We loved playing this back in the 80's. It was a comprehensive catalogue of military that we ate up. We played it with various ideas for backstories, some were total nuclear devastation Mad Max style, others were ideas clinging to the original lore. One guy did a alien invasion story with it.
From what I've discovered is that a load of people took Twilight 2000 really seriously, whereas a bunch of other people were just having a load of fun, and I'm on the side of the ones having fun as I really adored the Twilight Nightmares book which had Dinosaurs and Aliens in it. :)
I used to GM this back in the day with friends. They had a 8Ton truck, 2 HMMWVs and a M1 tank which ran out of any ammo for the main gun and eventually had to abandon as they ran out of enough fuel to keep it running. Good times.
My group liked having that huge selection of gear and weapons. And from a game standpoint, the devil was in the details, if they took out or captured an enemy patrol, what weapons and gear they carried would indicate their origins or how well supplied they were. Did they have brand new AK-74s or rattle trap AK-47s? Where were the weapons made? Were the uniforms new or old? What generation was their gear? Different weapon systems had varying levels of performance. And since a lot of my group were prior service members, I had to make the game and it's details as accurate as possible.
I definitely don't have a problem with the amount of variety in Twilight 2000 Sourcebooks, I just kind of wish it had been more sensibly formatted than just massive books on all of the "Vehicles of NATO", and then "Heavy Weapons of NATO" (Warsaw Pact, etc, etc), I'd have preferred they'd made a book on NATO Forces, which incorporated in detail the most used Vehicles and Weapons, but also laid out the uniforms, ranks and organisation as well, along with a summary of the other equipment/vehicles. So if I was using NATO forces in an encounter I'd have everything to hand in one book rather than have to reach for a handful of books. Have to say that the geek in me loved poring over the books though and seeing absolutely everything laid out and detailed.
I remember after you spent much time calculating recoil it made shooting a gun feel very well simulated. I doubt this game has aged well for me, I like my mystical creatures too much! I love your honesty about playing linear games. Going open world is so over rated today. I can't make it through a single live stream because there is such much nonsense and not enough story. Open world and high player driven input reminds me of writing stories with a friend where you right one chapter and they right the other: it just goes nowhere. Anyway thanks for the trip down memory lane my friend!
I definitely feel there's a space for both types of storytelling, just that in my reality, you've got to take the players by the hand and lead them or they just end up screaming at me "what are we supposed to do next"
It's definitely one of my favourite settings. But I have problems running many games that I adore so much, as I just think that I'll ruin them (Vampire and Wraith also come to mind).
Twilight 2000 is such a fun game, it is how i learned about the names of the soviet states, including Georgia! America has 2 primary governments in the game, MilGov and the CilGov! They made a bunch of adventure and area guides, including stuff about the
Don't tell the hardcore T2k gamers that your GM let you keep a tank, they'll be outraged. I loved throwing in the Twilight nightmares stuff, so among the horrors of the Atomic Wasteland, there would be Dinosaurs or Aliens, so much fun.
I feel like the specificity of detail is all part of the appeal. Now is that appeal very narrow? Probably: veterans, history buffs, gun geeks, people that watched Red Dawn too much as kids... I can say that if you're in that niche you want all those guns and tanks and equipment in your toy box and you're always wanting more!
Totally get that, and perhaps I wasn't being clear. I feel the detail they provided doesn't support the setting completely. Because in the post holocaust setting, you'd be scavenging for guns and ammo. It's all very interesting if your character is a sniper you uses a Barrett M107, but if you can't get ammo for it then it's just a pretty decoration. Most of the ammo will be for the standard few rifles used by the military, and then civilian pistols and shotguns. So while having loads of options is always nice (I love the equipment sourcebooks for Shadowrun and Cyberpunk so I'm not beyond enjoying some gun porn), but if the campaign is always going to come down to everyone using the same M-16's and shotguns they've actually got the ammo to use then it's pretty pointless. I always found the T2k books to spend so much time going over every weapon of every military force in detail, and then just gloss over the civilian weapons which are likely to be more easily available when you're actually playing.
@@RPGGamer You're definitely not wrong, some of the detail does seem a little misplaced as far as the game goes. Now I could point out that the M16 in your example uses a standard NATO 5.56 that is used across the board by NATO small arms, along with the 7.62×51. On the other side, the 7.62×39 and 7.62×54R is used in almost all Warsaw pact small arms. This equals lots of guns that look similar and admittedly function similarly. So some eyes see "the same M16" or the "the same AK" but some eyes see and appreciate the variations. I won't point that out, though, because to your point it's all just unnecessary flavor for most gamers. And frankly, people who would know the gun nerd stuff like that didn't need a game book to tell us, so it's kind of doubly irrelevant. I still love it, having said that.
I find it interesting that it went from a near future game, to being an Alternate History game. Which is a sensible direction to take it, where they tried with Twilight 2013 to keep it near future, which while interesting wasn't really worth it.
My only concern is that I've heard they're moving the Twilight war further ahead again to make it futuristic, which means they'll have to include modern weapons, technology, politics and events. I'd definitely prefer if they left it as an alternate outcome to the cold war (like Man in the High Castle is an alternate outcome to WW2.)
@@langdolin Just saw this today, looks like it may be similar to the original, just a couple of tweaks. "Just like the original version, the new edition is set in a year 2000 devastated by war - now in an alternate timeline where the Moscow Coup of 1991 succeeded and the Soviet Union never collapsed."
LOL, it Twilight 2k though, if you fired as many shots as the A Team, then you'd soon run out of ammo, it's definitely a game of scavenging for every bite of food and every bullet.
Could work better for the MERC: 2000 version that came out a little after. Same system, but set in "modern" times. You could do A-Team, Expendables, Predator, etc... lol
You don't happen to know the name of the book that this "last submarine" mission is in, do you? I have been keeping an eye out for a game that was based upon a last ship or submarine, after WW3 or a world wide plague, that I had heard about back in the early 90's. I have yet to find this game or scenario. It sounded like a very interesting concept. I even found an interesting TV like series called The Last Ship, but that isn't the game. I would know it if I found it. Thanks!
You want lots of guns as the target audience is mostly American teens in the Cold War, especially ones that are into serious hardware. This is not the right game for a stat saying "pistol" and another saying "rifle." This was written by a wargame designer and is a pretty crunchy set of rules, so hardcore simulation needs the detail. In fact, the wonder of this game is the immersion where you feel the depth of being inside the world. This is not for goofy action movie swashbuckling.
I totally agree that it's because of the origin of the Game being a team of people from a wargames background, but you've got to remember the same rule set was used for goofy action in Cadillacs and Dinosaurs and Dark Conspiracy . . . . And while I love detail in a game, I still feel that much of what they give you in Twilight 2k is extraneous, as the weapons the players are going to end up using is those the can scavenge (so as they run out of the fancy ammo for their assault rifles, they find a farmer with a shotgun and 2 boxes of ammo, so use that instead, etc), detailing 8 different Heavy Machine guns just seems a bit of a waste of time..
Finding a gaming group is definitely one of the biggest challenges of gaming. Have you tried the online platforms, or whether anyone is organising a game through facebook groups or the like?
@@RPGGamer didnt really see 3-4. 2nd.. in first, ( i can not remember which module, theyre all out in the storage shed.) they had a module, onle of the last i think. they introduced a system to use miniatures. that system is basically second edition. we didnt like it, because it changed from a D100 system, to a simplified 10 for the roll playing. we had already converted all the d100 stuff straight across into a system for playing miniatures on the tabletop. not just in 28mm, but in 1/285 scale as well. this allowed us to have one table for birds eye and vehicle fights on large scale, and another to have the larger scale detail fights in villages and stuff. im sure that the 2nd was prolly good, ive been reading it lately, not for roll play, but for 28mm table top toy soldier play pew pew pew... our hard headedness because of all the work we did, as well as how long we used it, kept us from changing. i bought it when it first came out, bought every module they made, and we played everyone, over the years. Alaskan winters give you lots of time to play.
@@h.s.lafever3277 3rd Edition tried to do some interesting things, but messed up the timeline terribly. 4th Edition is nice, but feels too simplified, it includes so much, but there's no real depth to the rules (if I'm explaining it right), and is far more of a homage to T2k than a game in it's own right.
