Twilight 2000 2.2e vs. 4e Celebrity Deathmatch

[HaplessOperator]

I've been split on 2.2 and 4e for a new game, after discovering the hype around 2.2 and giving the books a look-through, but i'm leaning towards a heavily modified 4e (feel free to sway my mind; it's probably easily done).

For those with experience with both, and having seen several threads running on the topic, I'm keenly interested in knowing what specific or cohesive changes anyone reading would make to either the 4e timeline or mechanics to bring a greater degree of verisimilitude and feel of 2.2 into the 4e setting and mechanics.

[Red Diamond]

I want to reply just because of the title!
Having said that, I've never even seen 2.2e, just 1e and 4e.
4e is good enough- it's pretty fast flowing, has plenty of room to tailor the game/scenarios how you want and is sufficiently vague to fill in the blanks however you, the GM, want.
The fact that there are so many loose ends in 4e creates work for the GM but also allows the GM to tailor the game however they see fit.

There're a few draw backs.
The character generation spends too much time on background/history/moral code/big dream. That's a lot of effort on a PC that has 3-6 hit points and will die sooner than later. There's a strong "move the fiction forward" and cinematic feel for the game which trumps the grittier details needed for survival/military rpg.
There are only four attributes and three skills that align with the attributes. In my two months of playing, I've learned that if I sell out Agility and Intel and invest in Recon and Survival getting A rating in all of them- I'll have a really great chance at passing 75% of the challenges that come my way. That's too lopsided in my opinion. Also, there's not a lot of reason to get distracted by Specialties since they're so narrow- just invest in the skills and you won't need the specialties in most cases.

Still, it's fun.
I recommend 4e!

[Heffe]

I prefer 4th edition, though there's certainly a lot to be loved about 2.2 - it's crunchy and deep.

Regarding 4th edition, the main issues I might look to rework if I was trying to find a balance with 2nd would be to see about revising the attribute/skill system a bit. IMO 12 skills across 4 attributes is simply to shallow for an open-ended RPG - as a result you end up with a couple of skills being required for PCs in order to have a successful campaign. Specifically, I'd love to see Recon and Tech both broken apart significantly into more constituent skills.

[Raellus]

I ran 2.2e for close to a decade. Even at the end of that span, I needed to crack open the rule book on the regular. I thought it was pretty decent, but I had nothing to compare it to (except 1e, the rules for which I found inscrutable as a teenager).

I'd invested so much time into learning and applying the 2.2e rules that I was initially quite reluctant to even try 4e. But, I finally did, and I found that I greatly prefer 4e to early editions, rules-wise. They're not perfect, but they are a lot less clunky than 2.2e. As a result, gameplay is smoother, without sacrificing verisimilitude.

Now story-wise, I have a lot of issues with 4e. I've written up a couple of alternate histories to improve upon its numerous shortcomings, but I usually fall back on the 1e timeline of events. IMHO, 1e has the richest, least-unrealistic world-building of all the canonical T2k editions.

-

[Targan]

I'm one of the ostracized freaks that likes T:2013 :)

[Tegyrius]

1e for timeline and setting. It has the deepest library of official publications from which to draw and consequently is the best-developed world.

2.2 for play-by-post. Its mechanics have deeper levels of detail, but that slows me down too much when I'm trying to run a realtime game, and I've found a number of players willing to try it but none willing to master the rules.

2013 for strip-mining conceptual elements to port to the other editions. Justin Stodola's work on the ballistics model still sings. The gear library adds the fiddly "what's in his pocketses?" bits that appeal to my inner twelve-year-old poring over U.S. Cavalry catalogs. I occasionally think about returning to the initiative system to tweak it to feel more like X-Com's action points.

4e for in-person (or VTT) play. It has enough resolution to satisfy my usual groups, none of whom are particularly obsessive about tactical minutiae, and it runs smoothly and quickly enough that I can get an eight-player group through a firefight in a single session with time left over for investigation, exploration, and roleplaying on either side of the combat.

- C.

[Cdnwolf]

I'm one of the ostracized freaks that likes T:2013 :)

Me too man

[3catcircus]

Me too man

Makes three of us. Only rules set amongst all of the iterations whose damage and wound mechanics feel right.

As previously mentioned, the ballistics model (and the underlying maths) allow you to gin up stats for pretty much any firearm.