take me a while to read through this massive tome, but I am looking forward to getting lost in this world. Does it bug me this is based off a videogame first? Not at all, really, Bioware built a real and compelling world first, and this is just as much of a fascinating place to explore as any of the old-standards we have in Pathfinder or D&D. Oh, and they do have a PDF available, bonus points for that inclusion.

First impressions? Mightily impressed, happy I purchased, and this one is going to steal some play time from our normal games. The world of pen-and-paper fantasy gaming is getting a little broader this summer, and rules-light but setting-heavy games are setting up their castles in the landscape of roleplaying. This is a good thing, and I welcome the options and excitement this game brings to the table for our little hobby.

Well done, and a full report very soon on this impressive game.

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.