Sweet old Twilight 2000

[S'mon]

I can't remember if it was T:2000 or Traveller: New Era that brought in the auto-kill head & chest shots. Basically head shots do x2 damage, and head or chest shot you roll a d20, if number rolled is less than or equal to damage, instant kill except on a 20. So a typical chest shot from 7.62mm FN-FAL would do 14 damage, chest hit 70% instant death, head hit 95%. From a 5.56mm M-16 7 damage, chest hit 35% instant kill, head hit 70%. The GM could optionally not use this rule on PCs.

 

[Teflon Billy]

God we loved that game.

I recal that first edition being oddly low-mortality as well (at one point my character had shot a Soviet soldier something like 9 times with his M16 to no appreciable effect. Finally just launched an HEDP Round from the underslung M203 Grenade launcher at him...it managed to knock him unconscious.

The second Edition was way better in that the combat system was a a lot more deadly, you didn't have to play Americans, your spec wasn't randomly determined, and most all of the excellent supplements for 1E still had alot of utility (We spent a lot of time in the Free City of Krakow).

Mine was the only character to make it through the campaign alive (A Canadian Forces Commando who--thank you dice Gods--spoke Polish).

 

[IronWolf]

I only played the game casually in late high school, early college. We had a good time playing it and certainly have more fond memories of it than poor ones. I still have my boxed set in the basement as well as the 2nd edition boxed set.

 

[Barak]

I almost played that game several times. One of my gaming buddies is a big fan of the game, and so he "started" a campaign 2-3 times. Sadly, he's not overly fond of DMing, so we never got actually started, just made characters. Not sure what edition it is, but apparently it isn't first, as we could be soldiers from pretty much anywhere.

The character generation system is all I can speak of. It's fun, but can lead to very sucky characters. I was trying for an Intelligence Officer, hoping to get an old dude as he would be more effective (combat monsters can get away with being young). Sadly, the "Big One" started right after he was done with officer training. I could do basically nothing. Twould have been interesting..

 

[painandgreed]

Loved this game and keep thinking about playing it again. Had one really long campaign with a bunch of ex-military guys. First we ran through Krakow and played a long game of espionage until one preson said the wrong thign to the wrong person and the KGB killed everybody, stole project reset and the city guard attacked us. We fled down the Vistula to Warsaw where we defeated the warlord leader on the first day in town. As soon as we heard what was going down, we sent a three man team that reconned behind the enemy lines to withint 50 call sniper range of the main barracks. When the main guy came out to inspect troops, we took the head shot and ran without looking to see if it even hit. We had a running firefight back to safety and over the next few days, it turned out we'd killed the guy and nobody could keep the forces together so by time the big battle happned we were much larger. From there we caught the last train back to America taking with us the 12 kg of white china heorin. The US government sent us into New York to look for the gold and we unified people there, defeated the bad guys and then had to leave because everybody knew we were responsible for the heroin that had returned to NYC. After that it was all spooky stuff against the secret militia group that was trying to take over the US in the Allegane mountains and Ohio. Our last battle had us winning until Spectre gunships rained down death upon everybody and we had to flee.

 

[SWBaxter]

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

Way back in high school, it was probably the first game with a relatively realistic combat system that my group was willing to play. By relatively realistic, I mean one in which nobody wants any part of a fair fight. We had a huge amount of fun with the game. Fantastic adventures, too, with all sorts of interesting situations and settings. Including one of the best reinterpretations of the dungeon crawl ever, in The Black Madonna.

Oh yeah, glad it's on DTRPG to introduce a new generation to the game. I have two copies of the first edition box set on my shelves.

 

[Breakdaddy]

Twilight 2000 r0xx0red, esp. v2.0+mercs. I cannot tell you how many hours of my life were spent peppering enemy light armor with small-calibre ordinance from range. I really miss playing it very much, but still have a very good condition copy of the yellow V2.0 box.

 

[kigmatzomat]

I played a short-lived TW2k 2e game back in college. There were six or seven of us so we started with plenty of gear. This was bad b/c we were all engineering students. Our party had enough stills, MREs, reloads, and spares that we were an entire support division.

Combat mechanics weren't too hairy except for the CAW; that was the devil. TW2k did very, very wrong things with shotguns, giving you the option of hitting a different person with every piece of buckshot. Ack. We finally built a hit/damage matrix to refer to instead of rolling hundreds of d6s.

We were also decent at the paranoid-survival mindset. Ninjas sneak into our hideout at night? Say hello to Mr. Door-grenade. Starving peasants mob our vehicles instead of asking politely for assistance? Waive goodbye as the claymores strapped to the side of the bradley detonate. Think you've got the high ground advantage by using the town's historic clocktower? Enjoy the ride from the C4 we installed at the base.

Plus my tanker was a scrounger/mechanic extraordinair with mediocre, but completely adequate, driving & shooting skills. We find a Bradley with a full complement of TOWs but missing a tread and a shorted launcher system. I manage to take some of our ablative armor plate spares and forge a workable low-speed track. Then, I hotwire the TOW launcher. They become dumb rockets with no guidance but they were dumb rockets we didn't have before. The bradley had the same autocannon as our other armored vehicle (I think he'd intended us to scavenge the bradley's cannon and some other spare parts) so we suddenly had two armored vehicles.

The GM gave up when we were supposed to do a weapon sale. We decided to go through with it but had our GTH plans in place. I'd pre-ranged the mortars on the camp with dummy slugs and setup range markers. We then put the camp fire over the test target so the helo will use it as the reference. Well, the chopper hovers *directly* over it! When the chopper nukes our Humvee I manage to drop an HE mortar shell directly on the rotor as the Spetznaz begin rappeling down. *BOOM*

It was an entertaining game but not exactly what I'd call fun.

 

[Rackhir]

I vividly remember trying to play the first ed of Twilight 2k. I have to agree with the people who told tales of the incredibly screwed up results possible from the combat system.

We had two vehicles, a fully loaded bradley and an m113 with a grenade launcher. We encountered a small sov mechanized group and pumped 3. Count'em 1, 2, 3 Tow-IIs into a BMP-2, the "Flaming Coffin", without inflicting any serious damage what-so-ever. Remember each one is designed to take out a 60 ton MBT.

The vehicle damage system IIRC was based around your weapon causing x-amount of damage. Armor would stop x amout and there was a % chance of hitting systems based on the location of the hit. Through poor dice rolling we managed to hit nothing of any significance. Eventually, the GM was letting us kill infantry on the other side of the BMP, with the left over damage since we were getting so frustrated.

We stop trying to use the system not too long after that.

 

[Garnfellow]

I never played it, but I remember a classic review from a British game mag -- probably either White Dwarf or Imagine. Seems the reviewer very much did not appreciate the American fantasy of post-WWIII Europe.