How many died?
 

In TW 2013 they had a break down of how many people died and how and was wondering if the DC group ever analyzed it for TW 2K?

As far as the DC group goes I think Chico had a death rate by state IIRC.

Probably much better than the 2013 silliness too.

I did work out the US population for 2001. It's broken down by state, age & gender. I took a base 40% casualty rate, and adjusted it for age, climate, urban/rural, foreign invasion and military service (about 4.5 million combat casualties from the 31 million available in the 18-34 cohort, 80% male).

Howling Wilderness states that total US population losses are 52%. Mine totals up to 54.6%. I think that's close enough...

Alaska gets hits the hardest - 67.3% casualties due to the harsh climate and Soviet invasion. Hawaii gets hits the lightest - 42.9% mostly due to the mild climate.

I've attached the file.

Ok ok I don't like much of the time line either but I have to say again the T2013 rules are pretty cool. It is the first game in a long time to make me rethink my custom rule system.

in the one-off adventure I ran using the T:2013 ruleset, we used the V1 timeline as a 'background'. The T:2013 timeline is OK, but needs some tweaking I think.

I can't wait to see what the DC group comes up with - all that I've read so far is incredible.

My concern is that not ENOUGH people died to create the backwards collapse of civilization.

In TW 2013 they went drastic and said 90% of the population died. Even at that its one hell of a lot of people. NYC had a population of 18.8 million people... so if even 10% survived thats still over 1.88 million people!! Who is going to feed them or provide for them. IMO I think a 1 - 2 % survival rate AFTER all the lingering affects of the world wide disaster would make more sense. We could have new strains of super resistant viruses running rampant.

You could even break that state down by island -- Niihau would probably be largely unscathed, while Oahu would be nuked until it glowed.

Just today I visited my FLGS and asked them (politely but firmly!) to get in a bunch of T2013 rule books. I'm still trying to get together a group to play test the rules before I write a review.

On the other hand, the numbers of Twilight 2000 correspond to a “photo” of the situation at the beginning of 2000. Even with a better tendency than in the previous years, most probably we could suppose that the demographics curve is still descending. In the following years there would be a lot of deaths derived from the conditions caused by the war. I recognize that, sometimes, as a GM, I tend to describe to my players more stable and organized communities than would exist in reality. In someway I think that the Twilight modules fall in the same mistake. It seems easy, in these modules, to find organized communities perfectly adapted to postwar world. But in 2000 AD, everybody would be struggling to survive and deaths in a community (disease, famine, radiation, fights) would be a day-to-day fact.

I think GDW deliberately made it a bit more up beat than it could have been. If your character is definitely going to die of starvation, disease, radiation sickness etc within a few weeks or even months in game, why bother playing at all?

I guess I am basing my ideas on the end of the world on books like Stephen Kings - "The Stand" and William Heine - "The Last Canadian".

One other big questions... what happened to all those dead bodies? Even at 50% mortality rate... bodies are going to be everywhere and disease is going to be rampant.

Ei, bon dia Tigger! I fully understand the reasons behind the casualty rate and the consequences of the in the T2K world as described by the GDW team. In fact I have no problem to assume them. It’s the logical conclusion to the old discussion between reality and playability in the Twilight world. I’m only pointing that, even assuming the type of war effects described by GDW the population numbers probably would still be decreasing, though at a lower rate.

So, when I was talking about the communities described in some of the modules (like Krakow), it seems to me that they have existed in this way for a lot of years. Of course it’s only a personal impression, but sometimes, the situation of the NPC’s, the infrastructures, the organizations and the way of living seems a little too “normalized”. One has the impression that such communities have effectively overcome the war consequences in a few months or in a single year.

Mmmm... perhaps I'm going a little OT...

Dogs, rats, roaches and bacteria are going to deal with the bodies within months or years depending on where they lie. By early 2001 sure, there'll be lots of creepy skeletons but the disease problem will be very much in retreat.

And areas and buildings that survivors would find useful and frequent (i.e. pharmacies, libraries with handy how-to books, cleared and arable land, proximity to bodies of water used to purify and drink, etc.), they would police up the bodies and mass-grave them (or somewhere else out of the way), but wouldn't be likely to go building-by-building and house-by-house all over the city to tidy the place up. Just a large enough place to tend to their needs, especially if food was scarce...they wouldn't expend the calories to gather more bodies than was necessary to clean their required space.