Sweet old Twilight 2000

[Jamdin]

I have played Twilight 2000 and had some crazy times. It was one of the rare times that we took a break from AD&D and an even rarer time that the DM allowed another person to run a game. I remember playing a medic nicknamed Doc and his partner, Animal. They drove a Bradley tank and met up with the other players before entering Krakow. The campaign ended with a big showdown and things went from bad to worse when Animal thought an enemy was sneaking into our camp and opened fire on him (he was actually another player introducing another character). Animal was almost dead when Doc arrived on the scene and he was able to pick him up and enter the burning building that served our camp.

Another campaign had me with two different characters as we tried to create a military presence in New York City. It was not easy with a gung-ho Major and tons of mutants. No one survived that in the end either.

 

[painandgreed]

It could be said that the combat system was unrealistic, but for an RPG, it was incredibly deadly. In my group we all played with two characters due to PC mortality. A PC could take a fair amount of punishment, but you take that one bullet or piece of grenade shrapnel to the face, and it was over. No chance for resurrection or raise in T2000. We even had one character die because of infection due to no antibiotics to give him.

 

[Breakdaddy]

It could be said that the combat system was unrealistic, but for an RPG, it was incredibly deadly. In my group we all played with two characters due to PC mortality. A PC could take a fair amount of punishment, but you take that one bullet or piece of grenade shrapnel to the face, and it was over. No chance for resurrection or raise in T2000. We even had one character die because of infection due to no antibiotics to give him.

Hell yes! Grim N' Gritty to go, please!!!

 

[Ace]

I thought the rules were dubious but I did like the setting and I owned about 5 Supplements for it including Pirates of the Vistula, Airlords of the Ozarks (IIRC) and a few others

I also ran a GURPS game in an alternate USA of that setting. The players were based near Pueblo Colorado. The adventure featured Hannibal Lector (WAAAY before anyone heard of the book much less the movie) a group of British Sharpshooters armed with pump action Remington rifles looted from a sporting goods store and various other things

It was a bit silly but in cemented my love for GURPS

 

[painandgreed]

Hell yes! Grim N' Gritty to go, please!!!

Try doing WWII re-enactment sometime. You'll wonder how anybody ever survived the real thing. We had one guy that had been a US Ranger go out on his first event thinking "I was a Ranger. No way these guys are going to get me." He gets put on point and instead of going around a clearing he decided to crawl across it though high weeds. Just then, a German patrol starts marching past down the road. He just lays there and they never were able to tell he was there. When he thought he was home free, he rolled over and saw the German sentry they had following the patrol in the woods pointing a submachine gun at him at short range. There was an echo of machine gun fire and one Ranger is carrying himself back to the dead pool. If it had been a real war, he would have been dead without question. It had taken him 15 minutes to get killed. He got killed for more times tht day.

 

[Iron_Chef]

We never got past character creation in Twlight: 2000. It was way too complicated, too much math, too much bookkeeping. Yuck! I still want a refund on my old box set.

The Free City of Krakow was a cool adventure, however, and reading it is my only fond memory of Twilight: 2000. Never got to play it though.

For "old skool" post-apocalyptic RPGs, I prefer The Morrow Project, though I had some fun with the various editions of Gamma World even if they were a bit silly, setting wise. Never tried Aftermath, but remember the ads in Dragon and always thought about ordering it (but of course I never did). That was from FGU (Fantasy Games Unlimited), wasn't it? Or was it from the Villains & Vigilantes company?

 

[HellHound]

FGU -is- the Villains & Vigilantes company.

The Morrow Project is awesome, but T2K had the scenario that I loved - just the whole beginning of the campaign as everything goes to heck.

 

[BWP]

Never tried Aftermath, but remember the ads in Dragon and always thought about ordering it (but of course I never did). That was from FGU (Fantasy Games Unlimited), wasn't it? Or was it from the Villains & Vigilantes company?

Well, yes, to both questions -- it was made by FGU, and FGU did V&V.

If you were opposed to maths etc. in character generation you would have hated Aftermath!. It suffered from two problems: it was extremely complex for a RPG, and it was very poorly organised. (I've seen worse, but not many.) For a long time we couldn't make head nor tail of it until one guy in our group figured it out and then showed the rest of us, whereupon we went "oh, of course!".

Once you worked out how it was all put together, and realised that it was striving for a "realistic" combat system involving characters who were effectively superheroes, you could have a lot of fun with it. (E.g., any decent rifle or large calibre handgun would put down, if not kill outright, any "normal" person; but most PCs would be able to shrug one or two such shots off ... although they'd want to have a lie down afterwards ....)

 

[painandgreed]

I was just about to mention Morrow Project. All the time we played, it was much like old Star Trek on some human like alien planet. We had all the firepower we could ever want but the only real solution was through information gathering, and diplomacy with the natives.

If you thought the math in T2000 was bad, you really didn't want to play Aftermath with its combat system and flow charts. Character creation was T2000s weak point. IIRC, later editions did what we finally did and gave you "packages" of base skills according to MOS that you fleshed out with some extra skill points.

 

[BWP]

you really didn't want to play Aftermath with its combat system and flow charts.

Actually, there was very little maths involved in the combat system (although it was certainly otherwise complex, a number of different steps and multiple dice rolls that needed to be resolved in the correct order), and the flow charts were there specifically to make that complexity easier to digest. In that respect they were an extremely good idea, and it puzzles me why they frightened so many people.

Once you became familiar with the way the game operated, the flow chart could be put away and combat in the game flowed as quickly as any other game using a complex combat system and multiple dice rolls.

Maths was required in the chargen system, though -- not an "electronic calculator required" level of maths, just a fair amount of different numbers to crunch.