GangBusters RPG (TSR) Historical Gaming Discussion

[The Shaman]

It is a problem for the genre, insofar as they sell so poorly that they don't tend to stay in print. Compare the presence in the market of purely historical games to the straight fantasies, or to psuedo-historical games with fantastic elements included, and the problem becomes pretty evident.

What does sales have to do with enjoying the game?

Creating good and believeable settings, adventures, and challenges with only mundane elements is just more difficult than doing so in heroic fantasy.

June 30, 2006: Umbran and The Shaman agree about something. Can ice skating in Hell be far behind?

 

[Mycanid]

I knew one fella who said he took the gangbusters system and then mixes in fantastical sci-fi elements a 'la pulp fiction (a good example would be the recent movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow). I never played it myself, being never tempted with the genre (of course, neither was I tempted with Boot Hill) .... But Umbran (or anyone else), have you ever mixed in the 1920's etc. sci-fi pulp in your games of GB?

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

IME, the closer a setting gets to real-world, modern day, the harder it is to GM. Suspension of disbelief becomes harder, coming up with reasonable challenges becomes harder. Players become more obnoxious about bringing in real-world knowledge. Typical RPG challenges (travel, finding people or things) become either trivial, artificially difficult, or are just plain boring. What might have been a good RP session digging up the history of the eccentric wizard on the outskirts of town becomes a Knowledge (Computers) check to Google something on the Internet.

On topic, Gangbusters was ok. There were other, pulpier games out at the same time, though, that accomplished the same things, and had the added attraction of being useful in other genres. In otherwords, Gangbusters was good source material for the era, but there were better rules-sets for actually playing that kind of game.

 

[jokamachi]

Loved it.

My brother and I always played bootleggers, always strong-armed the cops and whoever else got in our way, always split our territory, and always had a gang war.

Could never get enough of those tommyguns.

Blam blam blam blam balm blam blam blam blam blam!!!

 

[The Shaman]

What might have been a good RP session digging up the history of the eccentric wizard on the outskirts of town becomes a Knowledge (Computers) check to Google something on the Internet.

This reminds me of a story...

I attended a professional conference some years ago, and a well-known professor of marine biology recounted giving a career-day presentation to a group of local high school students. The professor described his field work, collecting and analyzing data, and presenting the findings at conferences and in journals, whereupon one of the students raised a hand and asked, "Why didn't you just look up the answer on the Internet?"

The Internet is a powerful tool, but it's not omniscient - my personal experience is that it's no more difficult to manage the Internet in a modern roleplaying game than it is divination magic in a fantasy game. In fact, I would say the Internet is far more likely to give a misleading or false answer than a cleric's deity...

Along similar lines, I don't find other "typical RPG challenges" to be harder in modern settings: travel may seem superficially easier at first glance, but no more so than it is for a party of fantasy characters with teleportation or wind walk - in fact, encounters while travelling by plane or boat or train are easier to stage than for characters who can simply disappear from one place and reappear in another instantly. "Finding people or things" may seem easier, but people and things in the real-world disappear all the time - there are plenty of places in the world that are "remote" in the sense that physical, cultural, and political barriers still offer the kinds of hindrances that make for challenging investigative adventures and roleplaying experiences.

Where I agree that modern roleplaying games can be more of a challenge is in maintaining the suspension of disbelief. In some ways it's actually easier: the innate familiarity of the players with the "setting" and the numerous books and websites about it easily outstrip even the Realms! In drawing from history and geography, the game master need only change those things necessary for the game as opposed to creating from whole-cloth. Doing it well does take some work, though: my bibliography for one game runs to more than thirty volumes in order to nail down as many period details as possible.

The game master in a modern roleplaying game should be prepared to deal with, at least in contemporary Western urban areas, the impact of law enforcement, emergency medical services, and technology on the game - though once you get out of those Western urban areas, all bets are off. (I tend to set a lot of my modern adventures in the Third World.) None of these are show-stoppers in my experience, and I find the planning for modern adventures to be no more or less difficult than for a high-level D&D game as a result: more challenging than a low-level dungeon crawl, but definitely worth the effort.

 

[Teflon Billy]

I don't recall much about it other than Butcher Bertello was a badass

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I've got to find me some of those adventures. I can always convert them.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

In fact, I would say the Internet is far more likely to give a misleading or false answer than a cleric's deity...

Either your google-fu is weak, or my faith is. Hmmm....probably the latter.

I agree that you run into a lot of the same problems with high-level fantasy (or sci-fi, for that matter). I just find that the further one moves into the past or present that the more willing the players are to accept deviations from their modern-day expectations. The more I as a DM have to thwart those expectations, the more disgruntled the players get.

In a fantasy game there are in-game counters to most common player tactics. The DM can use them as he sees fit, hopefully finding that sweet spot between letting the players exploit a cheesy tactic ad infinitum and having NPCs always have the perfect counter to the parties strengths.

In a modern game, that becomes a lot harder. Sure, I can tell the player that they can't find the info on google, or set a really high Computer Use DC, or throw in red herrings. But to the players, that feels wrong.

Case in point. A long while back, I was in a modern-era game where we found ourselves in a jam and without enough weapons to go around. One of the players says he wants to use a 'Streetwise' type skill to get a gun. Dm says 'You don't have enough time', player responds 'Hell, *I* can get a gun inside a half-hour' and proceeds to call some shady people he knows to prove a point. Fifteen minutes later, a guy knocks on the door wanting to know who wanted to buy a gun.

At least in a fantasy game, when I tell them the BBEG has a teleport block on, they can't proceed to lecture me on the real-world limitations of teleport blockers.

 

[Umbran]

What does sales have to do with enjoying the game?

Well, there's the simple matter of non-presence.

If they don't sell well, they go out of print. The book isn't there for you to see on the shelf and buy. You have to stumble upon it by chance, and manage to find a rare copy. And if you do that, there's no further support. No published adventures, no supplements, no "network externalities", all of which make the game more difficult to enjoy.

Go out and get Gangbusters now, and you have what? One smallish core rulebook and 5 published adventures, and that's it, right? Nobody to ask advice from, every further bit of setting and game development has to be done by yourself. Nobody's heard of the game, and all the players are busy and gung-ho about games that are big on the shelves, and don't have time to play your game that they've never heard of. That sounds fairly difficult to enjoy...

Plus, if these games don't sell well in general, new games won't get made. It is quite impossible for us to enjoy games that never exist.

 

[grodog]

GB was a fun game; TSR published 5 modules, as well as minis, for it.

I learned GB from Gygax himself at my first con in 1980, in a bar/open gaming area called "The Hobbit" of all things