Well, I'd run it with GURPS or Rolemaster Black Ops personally but the set up has always been very playable.  A limited nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States seems pretty plausible these days anyhow.  Heck the Russian government wouldn't even need to be the trigger men.  It could just be terrorists seizing a couple launch sites in former soviet republics and letting lose to force the US to get involved in some local conflict.

Mind you, I did run a GURPS one-off where the PCs were Canadian special forces fighting scavengers and raiders in the ruins of Medicine Hat after a Neo-Communist revolution failed in Russia and resulted in the renegades seizing parts of Northern Alberta.  The only real rationale was that the Copplestone Neo Soviet miniatures are too cool to have on the other side of the world in a collapse scenario.

Quote from: David Johansen;592843Well, I'd run it with GURPS or Rolemaster Black Ops personally but the set up has always been very playable.  A limited nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States seems pretty plausible these days anyhow.  Heck the Russian government wouldn't even need to be the trigger men.  It could just be terrorists seizing a couple launch sites in former soviet republics and letting lose to force the US to get involved in some local conflict.

Mind you, I did run a GURPS one-off where the PCs were Canadian special forces fighting scavengers and raiders in the ruins of Medicine Hat after a Neo-Communist revolution failed in Russia and resulted in the renegades seizing parts of Northern Alberta.  The only real rationale was that the Copplestone Neo Soviet miniatures are too cool to have on the other side of the world in a collapse scenario.

That's pretty cool; I've tried it with different systems (d20, Hero, Silhouette) but I really wanted to give the actual rules a go and I'm finding I like them - so far.  I haven't hit any true WTF?! moments in how they play.  Also, to me, the idea of a USSR that didn't fall and a Cold War that eventually went hot is pretty appealing from a gaming standpoint with me being a child of the 80s.  This is what we expected to happen (I mean, the game was written from '82-'85 so...)

How was 2013 Batshit Fucking Loco?
How was the system?

We played some of the 1st ed back in the late 80s. The group was fun, I don't recall the rules getting into the way. My particular character was a crap rifleman, so I cursed the dice often. I blew things up pretty well tho.

Played quite a bit more of the 2nd edition, which was a different set of rules, but kept the same 'sandbox'.

I actually never had an issue with the population loss in Howling Wilderness. I'm by no means any kind of expert, but think about it.

There were like 50+ nuke strikes on the US looking at the map. Considering our national power grid is fragile and non-hardened, that would pretty much fry everything. No way to make replacement parts to get the power up and running. All the food in the grocery stores would rot within days without the refigeration, and most folks have food for maybe a week inside their home, I don't see how many urban folks would survive at all.

Add to that the drought mentioned over the midwest to kill the crops for the few people who actually know how to grow things, and it could be that the scenario in HW might be actually a little brighter that the background suggests.

I've never looked it quite like Post-Apoc D&D as you mentioned in the original post, but I can certainly see that in hindsight.

Quote from: TristanH;593079There were like 50+ nuke strikes on the US looking at the map. Considering our national power grid is fragile and non-hardened, that would pretty much fry everything. No way to make replacement parts to get the power up and running. All the food in the grocery stores would rot within days without the refigeration, and most folks have food for maybe a week inside their home, I don't see how many urban folks would survive at all.

Rationing? The USA is by far the world's biggest food exporter. You just need to keep enough food moving from where it is (agricultural areas) to where the population is. Surviving government elements could commandeer all gas, transport etc if necessary, although judging by Hurricane Katrina they might be better off leaving it to Walmart.

I'd expect that in the aftermath of a successful* Soviet first strike there would be (a) tens of millions dead in the major population centres and (b) mass hunger and some starvation. Eventual 30-60% fatalities seems plausible - I would expect at the low end, but there are a lot of variables. That's 80-160 million dead in the US. But nothing like 95%. Even the UK would not have had 95% losses, though we would have had it far worse than the US; 2/3 losses would have been very plausible for us, whereas that would be an extreme high end estimate for the US.

Anyway Twilight: 2000 was supposed to have a limited nuclear war, very unlikely IMO. I think this was more to make Europe more playable. In an actual nuclear war with use of battlefield nuclear artillery there would not be much of a playable environment left in the actual warzone.

*Several thousand MIRV warheads hit the US, each averaging around 0.5 megaton yield AIR, destroying the major population centres and many military, scientific, logistical centres and transport hubs.

Edit: On total aftermath deaths, the biggest factor might be the weather. A cold winter would mean vastly higher death totals in northern/colder states. I remember in the '80s thinking about my parents' remote farmhouse in the Grampian mountains of Scotland. It would survive the initial exchange, the nearest likely nuclear strike would be on RAF Kinloss base about 30 miles away. It has its own water and power, and there's plenty of wood in the surrounding forest.
But on reflection, stuck up a mountain seems about the worst possible place to be during a civilisational collapse.

Quote from: S'mon;593142Rationing? The USA is by far the world's biggest food exporter. You just need to keep enough food moving from where it is (agricultural areas) to where the population is. Surviving government elements could commandeer all gas, transport etc if necessary, although judging by Hurricane Katrina they might be better off leaving it to Walmart.

That's the thing. The game assumes the Soviets hit the refining centers in the US. There's not much fuel for transporting food to the population centers, and it'll be some time before they get more. The game talks about moving the urban population to the rural food producing areas. Again, I'm not sure the government would do that. Eventually, perhaps. By that time, who knows how many are left. Best keep the fuel for "emergency use".

You mentioned a cold winter. That's what happened that very winter in the timeline.  Flipping through it again (haven't looked at the book in years. yay, thread!), 52% of the population died between 1997-2000 or 135.2 million (at the time). It's a pretty bleak outlook either way, I just feel looking at our reliance on electricity in the modern world that the casualty list would be at least that or higher.

Winters, yeah sometimes rough, but in a post-apoc US there literally tons of shit to burn and no one to care if you do.

Summers however, without adequate water supply - people are going to be dropping left and right until they figure out how to live in a world without AC and tapwater.

Quote from: CRKrueger;593063How was 2013 Batshit Fucking Loco?
How was the system?

Well it uses a dice pool of d20s...I didn't get much further than that...I hate dice pools with a passion...I'll ship you a copy for $15.

One thing you could do to avoid the nuclear wasteland thing is to switch the timeline a bit.  By 1978, say, both sides figured out that being the lone superpower on a glowing cinder waiting for the last remnants of humanity to die horribly wasn't much of a victory.  Plus, the Russians always seemed fairly interested in conquering America and converting it to Communism rather than just destroying it and making all the resources unusable for 6,000 years.  Starting around 1979 or 1980, both sides started swapping out nuclear warheads for neutron warheads, the development of which was much more advanced than in the real world.  They were able to produce a higher radiation output with a smaller explosive reaction, further limiting property damage.  The bursts created a greater quantity of neutrons, but they weren't as potent; also, it was more unstable, and low air bursts would occasionally produce a similar degree of fallout as a standard nuclear weapon, although the half-life was on the order of a few months to a year rather than a few millennia.  By 1996, the upgrades had not been completed, leaving a number of warheads still carrying a nuclear payload.  By '97, when the timeline suggests the strikes occur, there had even been some progress in a missile that produced an EMP blast almost exclusively, although some residual radiation and damage from the burst still resulted.  These were sent first, knocking out some of the first launch capabilities on both sides, followed by the neutron warheads, then a few standard tac-nukes to make up for the neutron warheads that had been disabled.

Naturally, there would need to be some refinement and a bit of tweaking to make it work really well, but this provides for devastation without ignoring what would be a near constant high-level to lethal dose of radiation that would eventually cover the majority of Europe, Asia, and America.  Chernobyl made it around the world twice, and that wasn't even an explosion.  Hence, some areas would still be irradiated from nukes, some areas would be safe from radiation but swarming with disease from all the corpses, and some of those would still have some radiation danger.  The initial EMP strike areas would have been abandoned, leaving all kinds of non-electronic gear for the taking, and the PCs won't be the only ones to realize that.  It opens up a good deal more possibilities without handwaving the nuclear fallout problem away, but still allows for its presence when desired.

Quote from: The Butcher;592726Mongoose Traveller would do in a pinch, or BRP.

We had a group in the 90s that really disliked the T2K system, but loved the setting so I just run the short campaign with Book 4 Mercenary and the Classic Traveller rules. It worked great.

Quote from: StormBringer;593249Naturally, there would need to be some refinement and a bit of tweaking to make it work really well, but this provides for devastation without ignoring what would be a near constant high-level to lethal dose of radiation that would eventually cover the majority of Europe, Asia, and America.  Chernobyl made it around the world twice, and that wasn't even an explosion. .

Chernobyl caused elevated levels of radiation, but away from the reactor core there's no evidence that it actually harmed anyone, certainly not anyone hundreds of miles away. Similar with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There's no reason to think that a nuclear war would cause lethal radiation levels globally.

Quote from: TristanH;593195The game talks about moving the urban population to the rural food producing areas.

That's a good way to kill millions of people. For instance the 2 million Germans who died fleeing the Red Army at the end of WW2. Everything I've seen about actual nuclear war preparation indicates that the post-war focus should be on stopping people from moving and keeping the roads clear. It's always much easier to move food to the people (where they already have shelter and other supplies) than people to the food.

Quote from: TristanH;593195Flipping through it again (haven't looked at the book in years. yay, thread!), 52% of the population died between 1997-2000 or 135.2 million (at the time).

52% fatalities is within the 30-60% range I'd expect for an all-out nuclear war and aftermath. If I was running T:2000 in the US I expect I'd keep much of the aftermath but have had a lot more nukes fired in the initial war.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;592319So, 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.

Never thought about it this way, but it's pretty close I guess!
Got some good memories about this game ("I want a G11, I *NEED* a G11!").
It's been a while since I last read the rules, so I'm not sure how clunky they are/feel nowadays. Still, we had a lot of fun with it!

Read a bit of Twilight: 2013, but the whole geopolitical make-up put me off.
I would be tempted to play T2K set in the eighties again though (still inspired by the Cold War Gone Hot supplement, for the Force on Force wargame I read a while ago).

Quote from: S'mon;593279Chernobyl caused elevated levels of radiation, but away from the reactor core there's no evidence that it actually harmed anyone, certainly not anyone hundreds of miles away. Similar with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There's no reason to think that a nuclear war would cause lethal radiation levels globally.

The yield at Nagasaki and Hiroshima are firecrackers compared to the nuclear weapons of today.  And Chernobyl wasn't even an explosion, just a high pressure release of one nuclear reactor.  That circled the Earth at least once; the concentrated blasts of hundreds of nuclear missiles will put a radioactive cloud up that will block the sun for months, possibly years; aka "nuclear winter".  The recent Fukushima disaster elevated radiation levels in the milk produced by cows, and that also wasn't an explosion.

Even a fraction of the weapons used in a nuclear exchange would all but sterilize the planet.  Which is why nuclear war wasn't as big a threat as people thought back then, and is more of a danger now with rogue powers in possession of nuclear weapons.