Playing Games Part 5: Brand Loyalty

Gangbusters ad from the back of Dragon
Magazine. What could possibly go wrong?

We tried to be good consumers, us GenX-Latchkey kids. We really did. It stood to reason that, since Dungeons & Dragons was this really cool thing that we were all into, it stood to reason that the other games in the TSR line would be equally awesome, right? I mean, a couple of these games were mentioned in the Dungeon Masters Guide as possible crossover fodder. Like in a Marvel or DC comic book. Okay, TSR, you had our attention. What do you have for us...what’s that? Boot Hill? Are y’all high or something?

We tried every one of the TSR major releases, up to and including the board games, each time thinking, “It’s going to be different! This time, it won’t be bad!” And, like a latchkey kid whose deadbeat father promises to pick him up for the weekend and then never shows, we trudged back inside the house at the end of the evening, our hopes dashed, but ever-willing to forgive and maybe even forget, and try once more. Here’s what we played, or tried to play, and what I thought of them.

Boot Hill

We assumed, like anyone would, that Boot Hill was going to be a role-playing game in the style of Dungeons & Dragons. What we didn’t realize was that Boot Hill was a tactical simulator for those folks who were just dying to re-enact the Gunfight at the OK Corral and see what went wrong. This game was short on fun and long on statistical number crunching and measuring and frankly, it was the opposite of what a game called Boot Hill should be. It took two iterations before they decided to make Boot Hill an actual RPG, but by then, most of us were in college and had discovered girls. We wouldn’t get a decent western game until Deadlands, over a decade later.

Gamma World

This was much more like what we thought we wanted, only, at the end of the day, we lacked the sophistication and the irony to play Gamma World the right way. Which is a shame because I loved movies and TV shows that were post-apocalyptic, with a hint of ironic detachment. I'd run a hell of a Gamma World game now. What we ended up doing was rolling up a scad of mutant characters, looking for the most bizarre one, and noodling around with the character sheets. I tried, too late, to make a campaign setting based on Thundarr the Barbarian. By the time I’d gotten around to it, we were all “Too Old for That Stuff,” which is hooey, because now, I’d lose a full day playing a scrappy Mok in the world of Super Science and Sorcery.

Gangbusters

From the guys who brought you Boot Hill, here’s another game to simulate bootlegging and crime-busting, only, you know, we’re like, 12 and 13, and we could have used a little more guidance, here. Some movies or comics to read? How about some role-playing tips that were longer than a single page? Gangbusters was barely a boxed game. . Where was Doc Savage and The Shadow? We just did not get this. It was more fun to play a thief in D&D. At least you could do stuff in-game. We weren't the target audience for this. I can't imagine who was the target audience--The Young Republicans? Campus Crusade for Nixon? The J. Edgar Hoover Appreciation Society? We were listening to Def Leppard and watching The Beastmaster on HBO. 

Top Secret

Now, this we understood. We were all James Bond fans, and we gravitated to the more outlandish movie-spy elements of Top Secret rather than the geopolitical ramifications of sending heavily-armed operatives into Soviet-controlled territories to steal computer disks and, also smooches.

Top Secret was the first game I embraced that didn’t use a plethora of platonic solids. Percentile dice, only, chumps. Reds are Tens and greens are Ones. Everyone knows that. The thing was liked best about Top Secret? The skills. Hands down. There weren’t really skills in D&D, not as it was played, and Top Secret was all about skills (they called them “areas of knowledge”). We tried a lot more things in-game, mostly because we had the means to do so. The exception was hand to hand combat. It was god-awful and pointless.

Star Frontiers

Finally, TSR, a game with which to play Star Wars! Yeah…! Wait…um…blobs and insects? Hold up. Is this Traveller? No, it’s actually weirder. Not space opera. Not hard SF. It’s…It’s…well, it’s Star Frontiers. 

 It was clear to us that we were supposed to pick up a Star Wars kind of vibe from the packaging and the artwork, but hoo boy, did they miss the mark. Can you imagine what a TSR-produced Star Wars role-playing game would have done in the 1980s? Coming off of Return of the Jedi? I'm sure there was a money-based reason why this never happened. Just know that Star Frontiers didn't even come close to scratching the massive Star Wars itch. The only thing this science fiction clunker had going for it was the super sweet Tim Truman illustrations. Star Frontiers was the eggplant parmesan of TSR; it looked so good until we bit into it.

Lots of stuff in that box. It just felt
like it was a softball pitch.

Marvel Super Heroes

What Marvel Super Heroes had going for it was that it was officially licensed.

Oh, no, that’s it. Yeah, it was officially licensed. TSR had full use of all the clip art from the Marvel bullpen. Yep. That's about it. And while it looks like much of the licensed one-off products Marvel approved in the 1980s, it was actually pretty revolutionary. Marvel Super Heroes was the first time we’d ever seen this kind of broad-based storytelling system before. And weirdly, there was a disconnect between what we wanted to play and what we were reading as comic book fans. Percentile dice? Check. Stat categories? Amazing, Incredible, Uncanny? Oh, okay, cute idea, fine. You roll the dice and look up the color? On a master chart? Are we children?! 

See, at the same time that this game, which was in retrospect, very elegant and unobtrusive, first came out, Marvel Comics was publishing The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe (remember the Marvel-Phile feature in Dragon magazine? That was a response to those comics). In those issues were very specific and quantifiable numbers assigned to, say, the number of tons Spider-Man can lift, and how fast Quicksilver can run. This game was the opposite of crunchy, and to add insult to injury, it seemed to be aimed at our younger siblings and not us. We stuck with V&V and just made our own stats for Thor and Iron Man. Now, as an adult, I see this game for the genius that it is, but my younger self needed a crunch-level somewhere south of Grape Nuts to be happy. He was an idiot.

Box art-bad. Contents-Good!

Conan

Built on the same engine as the Marvel Super Heroes game, with a few noticeable tweaks, but by this time I threw up my hands and said Screw It. What I failed to recognize was that the game was actually very good. There was no way I could see it; I was too into lots of dice and levels with hit points to see the storytelling potential of what they came up with. I was also, at the time, a Conan snob, and more focused on what they got wrong instead of what they got right. I wish I had done what the Zefrs group had done and just made my own game with it. With several other Conan rpgs out in the wake of this one, including the one I worked on, TSR's Conan is more of a historical curiosity, but the presentation was quite clever and the background material very good (if you can overlook the de Camp stuff that crept in; sorry, occupational hazard). 

We never made it to Buck Rogers or Indiana Jones. Our hearts were broken, our hands scarred from being burned too many times by then. Also, and this is whack-doodle: TSR tried to copyright the term "Nazi" in the Indiana Jones rpg. It actually made gaming news back then. For a company not generally known for their genius ideas, this one was particularly egregious and smacked of weirdly-deep kinds of corporate money-grubbing. What, were they going to sue anyone who used the word "Nazi" in another game? Come on.

Out of everything on this list, the only games worth owning are the two I hated the most, Marvel and Conan. This is because of the system, largely, but Marvel Super Heroes was genius in its predicting the coming video games and what they would look like from the back end. Every other game on the above list has been remade for the better, or co-opted by better games. But that's not the point; these weaker offerings from TSR made it okay for us to look at other things that we otherwise might not have. In trying to be brand loyal, all we did was make ourselves into better consumers.