Your Preferred T2K Timeline

[kato13]

If anyone is interested in keeping up with defense issues, this is a really thorough aggregator site for defense news.

http://www.realcleardefense.com/

In general the real clear team strives to show a wide range of opinions for all their websites.

[kcdusk]

V1 of the T2K timeline is the only one i will consider, for a number of reasons.

1. I love the front cover of the box, every time i see it i fall in love with the game.

2. V1 is the timeline i grew up with, for better or worse its the only one i will consider.

3. If i had to look at another time line for a group, i'd go with whatever the current world wide situation was, add 6 months of time (to allow me to make up and project things going from bad to worse), and start from there.

For example, currently i'd say the Ukraine and Russia get into it. IS starts beheading people in public places of capital cities throughout the world (which was there current plan in Australia this week, i believe) , Scotland rebels against the UK, etc ... and drop the players in there.

[Draq]

When I discovered t2k, it was v1. Which is partly why I love it. The only other time line I'd use would be modified v1 or rewind to the late 70's and start ww3 during the cold war.

[Ancestor]

Ancestor again - forgot that I already voted but I'm now running a homebrew: V1 but set in 2030 (Soviet Union is Russia, Belorus, Ukraine; WP is Soviet Union, Hungary, a couple of the stans, plus the PIGS of Europe). War started with Sino-Soviet war over Siberian resources, then spread to Europe.

I just love the doom of V.1. I also run some modified rules (V.1 skill and individual combat, hybrid V.1/V.2 character gen, and then for mass combat I use a Russian game called "Art of Tactic"). My boys grew up on Memoir 44 and D&D V.4 so lots of hexes and miniatures, so it became a good way to introduce T2K to them.

[Ancestor]

[QUOTE=kcdusk;61283]V1 of the T2K timeline is the only one i will consider, for a number of reasons.

1. I love the front cover of the box, every time i see it i fall in love with the game.

Plus THIS! Metcalf South Mall, Clint's South Comics, 1985.

[Silent Hunter UK]

Just bought the v1 core books. Agree it's the best of the timelines.

[Draq]

Ancestor: I'd love to see your hybrid v1/v2 char gen system

[.45cultist]

I've grown to like them all. You can convert Paul's stuff to V1 easy enough.

[Draq]

im still a noob as far as actually playing the game goes. im getting fairly familiar with the setting, but i learn by doing, the same way i did with I.C.E. cyberspace, AD&D v2, original Traveler, and West End Games Star Wars v2. the t2k v1 books do a decent job explaining the mechanics, but there isnt a single play example. all the stats for characters, weapons, equipment, and vehicles make sense, but i need to see them at work.

[.45cultist]

im still a noob as far as actually playing the game goes. im getting fairly familiar with the setting, but i learn by doing, the same way i did with I.C.E. cyberspace, AD&D v2, original Traveler, and West End Games Star Wars v2. the t2k v1 books do a decent job explaining the mechanics, but there isnt a single play example. all the stats for characters, weapons, equipment, and vehicles make sense, but i need to see them at work.

They did a V1 example in Challenge Magazine, marauders attempt to take a barn with some soldiers in it.

[unkated]

They did a V1 example in Challenge Magazine, marauders attempt to take a barn with some soldiers in it.

Challenge 31, to be precise.

Uncle Ted

[ChalkLine]

As I've been playing the game off and on since it first came out I'm over the old timelines and prefer to play in a contemporary setting

[Raellus]

As I've been playing the game off and on since it first came out I'm over the old timelines and prefer to play in a contemporary setting

I get it. I've toyed with updated timelines, to make the setting more familiar, feel more relevant, and to incorporate new weapons and kit, but there are issues with that.

I think newer timelines lend themselves best to those first two considerations (creating a game world that feels more relevant, more familiar and connected to today). I find the opposite to be true for weapons and kit, though. There are two reasons.

First, new weapons and kit kind of betray the T2k ethos of a general breakdown of civilization and technology. PC's with tablets (no internet, but still), e-readers, mp3 players (old tech, today), and photo albums on their phones One of T2k's appeals for me is getting away from all that stuff, but yeah, that sort of tech doesn't feel T2k to me.

Second, newer weapons and kit tend to make the PCs overpowered. When most PCs are equipped with current gen NVGs, weapon sights, comms, drones, and body armor (or various combinations thereof), they essentially become superheroes, the equivalent of "Masters of the Realm" in D&D (5e). If the OPFOR isn't similarly equipped, it's like Level 15 D&D heroes going up against kobolds, goblins, and the occasional orcs. If you equip the OPFOR like the PCs, with all the latest bells and whistles, then it's not really T2k, is it It's Modern Warfare, and there are plenty of outlets for that out there now.

It's a Catch-22: Include lots of modern gear, it feels less like T2k. Eliminate all that cool current-gen gear, then there's less of a reason to update the timeline.

I've experienced this a bit already in the T2030 campaign that I run. Some day, I hope to confront my players with OPFOR that are as well equipped as they are but PbP is so slow-paced, IRL, that I'm pessimistic that we'll ever reach that point.

For these reasons, I keep coming back to the alternative, Cold War never ended, v1.0 timeline.

[Legbreaker]

Completely agree.
T2K is really about the aftermath of the war. The survivors only have the scraps left over, all the good stuff has been used up, or is on the verge of failure due to lack of maintenance and spare parts. The only reliable equipment are the simple things with few working parts, little to no electronics and can be repaired with little more than a hammer and anvil.
Anything modern is akin to magic and should be treated as such. Once it's gone, there's no replacing it.

[Raellus]

In Defense of the v1 Timeline

We don't know what the v4 timeline is going to look like, so it's too early to add it to the poll. I would, however, like to share some thoughts re critiques of the v1 timeline and some critics' assertion that it needs to be replaced by something (quote), more plausible (end quote).

The one argument against the v1 timeline that I keep seeing is that it strains credulity. It goes something like this:

New gamers can't get into v1 because it ignores real world history between its release c. 1984 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991. They are unable to accept the premise that the Cold War never ends because it is too implausible given what we know now.

Fair play. But I don't see how any other timeline that starts WWIII c.1996 eliminates this issue. They too, by their very nature, ignore real world events from 1991 to the commencement of WW3. It's a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Timelines that include the end of the Warsaw Pact and a hard-line military coup in the Russian Soviet rump-state do the same thing- depart from real-world events. IRL the coup didn't succeed. IRL, it took Russia 30+ years to even come close to regaining its Cold War power (it's still not there yet). So how is that route more realistic than a Cold-War-never-ended scenario

Successful coup scenarios tend to ignore that a Neo-USSR ruled by a hard-line military government would be an international pariah state on par with the Soviet Union of 1918; that its economy would be even more decrepit than that of the RL Soviet Union of the late 1980s because its European satellites had all left its orbit a couple of years prior to the historical departure point (the coup). With a wrecked economy, how does the junta keep the Soviet military afloat, let alone as powerful as it was prior to 1989 How does the Soviet economy recover enough to support a two-front peer-rival war in under half-a-decade And how does a Soviet Union without most of its Warsaw Pact allies compete in a conventional military confrontation with China and/or NATO (especially when some of those former allies were well on their way to becoming NATO members!)

I just don't see the v2 timeline or any others that include a successful coup resulting in a more realistic back-story/setting. If anything, I think it results in a much less realistic and/or believable back-story and setting.

For the v1 alternate history to work, one only has to figure out a way for the Soviet economy to remain afloat from 1989 until 1996. This seems much more doable than figuring out a how a collapsed post-coup Soviet economy somehow miraculously recovers in four or five years, leaving the neo-Soviet Union no worse off than it was prior to the coup (or IRL, after 1991).

I watched a Youtube critique of v1 recently. The Youtuber didn't like that it ignored real world events that occurred between 1984-1991. For him, it was "too unrealistic" and therefore, impossible for anyone younger than 35 to accept. This Youtuber preferred a revised timeline that included the fall of the Iron Curtain, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a coup replacing Yeltsin's government with a hard-line military junta (i.e. something more along the lines of v2). His explanation for the miraculous recovery of the neo-Soviet economy was the discovery of fusion power* in the mid-1980s (kept secret until after the coup, then used as leverage to win back the loyalty of the restive WTO states).

*Something that still hasn't happened, IRL.

A macguffin that erases history from 1991-2000 is presented as more realistic than a Soviet Union that manages not to collapse 1989-1991.



Poppycock, I say. If one is going to adopt a fusion power macguffin in 1991, post-coup, why not just insert it pre-1989 It's totally arbitrary and therefore, no more realistic than v1. Instead of fusion power, how about the discovery and exploitation of massive energy reserves in Soviet territory in the late 1980s That's not too far off how modern-day Russia rakes in a good chunk of western currency, IRL. With revenues from oil and natural gas, the Soviet economy could stay solvent until the advent of WWIII. With a minor tweak of reality, the v1 timeline works quite well. If it ain't broke...

I realize that this is all academic or, at least, moot, and that GM's can tailor their respective T2kUs however they like. That's the way it should be. But, for officially released starting points, I think the v1 timeline is just as plausible/realistic, if not more so, than v2 or what's been leaked of the v4 timeline. Either way, T2k is built around an alternate history. For me, the simplest route is the best.

That said, the timeline is the foundation of the setting of any iteration of Twilight 2000. A bad timeline will likely hamstring the game. One could argue that Twilight 2013 was doomed by its timeline. I really hope that v4 presents a plausible timeline. Different is fine, but better- or, at least, not worse than v1-2.2- is crucial, IMHO.

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