New Edition of Twilight 2000 Interview
 

A very interesting interview
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/6277597...tt_content=vod

Definitely "interesting". I think some people will find it quite illuminating.
I am still very much curious (and interested) in the material that Free League will create for the game world but for my tastes, their Year Zero rules are not for me.

Yeah, it sounds like they've got some ideas I can agree with, so I remain excited. It's just the difficult challenge of 'sticking the landing' with a good execution of a rule set.

I there an overview of what was covered for those who do not have an hour+ to spend listening?

I haven't seen anything to that effect but the basics are things that we already know: -
Free League is not really changing the world background that much from what we've seen in 2nd/2.2
it will use a variant of the Year Zero rules
Sweden will be a campaign starting region like Poland was in the earlier editions (like their Tales from the Loop RPG there will be two possible starting locations, in this case, Poland and Sweden)
the artwork will be pretty damned good

What I found interesting was that some of the live audience for the Twitch stream were happy to see that playing civilians would be an option - something that has been in the game since at least 2nd Edition. So it seems to me that some of the audience is actually quite ignorant of the earlier editions which may possibly be an indicator that Free League is attracting a new group of people to the game?

The other things of interest to me were how much the Year Zero rules are slanted towards fast play and also the systems reliance on gimmick dice. They're modifying aspects of the Year Zero system to account for T2k's survival theme and to give some differentiation between items of gear (e.g. small arms), but it is still intrinsically a Year Zero rules set.
While many aspects of the gimmick dice probably won't make it into their version of T2k, they still exist as a possibility. The guy that was interviewed said that the rules are not set just yet as they are only now going into play-testing. Therefore there is still the possibility that changes will be made.

This also means that the skill system we're used to from earlier editions is going to be much reduced and it seems that they won't even be called skills but "talents" and while these talents will be combined with Year Zero's much smaller Attribute list to see if you pass a skill test (like we see in the 2.2 d20 system), multiple types of die will be needed depending on how "talented" the PC is (subject to the play-test). At the moment they are using a two-dice system, it seems the core die is a d6 while the second die reflects how "talented" the PC is.
Low talents start with a d6 but as your PC increases ranks in that talent, the second die becomes a d8, then a d10, then a d12.

While I can see that that sort of mechanic can be really useful for fast paced or cinematic games, it's exactly the opposite of how I view most of a T2k game. It seems to me that the Year Zero system suits lots of dice rolling where you don't have to think too much about the mechanics behind the system or even how rules mechanics can shape/inform the game world. While that can certainly be an asset for some game genres, I'm not convinced it's a good fit for any sort of gritty survival game. It appears to suit their Mutant Year Zero game but that is as much fantasy as the Fallout computer games so definitely not what I would class as gritty or survival themed.

Tomas has offered to So obviously once I see it I can't say TOO much, but should be able to give general comments I think - enough to confirm or otherwise how closely it sticks to the earlier versions.
The feedback opportunity should be welcomed by many I believe - sounds like the community will have some influence over the final product.

I'm with you on the intended rule set, and personally don't intend to use it unless it's dramatically better than we fear it will be. Of course there's nothing to stop anyone using the 4th ed setting with 1st, 2nd or even T:2013 rules! For that matter, why not go all the way and use Phoenix Command? :D

PHOENIX COMMAND! :eek: :spanka:

Phoenix Command is directly responsible for me buying Twilight: 2000.
And that's the only good thing I can say about it (aside from the artwork being quite good). Far too complicated for my tastes.
When I finally got into RPGs, being in the Army Reserve at the time, I wanted a military themed RPG and found Phoenix Command. It convinced me that there was an easier way to do things so I went searching for a better rules system and found T2k 2nd Ed.

I love that level of crunch. Shame hardly anyone else does. :(

Gimmick dice aren't really a requirement for most (all?) of the Y0 system games as long as you have three different colors of D6s. In past games, you get dice for stats, skills, and gear. There are situations where a player can choose to re-roll dice, but a re-roll of 1 on stat dice means an injury and on gear dice means something goes wrong with the gear (skill dice have no re-roll flaw, which makes them valuable). All you really need is to be able to tell your three types of dice apart. The gimmick dice make it easier, but they're not necessary.

Some clarification is in order - to me, different coloured dice in that situation are just as much gimmick dice as are any of the speciality/unique dice created for a specific game.

I like the crunch when it adds to the game, for example skills being more specific like EOD being able to defuse unknown explosive devices, but Combat Engineers only being able to deal with with items that they use, or a Tanker being able to drive their tank (and maybe the generation before), but not an mobile artillery or infantry carrier unit with out extra training. Now on the other hand it can be taken to far, for example (I have never played it but heard it is the super crunch game of all) Harpoon where doing the math tracking each bullet fired out of a CIWS can take several hours, and game time for this is 3 seconds.

Phoenix Command, and the games that have come from the system (Aliens, Lawnmower Man, Terminator, Dracula) does take a little time initially, but once the players and GM get a handle on it, and have a copy of the tables in front of them, it really doesn't take very long at all. Yes, there's a couple of rolls required for each shot or burst (to hit, glancing, and how hard was the hit, then how well does the target handle it), but it's really not that much slower than most other systems.
Again, PROVIDED the players have read and understood the rules and have the tables immediately at hand.

The delays mostly come from lack of preparation and only having one copy of the relevant tables. ALWAYS a good idea to photocopy the tables and distribute them before the game session.

Are you implying that I didn't properly read the Phoenix Command rules? :mad:





You're right. :)
The system was too dense for my tastes. I wanted a system that I could adjudicate without having to constantly reference the rules. None of the people I gamed with at the time wanted the complexity of the Leading Edge Games system, to the point where they ran the games published by LEG with other rules systems.

OH I see what's going on here. :eek:
Leading Edge Games
LEG
Legbreaker
Leg
Hmm, seems to be a vested interest here! :boxen:
:p :D

Oh not at all! I'm sure you read them and then read them another dozen times.
What I'm saying is your small mind was and still is, simply incapable of understanding them. :D

I quite like the system, although it's been near impossible to find others willing to give it a go. It's (in my opinion) got an undeserved reputation as being very heavy going with a steep learning curve, but that's more from GMs rushing in without first fully understanding it themselves and thinking a few minutes play time with it should make everything clear. When in your first session you only manage a few seconds of combat in total, many people understandably are reluctant to give it another go.

Another thing I've found that for some reason many players can't wrap their heads around is that percentiles run from 00 to 99 rather than the more common 01-100 range. It's a small thing, but I've noticed whenever I have been able to scrape up players, it seems like a significant hurdle for most people. :confused:

OI! I resemble that remark!
You scruffy looking nerf-herder! That's right, I called you scruffy looking!
:D

That's really interesting, there's no difference between the two sets of ranges in terms of number of results. My maths is pretty average (which defintely contributed to my disinterest in the Phoenix Command rules) but even I can figure that much out so yeah, I'm with ya on this one :confused:

EDIT: And I bet you drink warm beer too!

Hmm... it sounds then like it will be v2.2 timeline, and the Swedish setting will be an offshot from the timeline to keep it playable, because in v2.2 Core book it says: "Most of the cities of Scandinavia are independent or insular, although broad regions in the south are organized. Areas in the north subjected to fighting during the war are either cantonments, devastated or in anarchy."

They said that they were keeping the alternate history idea rather than making it a possible future setting. So far, the background/timeline is like the 2nd/2.2 edition, i.e. the Cold War escalates after the Russian coup succeeds and the Russian hardliners take control.
There wasn't much more information than that but it seems Free League are looking at some measure of compatibility with earlier editions. Whether they can achieve that is still an open question for them as things like the play test and so on might require them to change the history/timeline.

It seems the twitch interview is now permanently offline.

Less than a week....
Wonder why?

Yes indeed.
I checked on it a few days ago and it was offline then. I kept checking in case it was something about twitch that I knew nothing about (highly likely in many cases as I barely use twitch for anything i.e. me = unskilled operator).
I think this is more about the guy's channel and how he manages it rather than the T2k specific material in this case.

I guess we'll find out more about this when August rolls around and the Kickstarter launches? I'm vaguely interested to see this - if only because this is the first possible set I'll possibly own in a physical manner. Shame it will probably mean an end to the player-developed sourcebooks that have been occasionally popping up for sale as of late.

Not necessarily. Free League has a licence to produce T2k material but they don't "own" the IP.
Far Future Enterprises (FFE) still has control over the IP and if someone wants to produce a 1st or 2nd edition sourcebook for retail sale, they don't have to get approval from Free League, they have to get approval from FFE.
Common courtesy would suggest that they work with Free League to avoid potential conflicts in sales etc. etc. but at the end of the day, it's FFE that everyone has to answer to.

Not at all. I know that Legbreaker is still working on his ANZAC book, and my work is still progressing on the Nordic book. I bet there will be more books coming in the future as people realize that potentially interesting areas of the world lack information. Such as the Iberian Peninsula as one example.

Correct. My book will be compatible with 1st, 2nd and 4th editions and published by Fria Ligan.

Great to hear!

FYI - per a discussion today with Chris Lites

At this moment there is no tie in with the 4th edition to the Twilight 2300AD timeline - meaning that the future for the 4th edition may be wide open and not constrained as the earlier versions of the game were - stay tuned but that would make the 4th edition a very different animal from V1 and V2.2

Waiting to get confirmation from Tomas

Considering FFE licenses 2300 out to Mongoose, I suppose that makes sense. That does, however, really only mean that we might see a few changes with the timeline to make it a bit less... constrained, like perhaps the French may actually get their shit kicked in. Unless they're sticking with the timeline as established entirely...

It would open all kinds of things to reinterpretation - keep in mind that the uber drought that basically took out the US efforts to rebuild was done in large part to align the final results of the war with the 2300AD where Mexico kept large parts of the Southwest and Texas was independent because the US was too weak and disorganized to do anything about it

And thats just one area that not having it tied to 2300AD could leave open to change - I personally would like a new edition that isnt tied down to a 300 years in the future canon - leaves you much more open to creating new things and makes the timeline one where you can actually do something and not be like so what if we liberated LA its going to Mexico anyway for 2300

Although at the moment, perhaps talking about Mexico and North America might be a bit presumptive - it does give me hope that some of the issues with North America (perhaps even New America itself - was never a fan of it) would be fixed alongside.

Its something I was hoping would be eventually fixed with a revamped V2.2 offering especially after Mongoose took over 2300AD and pulled it away from GDW and Far Future - but keep our fingers crossed

And there is the confirmation that the new edition will have no ties to 2300AD

From FB:Twilight: 2000 by Free League

Tomas Härenstam David Adams Chris Lites is correct, there are no ties to 2300 AD.

FYI splitting the game from 2300AD could make things very interesting indeed

Without that tie in does either the uber drought or New America happen?

The uber drought that basically stopped the US come back and led to the loss of the Southwest to Mexico and Texas going independent has always been controversial but something like that was needed as part of the rationale of the shrunken US for 2300AD. And the creation of New America that kept Civgov and Milgov so busy fighting them that they couldnt put the country back together until 2020 - and thus lose a lot of land to a much weaker country because of that.

Course we wont know most likely at the start of the game - keep in mind that none of that was in the original releases - it took until the Caribbean module to find out about New America and Kidnapped for the drought.

But it means that in many ways the future is wide open as to what could happen if there is no longer the predetermined 2300AD timeline that must be obeyed.

At the very least if it means that we might see some credible attempts at creating successor states beyond the two feuding governments, then I'm all for it.

That was really where canon fell apart for me; Texas going independent and Mexico keeping the southwest. The US just never would accept giving up the southwest to Mexico. CIVGOV and MILGOV would have fought to take it back even if the war lasted 100 years.

2300 was just garbage with that back story.

I fully appreciate that people have their own feelings about the link between T2k and 2300 but I would like to say something about it.
As we know, 2300 came first and the "Twilight War" was a significant event within its backstory that was later used as the basis for the Twilight: 2000 setting.

However, it should be noted that to come up with the history for 2300, the GDW staff participated in something called "the Great Game". This was in effect, a massive tabletop wargame in which the future of humanity, from the time of the Cold War until the year 2300AD, was gamed out like any tabletop wargame (including all the random events and strange occurrences that could occur in such a game).

The major events in the Great Game were used to plot out the timeline for 2300.
T2k came about years after the creation of 2300 and it could be argued that it was a happy coincidence that GDW had already plotted out a planet devastating third world war and afterwards wanted a military themed adventure RPG set in a devastated world - the two ideas suited each other.
So, the GDW staff plotted out the third world war already knowing the end result and thus they created a T2k history to fit into that end result (the end result being 2300's backstory).

Was this a good idea, was it necessary, was it effective etc. etc.? Subjectively I would say "yes". It worked well enough to create the game that still gets talked about 20 years later.
Ultimately though, none of that matters. Every T2k referee is free to do what they want with the game history. No matter how you might feel about the link between 2300 and T2k, it's worth remembering how that link came about when trying to understand why it exists in the first place.

Hear! Hear!
 

Well said, SSC!

It was an interesting thought-experiment, for sure. Starting with the end in mind works for some creative endeavors, but when the end is randomly generated, this process sometimes leads to some contortions of logic, and creates some pretty monumental narrative challenges to the creators.

Whether the creators of T2k did a good job, or a poor job, is an inherently subjective question; the answer is up to the discretion of the audience/consumer. The great thing about most pen-and-paper RPGs, T2k included, is that the shape the game world takes is ultimately up to the Ref/GM. If you like it, roll with it. If you don't, then switch it up.

It'll be interesting to see what Free League, unfettered by the end-game of 2300, comes up with for version 4. It remains to be seen whether their alternate history will be better, or worse, than v1 or v2 (which, in themselves, divide opinion). I'm excited to find out. The only thing that is certain, however, is that some will like/prefer it to earlier versions, and some will not. For everyone involved, producers and especially consumers, I hope they knock it out of the park.

I do hope that they can make some good changes to the game they will smooth out some of the holes in canon that have vexed so many over the years on the boards. I agree with mpipes on the particular issue of the American Southwest - while 2300 AD may have been the chicken and T2K the egg that hatched from it there were things that stretched credulity for many. The loss of the American Southwest was one of those things. I am also hoping that the 4th edition being free of the constraints of having to adhere to a preset future timeline will bring a freshness and newness to the game that will result in it being something that will make the current fans happy and bring new ones to it as well.

I was under the impression that T2k came out in the summer of 1985 while 2300 was released in time for Christmas 1986, so that would imply that T2k came first.

The background history for Traveller: 2300 was developed over the course of 1985-86 using a grand social-political-economic-military-diplomatic simulation known fondly here as The Game.
http://www.waynesbooks.com/TheGame.html
The Game was the center of attention for the GDW design staff for nearly six months (late 1985 to early 1986).
http://stalexone.tripod.com/gg2/2300game.htm
Again T2k came out in the summer of 1985 so predates The Game which was based on the Twilight 2000 world.