2000 vs. 2013 vs. 2020 vs. 20??

[Neal5x5]

It's pretty obvious from reading this forum that the setting history of the Twilight: 2000 games you're playing now has been tweaked to fit your group and style. What about the actual year of the game? I'm curious to know if more people are playing a near-future version of Twilight or if they are playing a year 2000 game. I think there's good reasons for both, but I'd like to get a better understanding of why people choose to run games set in either period.

Forgive me if this has already been covered in another thread - I'm still pretty new here.

[raketenjagdpanzer]

I'm sure a post-Soviet world a mere five years after the publication of Twilight:2000 would have seemed completely bonkers to the folks at GDW (and indeed 99.9% of the world's population at the time), however, I find the timeline(s) of T2k13 a little too far-fetched for my tastes.

Plus there's a lot of "the now" to factor in to how the world of T2k13 works...it's easier for me to look back on T2k as a divergent history (it could have happened) than T2k13 as "this could happen"...

That's just my feeling on it. All have their merits, though. T2k13, strictly from a "gun porn" standpoint has it's armored vehicles more anchored in reality - no M1 "Giraffe", no "Diana ADA" and on and on. The T:2k designs represent a mindset of the cold war continuing on through the 80s and 90s before going hot in '96...so stuff like the TUSK for M1, even the Stryker, Humvee variants and so on would likely have been suggested and rejected prior to the war in the T2k universe.

[The Rifleman]

Agreed with the above post. I can't see how a world would make sense. Its more an "alternate" reality based game now, as opposed to a future one. I suppose one could create a new "alternate" reality with a soviet resurgence and WWIII.

I belive that the would of Merc2000 makes more sense to your line of thinking. That concept, a world defined by an economic collapse, could easily fit our possible future.

[Raellus]

I prefer the alternative history/parallel universe of Twilight 2000. I got the v1.0 boxed set in 1986, when I was eleven or twelve years old. At the time, it seemed that WWIII could be just around the corner...

So, my T2KU is a bit of an extension of my childhood worldview- a universe in which the Berlin Wall did not fall and the Soviet Union did not collapse. The Cold War continued into the '90s, heated up, and boiled over. Really, I guess, it's a worst-case scenario from 1987 or so preserved in amber, with some "new" military technologies thrown in. It seemed very plausible when I was a kid, and that's the world I prefer to inhabit now, as an adult.

I wouldn't mind a game set in the near future (relative to today), but the lead-in would have to be plausible, the same way the original T2K was when it was first released.

[Snake Eyes]

Assuming one needs a timeline in the first place, and I assert that one does not, of the canon timelines I prefer good old v1. I never acknowledged the need to update it to account for then-current events for 2.0/2.2 but it doesn't really make that much difference to the end state in which the characters begin play. The 2013 timeline chapped a lot of asses around here and elesewhere, but I can take it or leave it for the same reason noted above - it mostly doesn't matter in the context of gameplay. At least not in any tactical context. Anything beyond the immediate battlefield is simply going to require some suspension of disbelief.

That said, I'm not currently running anything. But if I was, I prefer the Reflex mechanics of 2013, and would use them with only the slightest of modification for any timeline of the series and/or any of the alternate scenarios outlined in the GPS Survey. I figure it should work for anything set in the modern era out to the next 10 or so years of weapons development without too much effort.

[Cdnwolf]

After 3 months of looking I finally found my Hardcovered copy of TWL2013 (Yes I was one of those whom actually bought the book) and think the timeline was it's weak point and the book layout too spread out to find anything easily, but its reflex system did work well for any situation.