So I'm starting a new Twilight:2000 game soon, and I've got a few random thoughts I'll share.

First of all is the rules themselves.  Despite coming out in 1985, T2k feels very very much like original D&D.  So much so that it has six core attributes that closely mirror D&Ds, and stat generation is much like D&D's (roll 4d6 for each).  However you drop 4 - so if you roll, say, 19 - 5, 4, 5, 5, - it becomes 15.  Plus you can Favor up to 3 attributes, but you have to Slight an equal number of attributes (so if you Favor 3, you have to Slight 3).  There's math involved here but basically you can "bump" 3 stats up but you have to reduce 3 other stats using the formulas.

There's a percentage skill system that's pretty easy to use - roll under on d%.  Skills are bought at half cost, full cost or double cost depending on where they fall inside your character's background.  Plus certain military specializations give you skill discounts (e.g., if you're a tanker, Heavy Weapon and Drive Tracked Vehicle come at half cost).

But to get back to the original D&D comparison...rules in the set are very, very sparse.  Character generation (which is admittedly very involved and not very well explained) comprises 99% of the rules the Players Manual has in it.  There's a LOT of supplementary sheets for equipment that could have and should have been in a 3rd book, like OD&D's "Monsters & Treasures".  Combat rules are mostly the purview of the Gamemaster's Manual, as are notes for campaigns, and so on.  

The game itself is rooted in military role-playing but while it creates a military structure and background for your character, it doesn't then say "Designate one person in the group as the commander, they issue orders".  Rather, the disaster that befalls the remnants of the US Army as the game's premise immediately take away the whole structure of "Well we've got to do what HQ wants us to" railroad and instead puts the game in a sandbox.  Essentially, the remnants of the Soviet military overrun the last US division's rear areas including HQ and as there is a massive retreat through Poland, the final order you hear is "Good luck, you're on your own."  

With that the players are put in a "sandbox" of Central Europe where central governments have broken down, NATO high command is incommunicado, and battle lines just don't exist any more.  A group can meet a band of happy deserters of Soviet origin who'll gladly trade with them and warn them about dangers down the road, or be ambushed by a savage ex-NATO marauder group who, despite wearing US, UK, FRG and Canadian uniforms have no qualms about shooting every last PC in the party to take their stuff.  Given that you're dealing with local barons and lords instead of a centralized government, the comparison to D&D is, in my opinion, pretty apt.

Speaking of "stuff", since the nuclear war of 1997 has cut almost all resupply lines back to the US (and nothing's being produced there anyway, the US needing to get back on its feet), just like in D&D rare and powerful weapons can be discovered.  Where D&D has the +2 arrows of dragon slaying, in Twilight:2000 it might be a crate of reloads for your Tankbreaker (nee Javelin) launcher.  

As much as I like the game, it isn't perfect by any stretch.  Until I get a good feel for it, vehicle combat (or combat versus vehicles) is going to seem clunky.  Also, and this delves deep into the background, later authors turned the game towards misery tourism.  I don't suggest that a post-nuclear war America (or anywhere else) would be a picnic, but the US sourcebook Howling Wilderness and the later Twilight:2000 timeline (which GDW clumsily tried to patch into 2300 AD I guess to make the "end" of T2k seem not so terrible) has (for example) the US population in 2001 as 95% gone.  That's just absurd, to me, and something I'll be adjusting quite a bit.  In fact there's not a lot of HW I will actually use.  I'd prefer my game not be The Road, but a bit more like Jericho.  But, of course, that's the beauty of any RPG, it's up to the individual GM.

So, in a nutshell...Twilight:2000 is like OD&D but modern with guns and a tweaked character generation system and Outdoor Wilderness thrown in the mix, as there's very little in the way of "dungeon crawling".  It's almost exclusively a hex-crawl.

I had huge fun with T2k back in the day. I'd play it again with the right group. In fact, the RPG I am working on right now is very much my version of T2K in space.

It's an incomplete game, in both a good way and a bad way. The bigger problem were the military wank players who couldn't stop masturbating over the gun stats. If you can avoid those guys, its an awesome game.

We always ran it like The Road. The US soldiers were invaders, outnumbered and caught in a situation akin to the Black Death. Society has collapsed, the thin veneer of civilization is gone, the skies are dark with radioactive dust and Eastern Europe's psycho barbaric past is coming back with a vengeance.

Also, remember the movies of the time T2K came out - The Day After, Red Dawn, Gallipoli and Das Boat, soon followed by Platoon and Full Metal Jacket.

Did they ever come out with a new T2k edition? Any good?

Interesting, thanks.

Re 95% fatalities - even the Soviet-propaganda Pergamon Press stuff I used to read (Nuclear War: The Aftermath) didn't seem to predict a die-off more than about 60% for the US, probably much less. The UK and West Germany were going to really suffer, though.

Quote from: Spinachcat;592532Did they ever come out with a new T2k edition? Any good?

Twilight 2013 came out a few years ago and combined a clunky, odd system with an improbable back story.   I bought most of the line when it went on sale at RPGNow, and was just really disappointed in everything.  It didn't evoke any desire to play at all and was just kinda there.  

Mongoose has the license now, but hasn't done anything with it yet.

I would love to run or play in an original Cold War themed campaign, but could never get the player interest.

Quote from: Dave;592543Twilight 2013 came out a few years ago and combined a clunky, odd system with an improbable back story.   I bought most of the line when it went on sale at RPGNow, and was just really disappointed in everything.  It didn't evoke any desire to play at all and was just kinda there.  

Mongoose has the license now, but hasn't done anything with it yet.

I would love to run or play in an original Cold War themed campaign, but could never get the player interest.

T2k13 came and went - it was one skull airskimmer and powered armor suit shy of being full Siembieda level crazy, plot-wise.  I'll stick with 1.0's "Alternate Future" timeline, thanks.

Rules wise, though, I couldn't say about T2k13.  I know someone who helped playtest them and he liked them a lot, but the metaplot put me off so badly I never took a 2nd look at them.

I played both 1st edition and 2nd edition Twilight: 2000.  Had lots of fun.  I preferred the 2nd edition rules more than the first.  For one, vehicle combat wasn't near the nightmare it was in 1st edition.  Multiple rules worked better in 2nd edition.  1st Editions modules were much more interesting, however.  Most of the European adventure modules were particularly good.

You post-apoc Twilight players...do you know about the Juhlin forums for Twilight: 2000?

If not, google them and check them out.

Quote from: S'mon;592535Interesting, thanks.

Re 95% fatalities - even the Soviet-propaganda Pergamon Press stuff I used to read (Nuclear War: The Aftermath) didn't seem to predict a die-off more than about 60% for the US, probably much less. The UK and West Germany were going to really suffer, though.

The 1e boxed set background as written has a tit-for-tat nuclear war of attrition, with neither side willing to send 2400 warheads over the pole for fear of really destroying the world for good.  So the implication is that it's a few hundred strikes on either side, with Europe and China really getting pasted but good, and neither side willing to use any more weapons as industrial and agriculture having suffered so much.

Then Howling Wilderness came along and...yuck.

Quote from: Grimace;592597I played both 1st edition and 2nd edition Twilight: 2000.  Had lots of fun.  I preferred the 2nd edition rules more than the first.  For one, vehicle combat wasn't near the nightmare it was in 1st edition.  Multiple rules worked better in 2nd edition.  1st Editions modules were much more interesting, however.  Most of the European adventure modules were particularly good.

You post-apoc Twilight players...do you know about the Juhlin forums for Twilight: 2000?

If not, google them and check them out.

Yah, I post there a lot as raketenjagdpanzer (which is a Kanonenjagdpanzer Jaguar with the 90mm main gun and mantlet removed and a TOW-IIb or Euromissile HOT launcher as anti-armor, just FYI).

I'm going to try out some vehicle combat this weekend.  Should be interesting.

Twilight 2000 has long been on my list of games I'd like to run/play in, but have never found a group for. (Dark Conspiracy, coincidentally also by GDW, also makes the list.)

About 7 years ago, I came up with a "Twilight 2010" scenario, just for fun. It involved an inverse scenario, with the EU interning US units, and the US forces trying to escape into allied Poland, fighting EU forces along the way. War, nukes fly, etc.

Now, seeing Iran moving towards nukes, a "Twilight 2020" game could be possible. Iran v. Israel, US intervenes over Security Council objections, Russians get angry, war, nukes fly.

That'd be a viable setting. And leaving players stranded in the middle of Iran, trying to make their way to Europe, would be an interesting twist on the original campaign.

Just some thoughts...

I played 2nd edition back in the day and liked it a lot as a player. Although I was like 11 or 12, I played with my older brother and his friends.

I still have the box plus the module for Florida (can't recall the name right now).

It IS like DnD though. Just imagine finding a G11 and some crates of caseless ammo (a gun that never jams?!)

We rarely played outside of vehicles though. I loved the vehicle combat.

Fast forward 20 years and I thought, "Hey! Maybe my gaming group would want to try this out for a change of pace!" So I open the box, and I see that I need to find the square root of something to determine a stat.

Closed the box and put it back on the shelf.

I still like the setting, but I could homebrew something far less complicated. Makes me wonder just what houserules we used back in the day.

I didn't see any square root/algebraic function stuff in the character generation rules.  The only places it gets heavily mathy are Favoring or Slighting characteristics.  They present fairly simple character generation rules badly, that I will give you.

It's like D&D (to me, if you don't like D&D this won't sit well with you) : it's a good enough game that it's worth puzzling out the mechanical greeblies to have a good time with.  I'm blessed with just enough spare time that it's not a big deal.  Plus this is going to be PbP so it's not as though I'm going to be sweating at the table flipping back and forth through the rulebook, holding up 10 minutes of gameplay to reason out some of the fuzzier rules

If someone is going to play through though I highly recommend giving the rules a thorough reading a few times to get to grips with them (I'm doing so currently regardless).

Like 2300AD, this is a setting I want to like, but the dated geopolitics grate me to no end. Silly, I know, but there you go.

Still, I'd love to use it as a base for a gritty post-apocalyptic game. No aliens, no zombies, no robots, no Rapture, no mutants. Just men, the ultimate monsters.

Mongoose Traveller would do in a pinch, or BRP.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;592600Yah, I post there a lot as raketenjagdpanzer (which is a Kanonenjagdpanzer Jaguar with the 90mm main gun and mantlet removed and a TOW-IIb or Euromissile HOT launcher as anti-armor, just FYI).

In the early 80's you watched Wally George, didn't you?  

Quote from: thedungeondelver;592598The 1e boxed set background as written has a tit-for-tat nuclear war of attrition, with neither side willing to send 2400 warheads over the pole for fear of really destroying the world for good.  So the implication is that it's a few hundred strikes on either side, with Europe and China really getting pasted but good, and neither side willing to use any more weapons as industrial and agriculture having suffered so much.

Then Howling Wilderness came along and...yuck.

NATO nuclear war doctrine involved gradual escalation, flexible response etc. Soviet nuclear war doctrine was "fire everything we have as fast as we can" - preferably first, since they had limited second-strike capacity. But even with thousands of warheads landing on the US, much of the population would survive; probably most of it.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;592319(which GDW clumsily tried to patch into 2300 AD I guess to make the "end" of T2k seem not so terrible) has (for example) the US population in 2001 as 95% gone.  That's just absurd, to me, and something I'll be adjusting quite a bit.  

You do know that the 2300AD Background was developed from taking the Twilight 2000 situation, turning it into a strategic wargame, and playing it out with a lot of players from 2000 AD to 2300AD. Then writing down the result.