Michael's Reviews > GangBusters Rule Book. 1920's Role Playing Adventure Game

It’s interesting that, having come up with the role-playing sensation “Dungeons and Dragons” and instantly cornering the market on the newly-crafted RPG industry, the folks at TSR took so long to learn the basics of good game design. While there are flaws in the playability of early D&D rules, they at least managed to put something together that was more or less playable with minimal fudging, and actually stripped it down to a pretty good core with the release of the Holmes Basic Set. This game, which came years later, however, is just a mess, which probably explains why it is less well-remembered, so far as I can tell, than any of the other “side” games TSR put out during the 1980s.

There’s so much wrong with this game, I’m not even sure where to start. Part of the problem is that the designer doesn’t ever seem to have played a table top role-playing game, and so doesn’t understand the dynamics of what happens when you’re playing one. He imagines a group of people getting together, creating characters that have nothing in common and no real reason to work together (and in some cases being adversarial to one another), each going about his or her own business and ignoring what the others are doing until they wind up in a big shootout or car chase together. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that while the reporter character is running around digging up stories, all the other players are sitting there bored wondering when the GM will give them some attention, and that all of the cop and detective players are SITTING RIGHT THERE while the criminal(s) lay out and enact their nefarious schemes that their characters aren’t supposed to know about. And, wow, those criminal rules – basically several pages of obscure bookkeeping more appropriate for the kind of computer-moderating Play-By-Mail (pbm) games that were current at the time than for any kind of hanging out for a good time in-person with people game. And, since weeks or months of in-game time are needed to make a profit from running numbers or loansharking, you slow down the action to a crawl every time you use these rules.

Now, I did play “Gangbusters” with a group at least once, and the way I remember it we broke into two groups – one for criminals, one for law-abiding characters – and left the room in shifts as each side did their “secret” stuff, only coming together for the finale in a bootlegger’s warehouse. And we ignored all that bookkeeping stuff. I think we had another game going, like a card game or something, for my group when we waited for the “other side” to finish up. It worked well enough, but I think we were all happy enough to return to our D&D games afterward.

The rest of the rules are good enough, in terms of ability scores, levels, combat, skills, etc., no better nor worst than other non-D&D games TSR was putting out at the time. It’s mostly percentile-based, like the similarly “realistic” “Top Secret” game, with some things (like NPC reactions) being resolved by rolling 2d10 rather than a d20. It does seem to me that level progression and skill improvement is too slow, especially for a game that’s unlikely to spawn any long-term campaign playing, but that was typical at the time (and could easily be adjusted). Being a historian, I found the stats and descriptions of the various 1920s gangsters to be pretty interesting, as well as the fact that the writers pretty much accept as plausible the theory that John Dillinger’s death was faked (though this may have been more for in-game reasons than actual historical conspiricism). The idea of a straight 1920s prohibition game seems intriguing, but I think “Call of Cthulhu” is ultimately a better system.