Bonnie and Clyde

[Steve]

They were two of the most notorious criminals of the 1930s, so I was wondering if anyone had ever written them up in the Hero System for a Pulp-era game?

 

Would they be above-average in ability, or were they just lucky?

[Tjack]

   “Lucky”?   All things considered, not so much.   If you want to pump them up to fit your campaign, go right ahead, but in real life they were both a couple of ill educated borderline sociopaths.  The Great Depression brought out the worst in a lot of people and the best in many others.  When you look at B & C just think of two high school dropouts pulling into a highway gas stations, robbing the place and killing everybody inside.  The guy at the counter, the mom getting a soda...whoever.
  It is said that “comedy is just tragedy plus time.”  Maybe brutality plus time equals fame.

[BigJackBrass]

A degree of luck (their crime spree lasted a couple of years), myth-making and brutality. They loved powerful cars and guns, and took a lot of photographs, giving them a glamorous air in desperate times: the reality was more squalid, unsuccessful, petty and murderous. 

 

There's little to suggest that they were particularly skilled or clever. For one thing, they weren't up against difficult targets or efficient, coordinated law enforcement to start with. They killed more than a dozen people to gain trifling sums. Clyde was especially fond of the Browning Automatic Rifle he stole, a seriously powerful firearm which he clearly considered a status symbol, but honestly their main weapons seem to have been desperation and ruthlessness. 

 

The truth is they weren't "pulp" in an action/adventure way at all, from their harsh individual lives until their deaths together. I'm not sure I'd want to feature them in a game other than as news from elsewhere. 

[starblaze]

Check out the movie The Highway Men for a much less glamorous portrayal of B&C.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Yeah they were really overgeared for the times, with military weapon and absolutely no concern for human life.  And Highwaymen was a really great movie.

[DoctorImpossible]

Sounds like a fun addition to a game. Plenty of people use nazi soldiers and mafia henchmen as classic pulp bad guys, so a little variety ripped right out of the headlines from that era sounds great!

 

Well, since you're asking here, you're clearly playing a pulp action-adventure game, so I'd lean towards them being somewhat skilled but also having fairly potent weapons and a pretty good car (speedy, yet manoeuverable, but also reasonably tough) and then also add a heaping helping of plain old luck on top (good luck for them, and maybe bad luck for anybody trying to stop them).

 

Basically I would try to make them seem like significant threats to normal civilians and even less combat-focussed heroes, but not enough to stand up to an enemy military (Nazi invaders, or an alien war robot or the like) by themselves.