Sweet old Twilight 2000

[HellHound]

I just noticed that DTRPG is giving away the first edition of Twilight 2000 in PDF. I have sooo many fond memories of this game - for the first few sessions, it seems to always run as a game about book-keeping more than role-playing as the group slowly whittles downt he huge stockpile of supplies they tried to take with them from the initial destruction of the 4th.

Then the vehicles start breaking down, and more stuff gets left behind... until the party has their personal gear and maybe a vehicle or two left. And then the survival mentality actually seems to diminish, as a small groupw ith no major supplies is much less of a threat to the enemy, and the party slips into obscurity until they can do something or find a purpose to their lives behind enemy lines.

I also loved the abstract gun combat system using "shots", where each shot was roughly 3 bullets. It handled most combat situations nicely, kept things fairly simple, and seemed to work well for me. In fact, I used the basics of the system for my own firearms combat system for CyberPunk 2020.

Anyone else with fond (or not-quite-so-fond) memories of this game?

 

[HellHound]

Ahh... flipping through it, I remember something else I liked - the method used for determining general NPC motivations by drawing tow cards from a deck of playing cards, with the number indicating degree of motivation, and the suit indicating the type of motivation (Clubs = Violence; Diamonds = Wealth; Hearts = Fellowship; Spades = Power), with the face cards and aces having special meanings.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

I don't remember anything rules-wise, but I do remember the good times that were had. I've always been open to trying new RPGs and having played RIFTS before being introduced to Twilight 200, I was hooked with apocalyptic roleplaying. Twilight 2000 is a great game. I'm gonna have to print the PDF I'm DLing right now to be able to play it again. Ahhhh, memories.

 

[HellHound]

As I was blabbering on in the Hivemind thread, I have two copies of the contents of the boxed set as well as a small pile of supplemental material (much of it written by myself)... but I can't resist a free electronic version.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

but I can't resist a free electronic version.

I can't resist anything thats free. This is one of the reasons I have so many PDFs.

 

[Steverooo]

I never played Twilight 2000, but 2300AD had the same future-history (at that time) background, and also used the playing cards motivation system. I enjoyed 2300AD enough to devote a large web site to it, obviously...

 

[HellHound]

Wow... too bad the scan is SO TERRIBLE!

I've got home-scanned pages that are much more legible than the ones included in this product.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

Wow... too bad the scan is SO TERRIBLE!.

Yeah. I'm working on getting it cleaned up. Eliminating messy borders and cleaning up its appearance. I may even consider retyping a good portion of the material that I'll use.

 

[BWP]

Anyone else with fond (or not-quite-so-fond) memories of this game?

We HATED IT.

Our group was always very combat-oriented, so any RPG we played had to have a combat system that "felt" OK. We began to be worried when we found out that we could not fire a single round from our pistols or rifles (even though the equipment is physically capable of so firing in real life) ... how were we supposed to conserve ammunition when the combat system has high ROF built-in? We didn't like that, but grumble, grumble, let's see how it works out.

Then we fought some Russians. Eyebrows were raised when these guys were shrugging off bursts of fire from high-calibre weapons. We were not warming to this combat system at all.

The last straw was when we encountered some wild dogs, and one dog caused more serious wounding than a squad's worth of assault rifle fire. We gave up at that point -- as far as we were concerned, the game system was just messed up.

Now, I fully concede that we may have been playing some of these rules wrong, though we double-checked everything. It was our first attempt at it, and errors are always bound to creep in. But it wasn't just the combat rules -- we just didn't like much of any of it, and truth to tell we weren't especially keen on playing a group of American soldiers to begin with. (Cultural prejudice. Sorry.) We went back to playing Aftermath! to feed our shoot-'em-up tastes -- it's not a "realistic" game system either (it tried to be both "heroic" and "realistic", a difficult combination) but we understood it and could make it work for us. We might have been able to make T:2000 work for us too, but no-one could muster the enthusiasm.

 

[S'mon]

I have 2nd edition Twilight: 2000, it doesn't suffer much from these problems - you can fire single shots or bursts; NPCs usually fall over from a single hit by a heavy-calibre assault rifle (NPC takes a Serious wound & usually falls over at 10 hit points, FN-FAL does 4d6. M16 only does 2d6 though so you might want to shoot them twice). Its treatment of autofire is beautifully simple and by far the best I've seen in any game - simply roll a d6 per bullet, hit on a '6', cover etc means some dice automatically miss. It may not sound like much, but it models the effects of real-world autofire far better than other RPG systems - in T:2000 the more bullets you fire, the more likely you are to hit...