I've gotten a copy of this game Gangbusters B/X edition. It's an interesting caldron of porridge. It is simply the B/X edition of basic D&D with a 1920's skin on top. Some of the stuff is just fantastic, like the suggestions for campaigns, running gangs and businesses, court cases, and even the car chase stuff looks interesting (haven't quite digested all that). It is fully able to be integrated with B/X D&D, because all the NPC/enemies etc, have regular D&D stats and the guns etc. are on the same scale.
It is really rules lite, so you don't get bogged down in minutia, really just "if you don't know, roll ability score or less on d20."
The character classes are a weird bit however. There are 4 classes: Brutish, Educated, Connected and Street Smart. Each is rated from level 1-6. Their HP progression is weird:
Brutish: lvl-1: 1d8, lvl-2 2d8, lvl-3 3d8, lvl 4--4d8, lvl 5-4d8+1, lvl 6--4d8+2
Educated: lvl-1: 1d6, lvl-2 2d6, lvl-3 2d6+2, lvl-4 3d6, lvl-5 3d6+2, lvl-6 4d6
Connected: lvl-1 1d6, lvl-2 2d6, lvl-3 3d6, lvl-4 4d6, lvl-5 5d6, lvl-6 5d6+2
Street Smart: lvl-1 1d4, lvl-2 2d4, lvl-3 3d4, lvl-4 4d4, lvl-5 4d4+2, lvl-6 5d4+1
Their xp tables are based on D&D with Brutish using the fighter chart (2000xp to lvl 2), the Educated the thief chart (1200xp), the Connected the cleric (1500xp) and the Street Smart the magic user (2500xp).
Their class abilities are very bare bones:
The Brutish class make 1 attack per level against I HD or less enemies, gets +1 to intimidate and can use improvised weapons without penalty.
The Connected Class has 1 sphere of influence it can get favors from.
The Educated Class gets two vocations to be good at, one bonus language, and an area of expertise (like safe cracking or chemical analysis)
The Street Smart class gets 4-5 special abilities (similar to D&D thief skills).
The Street Smart abilities and Educated expertise are resolved by rolling 1d6, and getting 3+.
I don't know how players would react to these bare-bones PC's. It might be super cool, but fights are going to be very simple and very fast, so it's not a game for combat joy. One would hope that people would just "try stuff" rather than seeing if there's a rule or ability for it.
The weirdest thing is PC armor class. It's based entirely on the quality of your clothing. If you wear poor clothes, you're AC 7, ordinary clothes AC 5, fancy clothes AC 3. My daughters think that that is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I just can't wrap my head around it. NPC's don't work that way at all, the book just assigns them an AC, so a Prison Guard has AC 7, Hooligan has AC 6 and Moonshiner AC 4. It's just completely arbitrary like early D&D monsters.
I think this might be fun as a one-shot sometime, or a short 3-4 session campaign with a definite goal,
