Twilight 2000 using other systems.

[ChalkLine]

Do you use any other system for Twilight 2000 other than the one's published?

I ported the whole thing to Cyberpunk 2020, as it's a Stat (1 to 10) + Skill (1 to 10) + Roll (1d10*) system nearly everything in Twilight 2000 2.2 bolts straight on. However the combat and wounding systems is IMHO far superior.

The combat system simply has a rate of fire for automatic weapons. This number, usually around 30 for something like an M240 or PKM, is it's cyclical rate divided by 20 modified down for hand held weapons. This is the amount you can spurt out in a round and has a multitude of uses but most importantly it's the save roll against which a player must make to enter its beaten zone. If they fail they take 1d6 bullets. It's so simple and fast and it makes suppressing a far easier mechanic. often players will suppress a firing position while others flank it and try and grenade it, of course the other guys might well be doing the same thing.

However the game is far more lethal. A pistol bullet hitting the player in an unarmoured location will probably knock them out of the fight and a rifle bullet hitting your PC in the head will more than likely simply end them. It makes combat tense.
However like nearly every roleplaying game I found the system is too easy to make a hit, I suspect most of them base their mechanics on shooting ranges where nothing's coming your way. I added a system I'm playtesting now where dodging, simply being aware the enemy is there and trying not to get hit while fighting, adds a level of difficulty (+5) to their shots but also to your own. This so far has made meeting engagements use up a lot of ammo as desperate soldiers shoot off a lot of rounds trying to hit fleeting targets while not getting hit.

It also has an easy method of creating vehicles and you can make anything from an MBT to a scooter just by knowing its weight and other basic values, which is good for me as I like to use a lot of stuff not in the rules books.

There are two statistics in it I find immensely useful: Cool and Luck.

Cool is much like Coolness under Fire in T2K v1 and is incredibly useful for NPCs and also deters players from doing silly things like entering the beaten zone of a machine gun. They can still do it, it's heroic, but it's not easy as you have to beat the rate of fire of the gun with a Cool Roll. Coupled with the suppression mechanic above a lot of shooting involves keeping the enemy's head down while other members of the group flank the foe and it makes for a far more mobile fight. I've found a lot of combat in Twilight 2000 is simply a one or two combat round spurt of fire with almost no movement.
Cool also makes the enemy break a lot faster, often before they ever get into combat. This has the strange effect of freaking the players out: they know there's more out there and that they might soon rally . . .

Luck is a Cyberpunk mechanic that allows the player to modify any roll before it is made. Thus if close enough they can expend Luck Points for another character who has been shot and is making his rolls not to die before the medic can get to him for instance. As they only get between 1 and 10 points the system is not unbalancing, the points only refresh when the GM tells the players they do. As there's unlimited enemy is a statistical sense the players will statistically sooner or later get a 'bad dice outcome" (ie: get shot) and this puts that off.

[swaghauler]

I have given serious thought to how much effort it would take to modify TW2K13 to a "dice pool" mechanic. I would just use a Skill Level rating and drop the Competency Ratings. That Skill Level would be the number of D20s you rolled for a test and you could have the following Success Thresholds...

AVERAGE Task = 1 Success
DIFFICULT Task = 2 Successes
FORMIDABLE Task = 3 Successes
IMPOSSIBLE Task = 4 Successes

To give lower-skilled PCs and NPCs a chance of Success at greater levels of Difficulty, the D20 would "explode" and produce another D20 to roll upon a result of 1 [on that D20]. D20s could continue to "explode" until no more 1s were rolled. A Catastrophic Failure would occur if you rolled all 20s on the dice you threw. So lower-skilled users would be more likely to see such an event than higher-skilled PCs/NPCs.

I would STILL use all the TW2K13 modifiers to determine the Target Number but the "Thresholds for Success" would have to be modified throughout the game.

This is still very much a "whiteboard exercise" for me but I'd be curious to know IF anyone else has ever tried this.