Mongoose Publishing and Twilight 2000

[helbent4]

Originally Posted by Tegyrius

I do not believe another treatment of the Cold War would be commercially viable in today's gaming industry.

Tegyrus,

I understand we don't want to get into sniping over T2013, and this is not meant as a flame.

Call of Duty: Black Ops is actually set during the Cold War. It's certainly not a Cold War going hot, but it's success is proof positive that this time period and the conflicts that arose from it can and does bear enormous fruit in terms of commerce. In simple terms, someone is making quite a buck off the Cold War.

Granted, you can very easily argue Black Ops is not T2K (the difference being several decades, a hot war and an established computer game franchise) and there is no way to piggy-back off that success in terms of gamer cross-over. That isn't my point. Professional game designers may never want to revisit T2K's Cold-War based background. Still, maybe someone should because all kinds of people really do seem to like it or at least aren't turned off by it.

Tony

[Eddie]

Originally Posted by helbent4

Call of Duty: Black Ops is actually set during the Cold War. It's certainly not a Cold War going hot, but it's success is proof positive that this time period and the conflicts that arose from it can and does bear enormous fruit in terms of commerce. In simple terms, someone is making quite a buck off the Cold War.

Granted, you can very easily argue Black Ops is not T2K (the difference being several decades, a hot war and an established computer game franchise) and there is no way to piggy-back off that success in terms of gamer cross-over. That isn't my point. Professional game designers may never want to revisit T2K's Cold-War based background. Still, maybe someone should because all kinds of people really do seem to like it or at least aren't turned off by it.

I'd also be willing to wager that most purchasers are like my two teenage sons...skipping the story to get to the shooting or bypassing it altogether with the multiplayer, online combat.

[pmulcahy11b]

The problem with T2K as an MMO is that it would inevitably focus on the firefights -- and those are just a small amount of any proper T2K game. The same thing happened with the T2K computer game.

[LBraden]

Dare I say it, but I have to agree to that, too many games now are just "skip, skip, skip, SHOOT, duck, shoot, call in artillery, skip, skip, skip, shoot, artillery strike here, shoot, skip - credits"

I have to say that I lost all hope in games like that years ago, yet I have to admit that COD 4 Modern Warfare storyline, and the whole USMC surviving to see the nuclear fallout just before dieing, was one HELL of a good bit of gaming.

Now, lets look at Star Trek Online, a nice MMO that has been squeezed to "tie up" a lot of idionims to the older Trek series (seriously, the amount of "hang on, that's from TOS", is silly) has gotten to the point of just skipping everything and shooting, only since they got some of the guys who made Fallout 1 and 2 involved, it has gotten more "read the story" and more "diplomatic approach" than the old "go here, blow this up, shoot this guy, come home" that most "gamers" want today.

Hell, I prefer games with good stories and gameplay, but I NEVER like it when they sacrifice the story for just out and out shooting fest.

[helbent4]

Originally Posted by Eddie

I'd also be willing to wager that most purchasers are like my two teenage sons...skipping the story to get to the shooting or bypassing it altogether with the multiplayer, online combat.

Eddie,

Well sure, like I said there's not necessarily a way to piggy-back off COD:BO's success due to the divergence of that segment of the market from ours. That would be too much to hope for.

Although, even if only 1% or less of the people who bought COD:BO (7 million as of the 10th of November) care about or at least paid attention to the Cold War background then that's hundreds of thousands of gamers right there, along with the 99% for whom it wasn't a turn-off right there. So hey, maybe some of those players are also RPgamers like us, who knows?

Again, that's not my point. (That is, I'm not seriously proposing that there will be any appreciable cross-over; the preceding was more of a thought-experiment than a serious proposition.)

My point is that it's somehow become an article of faith that the Cold War is market poison for gaming. I don't see why that's the case, although I admit I don't have any particular insight into our own slice of the hobby. I can only extrapolate from the world at large, and I just don't believe that most RPgamers are so fundamentally different from other gamers that there's no useful correlations to be drawn!

Personally, getting back to the topic at hand, if Mongoose or someone else gets the T2K licence and changes everything that would be fine, it's an exploration of the game and with tongue-in-cheek I agree that sometimes you have to burn down the ville in order to save it. That said, there's no reason that some kind of sourcebook on the original Cold War background still couldn't be done.

Now that we're on-topic, allow me to get off topic and ask how your interaction with Law went? We generally got along well most of the time in the one game we were in, although we had our differences. PM me if you don't feel like clogging up the thread more.

Tony

[Eddie]

Originally Posted by helbent4

Although, even if only 1% or less of the people who bought COD:BO (7 million as of the 10th of November) care about or at least paid attention to the Cold War background then that's hundreds of thousands of gamers right there,

Actually, that's 70,000 at 1%.

So hey, maybe some of those players are also RPgamers like us, who knows?

Undoubtedly some of them are RPers as well. That is not my point...

Again, that's not my point. (That is, I'm not seriously proposing that there will be any appreciable cross-over; the preceding was more of a thought-experiment than a serious proposition.)

And my point is that it's like comparing oranges to orange juice. They're made out of the same stuff (story) but you choose one because you want to chew the meat, and the other because you want the vitamins and refreshment quickly.

My point is that it's somehow become an article of faith that the Cold War is market poison for gaming.

I never said it was poison, just not financially smart to choose that. There is a smaller and smaller percentage of us that "haven't grown up yet" that remember the Cold War, much less care about it. A game company can appeal to a much larger client base and gain some emotional investment by setting it in a time period that is more contemporary or widespread. You can't blame a company for using that logic to try and make money.

and I don't see why that's the case, although I admit I don't have any particular insight into our own slice of the hobby. I can only extrapolate from the world at large, and I just don't believe that most RPgamers are so fundamentally different from other gamers that there's no useful correlations to be drawn!

Useful correlations. Exactly my point. In lieu of hard statistics, of which I'm almost positive none exist, look at the majority of gamers out there and take admittedly-anecdotal evidence of what they do. Most people skip the story in video games for the instant visual and auditory pleasure and the emotional pleasure of talking smack to your buddies about how you killed them with a knife while they were wielding an M134 minigun in both hands with an invisible-cloaking-antigravity-generator.

YMMV, but mine has been pretty much as written here.

[helbent4]

Originally Posted by Eddie

Actually, that's 70,000 at 1%.

Eddie,

Ha, yep, MATH FAIL!

Still, tens of thousands in one day alone are nothing to sneeze at. That's taking the number at 1%, but it's without a doubt much higher. Reviewers have given their thumb's up to the Cold War campaign, which tends to prove my point that the Cold War scenario turns people off or isn't a significant drag on sales or interest.

Two things which are different can still be enough to draw useful comparisons, which is sometimes all we can do in our imperfect world. (You can also "slice the pie" narrow enough to exclude any comparison you don't agree with, to mangle a business metaphor to suit my purposes.) Gamers are gamers, even if there is no cross-over. The larger game world seems to disagree with you that a background that makes use of the Cold War is not financially smart, and there it is.

On the topic of Mongoose Traveller, I've bought it and had a look, it's basically a cleaned-up version of Classic Traveller without being on steroids (MegaTraveller). I'm in agreement that the rules (especially combat) don't seem crunchy enough to do T2K justice, but I don't have access to Mercenary at this time. There could also be a lot more chrome added in the sourcebook, and at least you're not stuck in one career!

Tony

[Eddie]

Originally Posted by helbent4

Still, tens of thousands in one day alone are nothing to sneeze at. That's taking the number at 1%, but it's without a doubt much higher. Reviewers have given their thumb's up to the Cold War campaign, which tends to prove my point that the Cold War scenario turns people off or isn't a significant drag on sales or interest.

I haven't read any reviews, but I work around 18-42 year old military men every day. The office talk hasn't been that great about COD:BO. I'm running into the "don't waste your money" line quite frequently. It may or may not, but like I said, I haven't seen any hard statistics one way or the other.

I know that personally, I don't listen to formal reviewers or critics nine times out of ten. My tastes are usually pretty diametrically opposed to the mainstream. I'll go for informal reviewers on the web and forums more times than not. I have no interest in COD:BO though, so I haven't put forth the effort for it.

Two things which are different can still be enough to draw useful comparisons, which is sometimes all we can do in our imperfect world.

I didn't say apples to oranges. I said oranges to orange juice. Two versions of the same fruit. I used it as an analogy for pen and paper communal storytelling to individual video gaming storytelling.

Gamers are gamers, and at least there is cross-over.

Not necessarily. The only video games I play are UFO: Extraterrestrials because X-Com was the greatest game I ever played and Command and Conquer.

The larger game world seems to disagree with you that a background that makes use of the Cold War is not financially smart, and there it is.

This is a misleading statement. Of the seven million people you quoted that bought the game, how many of them paid attention to the story vice how many skipped the story parts to get to the shooting? Then we delve into the ones who paid attention to the story, how many cared? How many knew what the Cold War was? I'd wager the kids in the US public education system have no clue that the Iron Curtain wasn't a cover band of Iron Maiden. Because remember, video games aren't given the same social stigma that D&D and other role-playing games are; jocks, band geeks, gamer nerds, alpha male boneheads, O. G. gangsta rap stars, and 45-year-old virgins all talk about and play video games to be cool. You don't get the same response when you talk about Magic Missiles or your latest dungeon crawl in most social circles.

We can agree to disagree, I'm sure.

Tony[/QUOTE]

[helbent4]

Originally Posted by Eddie

This is a misleading statement.

We can agree to disagree, I'm sure.

Eddie,

As a point of fact, we may be coming from different points of view when it comes to education, as I can only say what I know locally (Vancouver BC). I've run post-apoc RPGs that use a Cold War background (WWIII involving the Soviet Union; in this case, The Morrow Project). The younger players (who are also not hardcore gamers) in their teens and twenties had learned about it school and were interested in the same way presumably we were about historical conflicts and periods we didn't live through, either. I mean, I was never around for WWII nor to any great extent the American-Vietnamese war but that didn't compromise my enjoyment RPGs and wargames based on these themes!

Agreed, if we don't like it, we can always draw the line to exclude any fact or comparison that doesn't fit our preferences. At this point, I think we're certainly agreeing to disagree.


Tony

[Raellus]

I think it might be fun to create T2K characters with the Mongoose Traveller system. On the other hand, if you're shooting for a particular type of character, it might be very frustrating. In particular, it might be a lot harder to roll up SF-type characters. IMHO, that might not be such a bad thing.

I don't think the Traveller combat system is going to work very well for T2K.

I wish there could be a hybrid- The original T2K timeline (v1.0, of course); the T2013 Relfex combat system (with some slight mods), and the Traveller char-gen system.

[helbent4]

Originally Posted by Raellus

I wish there could be a hybrid- The original T2K timeline (v1.0, of course); the T2013 Relfex combat system (with some slight mods), and the Traveller char-gen system.

Rae,

You and me both, obviously.

I'll have a look at M:T Mercenary when I can, see if the character generation allows for more flexibility. Presumably any T2K sourcebooks might add detail as well. A 2d6-based system seems to conform to a gaming industry belief that simplicity and ease of play are paramount, a view that has a lot to recommend it even if I don't personally agree.

Tony

[Chris]

I meant to get back to the thread earlier, but busy, busy weekend.

From what Mongoose wrote, 2300AD and Twilight would be sourcebooks for their new Traveller system. I haven't even seen a copy of the new Trav locally. Has anyone read it and do you think the system is a good take for Twilight?

Thanks,
Chris

[LBraden]

There was a PC game about 10 yrs ago now, that had an interesting comment in the Manual, first line went

"Thank you for being one of the 10% of people who buy our game and read the manual, and not be like the other 90% who clog up our forums asking for advice that we give here"

[Adm.Lee]

Originally Posted by Chris

I meant to get back to the thread earlier, but busy, busy weekend.

From what Mongoose wrote, 2300AD and Twilight would be sourcebooks for their new Traveller system. I haven't even seen a copy of the new Trav locally. Has anyone read it and do you think the system is a good take for Twilight?

I have it and I've read it, but I haven't done a lot of playing with it.

It's very similar to Classic Traveller:
- nearly all die rolls are 2d6, beat a 7 with modifiers, of course.
- semi-random lifepath character generation. That is, you pick a career and roll to see how you do, and what skills and goodies you pick up. With very few adjustments, this could be made to fit the T2k background.

I don't feel confident to comment on how the combat works, the few times I tried playing with it, the GM was house-ruling a lot of it. Reading through it, it seemed to cover a lot of similar ground. It's supposed to be somewhat deadly, so that's somewhat a plus in T2k.

I'm intrigued by the concept, and wouldn't mind messing with it, if I had a group. To be honest, the 2300AD setting applied to this ruleset appeals to me more than T2k.

[Legbreaker]

Hmmm, I'm not too keen on the 2D6 mechanics. Not really enough variation for my liking.

[Chris]

Originally Posted by Adm.Lee

I have it and I've read it, but I haven't done a lot of playing with it.

It's very similar to Classic Traveller:
- nearly all die rolls are 2d6, beat a 7 with modifiers, of course.
- semi-random lifepath character generation. That is, you pick a career and roll to see how you do, and what skills and goodies you pick up. With very few adjustments, this could be made to fit the T2k background.

I knew they were trying for the "Classic" feel, but it sounds like I should just dig out my little black books again instead of looking at the core. That is if (I mean when, honest) they actually get it out in 2011 or so.

I'm going to cross my fingers on this.

Did they keep the hard-core survival role in each term? I remember going seven terms in the scouts, getting a mandatory re-enlistment, and dieing in the eighth.

[Adm.Lee]

Originally Posted by Chris

I knew they were trying for the "Classic" feel, but it sounds like I should just dig out my little black books again instead of looking at the core. That is if (I mean when, honest) they actually get it out in 2011 or so.

I'm going to cross my fingers on this.

Did they keep the hard-core survival role in each term? I remember going seven terms in the scouts, getting a mandatory re-enlistment, and dieing in the eighth.

I like the more detailed chargen of MongTrav over Classic, more things you can weave into a background.

Hard-core Survival is an option, but the standard rule is that you are forced out of the career, possibly with an injury.

Mercenary does have more career options (Wet Navy, Air Force, training cadre, etc.), and mass-combat rules and mercenary ticket generation. There are more weapons & gear (esp. heavy ordnance), of course.