Wednesday, May 3, 2023

Retrospective: Ghostbusters

Roleplaying games based on officially licensed properties started appearing quite early in the history of the hobby. FGU's Flash Gordon & the Warriors of Mongo is the first that I can recall, unless you wish to count TSR's Warriors of Mars, which is, in my opinion, something of an edge case – and it wasn't officially licensed at any rate). Others soon followed, like Heritage's Star Trek (and FASA's too!), SPI's Dallas, Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer, ICE's Middle-earth Role Playing, and many, many more. 

I mention all of this because I think it's sometimes easy to forget, especially on the old school side of the hobby, that gamers have long been quite keen on playing around in fictional worlds originally created for mass media. Much as I valorize the inventive and often idiosyncratic settings unique to RPGs, I'm also a big fan of a couple of games that make use of licensed settings and think the hobby would be diminished without them. If nothing else, licensed roleplaying games can serve as a useful entrée to newcomers.

Though I suspect that Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, released by West End Games in 1987, is the most well-known (and successful?) licensed RPG ever, at least some of its success depends on another West End RPG, released the year before: Ghostbusters. Subtitled, "A Frightfully Cheerful Roleplaying Game," Ghostbusters is an unexpectedly good game, boasting not just a good sense of humor, as you'd expect, but also a solid and easy to use set of rules. Looking at its designers – Sandy Petersen, Greg Stafford, and Lynn Willis – this should come as little surprise. What still surprises me, though, even after all these years, is that it was Ghostbusters that gave the world not just the core of the system later used to excellent effect in the aforementioned Star Wars RPG, but also gave it the now-ubiquitous dice pool method of resolving in-game actions.

Characters in Ghostbusters have four ability scores, called traits – Brains, Muscle, Moves, and Cool – that are each given a numerical rating representing the number of six-sided dice rolled when making use of that trait. Players can associate a talent with each trait. Talents are more or less skills, like brawl, convince, or parapsychology. When a character makes use of a talent, he gets an additional three dice to add to those already provided by his trait. Other things, like equipment, can add to the pool of dice a player rolls as well. The sum of any roll is then compared to a target number assigned by the referee (called the Ghostmaster), based on its difficulty, success equated with meeting or exceeding the assigned target number.

If you understood the foregoing description of Ghostbusters' game mechanics without any trouble, that's because they're now well-established and commonplace, but that wasn't the case in 1986, when the idea of dice pool was somewhat exotic, at least in the circles in which I moved. As I already mentioned, Star Wars borrowed and further developed this system, which is no surprise, given that the two games were both West End products. What's more remarkable, I think, is that games like Ars Magica, Vampire: The Masquerade (and its sequels), and Shadowrun all evince the direct or indirect influence of Ghostbusters, making its mechanics, along with those of Dungeons & Dragons and Basic Role-Playing, among the most enduring in the history of the hobby.

Ghostbusters included or popularized several other mechanical innovations, such as the use of "brownie points" with which a player could influence the result of dice rolls, potentially blunting some of their negative consequences. "Hero points" of this sort were nothing new by this point. However, Ghostbusters enabled a player to gain more brownie points for his character through good roleplaying and achieving his character's stated goals. I can't say for certain that nothing like this had ever been done before – I'm pretty sure it had been – but, at the time, I found it revelatory. At the opposite end of the scale, the game included the "ghost die," a special six-sider where the 6 was replaced with the Ghostbusters logo. The ghost die is used in every roll and any roll showing the logo indicates a negative consequence of some sort, even if the roll is otherwise successful. Again, it's old hat now; in 1986, though, this was genuinely innovative.

Another aspect of Ghostbusters that I think deserves special praise is its basic premise. Unlike some licensed RPGs, which assume the players will take on the roles of existing characters within the media property, Ghostbusters assumes the players will create their own Ghostbusters, who are franchisees of the original, New York-based Ghostbusters of the 1984 movie. The idea is that the player characters are the local Ghostbusters of their hometown and their adventures should reflect that fact. I think it's a great set-up and, even at the time, I felt that it was a good basis for making more Ghostbusters movies, with each one taking place in a new city with a new cast of characters. 

I really enjoyed playing Ghostbusters when it was first released and still look back fondly on it. Sadly, I no longer have my copy and trying to replace it is prohibitively expensive. It's a very underrated RPG for one that is so well designed, influential, and fun. I wish it were more widely known and appreciated today.

23 comments:

  1. Have not investigated the legality, but there is https://ghostbusterscities.com/media/ghostbusters-the-roleplaying-game/ which appears to have PDF copies of the rules.

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  2. Quick correction: Ars Magica didn't use a dice pool as such, (single d10 plus fixed ability score) but you did try to get over a target number. It more resembled 3rd edition D&D, which shouldn't be surprising since Jonathan Tweet was heavily involved in writing both games.

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    1. Well, 3e resembled Ars, which is 13 years older.

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  3. Regarding brownie points: as near as I can tell, the earliest form that I can find is the Fame and Fortune points in 1st edition Top Secret, although as I recall they were somewhat nebulously described.

    James Bond 007 in 1983 codified the hero point concept more rigorously, and, if I remember, even allowed the players to spend hero points to make mild changes to the environment to their advantage if the gamemaster so allowed.

    I'm not sure if there were any major games between those two that also had a hero point/luck system, but they've become ubiquitous since then.

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  4. You're obviously playing my song here James.

    Not only did we run the hell out of this when it came out but over the years I've run a couple of really great Ghostbusters campaigns using a modified WEG system. Additional mechanics and ideas have been added from such games as InSpectres and recently Free League's ALIEN RPG. I did a complete write-up of my GB game on my blog.

    This game introduced me to Die Pools and helped cement my love and preference for them, made all the more powerful by the Star Wars D6 system. Funny enough, we added houserules to Ghostbusters back in the day that ended up very similar to Star Wars 1st Ed. before the later game came out. Great minds think alike it would seem.

    Someone already noted that Ars Magica wasn't a Die Pool system but I have another small nitpick. You say, "Another aspect of Ghostbusters that I think deserves special praise is its basic premise. Unlike some licensed RPGs, which assume the players will take on the roles of existing characters within the media property, Ghostbusters assumes the players will create their own Ghostbusters, who are franchisees of the original, New York-based Ghostbusters of the 1984 movie." What games are you thinking of? As someone who tends to run IP based games I can't think of any of the classic ones that assumed you'd play the characters from the films, shows, comics, etc.

    FASA Star Trek had you making your own Starfleet Officers, Star Wars had Templates to design your own Rebels, DC HEROES was a Champions style point buy system to make your own Costumed Crimefighters, and Marvel Super Heroes did it with random rolls on charts. What game(s) are you are you referring to?

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    1. I was thinking primarily of both DC Heroes and Marvel Super Heroes. You're right, of course, that both games provide the rules necessary to create your own heroes, but there seemed to be a subtle suggestion that you'd play Batman or Spider-Man or whoever, given the way the games were marketed and how the adventures were presented. Or maybe that's just my own faulty perception.

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    2. Maybe you were thinking of the Indians Jones RPG?

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    3. Indiana Jones is definitely closer to what I had in mind, though I'm not sure how common its approach was.

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    4. And MERP defaulted to an era about a millennium and a half before the Fellowship. :)

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    5. The first TSR Marvel rpg assumed you'd play existing superheroes. It was only with the advanced box that they gave you character generation rules.

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    6. We certainly played the actual superheroes as I played Spidey or Dr Strange most often.

      And with MERP/RM although we did roll up characters originally, we ended up playing famous characters using stats from the modules and Lords of Middle Earth in a completely non-canon set up vs Morgoth, Saron or Shelob - a sort of MERP-Superheroes game. Very silly but fun.

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  5. SPI actually licensed quite a few things beyond (and mostly before) Dallas. Dawn of the Dead and Lord of the Rings might be the best known IPs, but they also published games based on Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat, Burroughs' John Carter of Mars, Frederick Pohl's High Crusade and Disney's Dragonslayer film. Dallas might be the weirdest thing they licensed, though.

    That said, Ghostbusters was a terrific game with three of the industry's most talented designers behind it, and its adventure modules were almost uniformly fun to play and displayed a nice variety of quirky storylines that went well beyond simple "go catch a ghost" outings.

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  6. No matter what RPGs I discover over the course of my life, I will always occasionally think, "Eh, Ghostbusters still might be the best game I've ever played..."

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  7. Designed by Sandy Petersen, Greg Stafford, and Lynn Willis and not a Chaosium game? There is a story there I should think.

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    1. It maybe gets curiouser, even: the Chaosium logo appears on the 1st edition box and next to the designers' names on the title page. I don't know if WEG got the license and contracted Chaosium for development, or if Chaosium had an initial license and decided WEG was in a better position to publish the game, or what.

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    2. I believe the game is a Chaosium design published under contract to West End.

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  8. One other name that ought to be mentioned with this game: it very much has the fingerprints of its WEG editor, Greg (Paranoia, Toon, and later WEG's Star Wars) Costikyan all over it, which is not at all a bad thing.

    This really was a game that came from some of the best people in RPGs at the time.

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  9. There is a retro clone of it of anyone wants to make a new game of it!

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    1. I believe there are at least two retroclones or near-clones of it: Spooktacular and the Awfully Cheerful Engine. I actually thought there was a third, but I might have been thinking of versions of the setting with serial numbers filed off for other systems, like vs. Ghosts and OneDice Hauntaway.

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  10. We played this a few times but while it was enjoyable I don't remember that it had much longevity for us. Good for a bit of light relief but we couldn't get it to sustain more than one or two adventures in series.

    I think thst my kids would love this even today.

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  11. Two more points. Chaosium did eventually publish their own in house "dice pool" system, Prince Valiant, which used coin flips instead of dice, in an attempt to attract beginner players. I think the coin-flipping system wasn't as attractive to new players as Chaosium thought it might be; a big attraction for many new players is being able to roll all those funny looking dice.

    Also, this isn't the first time Chaosium had designed a game for another company; they did the same thing in the mid-80s with Runequest 3rd edition. It feels like they wanted to get out of the publishing business and just be game developers, but perhaps I'm misreading the situation.

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    1. The third edition of Call of Cthulhu was published by Games Workshop. There does seem to be a trend, but why Chaosium was working with others around this time, I don't know; ostensibly the Avalon Hill RuneQuest deal was to get access to AH's wider distribution network.

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  12. I think it may have been the "cheerful" description of the game's box cover preventing me from purchasing this long ago. I was listening to Metallica, watching horror movies, and trying to get my hands on porn (skin mags), I wasn't interested in some kid RPG.

    Finally got to play it a decade ago. Really cool game! I wish the people responsible for the tag line had been slightly more badass. Ah well...

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