Twilight 2000

[Grimmnar]

I love the bleak and desperate setting of T2000, but the rules suffer from tableitis.

Yeah, but with anything, proper management tableitis can stay under control.  :-)

Grimm

[northtroll]

I always liked Twilight 2000. Of course growing up during the 80's in the States, and living with the fear of limited nuclear war kind of made it more comfortable-if that is the right word-as a background. I grew up in a fairly isolated rural area, maybe that had some appeal to it as well. I remember losing power for several days, and folks living with a lot less than they were used to all around me. I'ts really hard to get that feeling across unless  you have lived through similar experiances. It ain't camping!

One thing that has bugged me with most games that are heavy on firearms is the lack of rules concerning maintenance of firearms. Unless you happen to have spare parts and the tools to do gunsmithing with, certain repairs are impossible. A fully functioning machine shop is worth it's weight in gold in such a situation, as long as you have skilled machinists. Most simple fixes are easily accomplished by replacing components in the field. But it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes the fit isn't quite as good as it should be and the firearms don't function correctly, or at all. This becomes even more accute, I would imagine after replacements become harder to find.

[Mr. Peabody]

One thing that has bugged me with most games that are heavy on firearms is the lack of rules concerning maintenance of firearms. Unless you happen to have spare parts and the tools to do gunsmithing with, certain repairs are impossible. A fully functioning machine shop is worth it's weight in gold in such a situation....

Aftermath is a set that works along these lines. Weapon condition, wear & tear, maintenance, reloading and the value of 'brass' were all big factors in our games.

Very gritty game and heavily dependant on number crunching and tables, but fun times.

[Halforc]

Loved both games, still play aftermath!  Rules heavy and combat is complex but I can gm a combat between 5 players vs 30-40 brigands with ease, mind you 26/27 years of playing helps.

[NurgleHH]

I think Twilight:2013 is easier to play. Less tables, more gaming...

[NurgleHH]

Oh, I found an article in the Challange-Mgazine 25. The rules for Twiiight-Miniature-Games.

[Machinegunkelly]

Thanks for all the input. It seems there are more people than me who have fond memories of TWK2000.

[Conquistador]

Just my experience:  The key failure of the game was that you could spend "hours" making a pile of characters (you would need more than a couple of spares in any but the shortest of gaming sessions) and after all that work you can use them up in an all night game session even if you don't make any serious errors in combat because the GMs were almost universally focused on the tables more than the game play.

And nothing was gained with having a highly skilled technical specialist with low combat skills.  Yet... yet... most of the people in the post 1914 militaries were not in jobs that exposed them to large amounts of combat.  I enjoyed recreating the people/skills I saw in the USAF in the 1970s but the life span of those characters was incredibly short and almost universally unappreciated by the "run and gun" players in my area.  That most likely was also inpart the result of the 4F type GM who ran the games though...

 War gamers can get some really unrealistic ideas about the military from games...

I'm done whining...

Gracias,

Glenn

[NurgleHH]

I think T2K is a game which must be lead by a good gamemaster. I always had the luck to play with excellent gamemasters with a lot of sensitivness. So at the beginning o each sesion I hadn't to make new characters.

But in the moment t2K for me is more an environment for my modern troops to use it.
 

[S_P]

I've used it to run non WW3 but still post war games with great success- key I find is 1) get the scenario right and 2) remember psychology in the firefight don't get fixated on the hardware (easy I know).

[Conquistador]

I agree with what you are saying 110% lots of army jobs are non combat. To be fair though combat or not I think the short lifespans are fitting for someone in the thirld world war in its major theatre.

as for shoot everything gaming, as a GM i dont have a problem with people shooting lots and thinking little. They just have to deal with the consequences they create if they do that.

GDW also had a very war focused set of products. Most of their games were military sort of RPG's. This led to lots of Role playing a wargame from its players which I think is total shit. Frontline combat is not good RPG fodder.

In fact the more you move away from military style games the more fun you have. If you must do a milli game then do a behind enemy lines on their own sort of thing.

A war as a backdrop on the other hand is a fine thing.  

I think that is why Traveller type rules/games was less attractive in the early days (1970s and 1980s) to me because most of my games were by war gamers turned to RPGs and that bias affected the game experiences.  RPGs and War games overlap but a lot less than some people think in my experience.

Still, there can be good mixes if the group is capable and the GM is willing to put in the work.  

Gracias,

Glenn

[Halforc]

For real fun try morrow project, combat was lethal!

Btw Aftermath had 30 hit locations, you may be mistaking 52/53 for location 12, groin shot!

[maxxon]

One thing that has bugged me with most games that are heavy on firearms is the lack of rules concerning maintenance of firearms.

In a T2K style environment you are rather unlikely to have the ammunition supply to seriously wear out most small arms.

E.g. the first thing to fail on a CZ pistol is the slide stop (this is a design feature/bug). They typically last 5,000-10,000 rounds. The likelihood of anyone except a sportsman training for competition shooting 5k rounds with a pistol is virtually nil.

And when it fails, you can replace it with almost any metal rod of similar diameter, e.g. a piece of cleaning rod. The slidestop won't work but otherwise the gun is fine.

In case you were wondering, the CZ is not a particularly robust firearm. Try this for size:

http://thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=523220

If we are talking "Mad Max" type of setting where the collapse happened long ago and you have to figure in long periods of bad or no maintenance, things get a bit different. Discounting actual rust problems, springs can lose tension in the long run. This makes the arms less reliable and can turn (semi)automatics downright dangerous. Otherwise there is generally nothing wrong with a 100 year old rifle.

Africans have a habit of burying AKs in the ground and digging them up as needed. The biggest problem they have is termites eating the wooden parts -- so they just carve new ones and off they go...

Yes there is wear and tear -- but it's a long road from not having optimal accuracy to not working at all.