Design Discussion: Barriers to New Player Entry for T2k

[Olefin]

When the dragon can burn your PC to a crisp or swallow whiole, that's all the formal authority it needs...

The original Kalisz scenario using 5th ID requires a GM that enforces a party that is "realistic" in makeup - armor, infantry, field artillery, or cavalry units, and division or battalion support (engineers, cooks, MPs, Intel, etc.) No green berets, no seals, etc. If there are rangers, they're tabbed not scrolled and they are part of one of the 5ID units. Civilians could be locals. Govt agents could be CIA, DIA, locals, etc. Other nationalities would be German, British, etc. or Pact forces deserters. There *might* be 2MarDiv liaisons, but they'd likely be part of German 3rd Army or US IX Corps. All of the noncombatant support soldiers are gonna be in, FREX, the HHC of the applicablee battalion or division, not in one of the actual rifle companies...

It also requires work on the part of the GM to properly outfit the party. Which requires the GM to look at an ORBAT and TOE info.

The challenge is finding players who are willing to work within the bound of the rules and campaign. It is akin to a D&D game where one of the players wants to pick a class or race that isn't part of the campaign or wants a backstory that doesn't fit.

As to falling back to organized units - that becomes the goal rather than the adventure. In the core v1 campaign, you can spend months real-time adventuring in the areas surrounding Kalisz without the GM ever advancing the campaign into getting close to seeing another organized NATO unit.

Remember at the time it was released they didnt even have special forces yet, or at least ones that were detailed out - they were introduced with the RDF Sourcebook. People forget that because its been a long time since the game was originally introduced.

Now you can build special forces characters on day one. Given the original scenario especially as it builds into Krakow I could see a character being a Green Beret that either had got separated from the unit going after Reset or a survivor of the ambush - or was from a unit that was supposed to meet up with them and got steamrollered by the Soviet attack just like the 5th did.

[unipus]

When the dragon can burn your PC to a crisp or swallow whiole, that's all the formal authority it needs...

The original Kalisz scenario using 5th ID requires a GM that enforces a party that is "realistic" in makeup - armor, infantry, field artillery, or cavalry units, and division or battalion support (engineers, cooks, MPs, Intel, etc.) No green berets, no seals, etc. If there are rangers, they're tabbed not scrolled and they are part of one of the 5ID units. Civilians could be locals. Govt agents could be CIA, DIA, locals, etc. Other nationalities would be German, British, etc. or Pact forces deserters. There *might* be 2MarDiv liaisons, but they'd likely be part of German 3rd Army or US IX Corps. All of the noncombatant support soldiers are gonna be in, FREX, the HHC of the applicablee battalion or division, not in one of the actual rifle companies...

It also requires work on the part of the GM to properly outfit the party. Which requires the GM to look at an ORBAT and TOE info.

The challenge is finding players who are willing to work within the bound of the rules and campaign. It is akin to a D&D game where one of the players wants to pick a class or race that isn't part of the campaign or wants a backstory that doesn't fit.

As to falling back to organized units - that becomes the goal rather than the adventure. In the core v1 campaign, you can spend months real-time adventuring in the areas surrounding Kalisz without the GM ever advancing the campaign into getting close to seeing another organized NATO unit.

Sure, you CAN. You can also beeline it west and with a bit of luck have achieved your goal within days. I'd argue that if your goal is to fall back to organized units and you spend months adventuring around Kalisz then you're either not very good at adventuring or you're not very good at setting goals. :P

Or, more likely, you're enjoying the game and willing to break immersion a bit to keep it going rather than the break the game to keep immersion. In that sense, all the stuff you posted as "requirements" really aren't... they're wishlist items that some players may want or even demand, but they are not fundamental to general enjoyment of the game or setting.

[Raellus]

Wolverines!

I'm sure someone somewhere has tried to play a Red Dawn-style scenario using a T2k system. I think that should at least be an option. I know I would have been all over that as a kid.

In that type of campaign (where most if not all PCs are young civies), the char-gen rules in v's 1-2.2, as I understand them, would have generated PCs that aren't much stronger than novice OPFOR NPCs, so it probably wouldn't end up being a very long or successful campaign. That, IMHO, is a bit of a design flaw.

I haven't looked closely at the v4 rules but, IIRC, I've heard that they can produce less wimpy civilian characters than previous editions. Hopefully someone who's tried the v4 rules out, or at least looked at them a little more closely, can confirm (or deny).

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[Southernap]

I think its the background bit that prevents a totally civilian career from working. One of the gaps and something I obliquely touched on here in this thread about the other entities that would have to decide on MilGov or CivGov. Is that you could have a federal agent who never enters the military and is stuck in the US or maybe overseas with what is left of US government representation.

However, in most of the background material that is presented in the core rule books. By 1997 in the US at least the Selective Service has been brought back from the dead. Remember in 1984 when the rules were written the Selective Service Act was restarted by Jimmy Carter in 1979 in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. So that meant everyone who was 18-26 in 1979 had to register or lose any federal benefits. So the authors assumed it would have been maintained, instead of let to atrophy like it has in real life. So that when WW3 starts, the draft would have been reinstated as the war starts.
Since I have only done character creation under V2.0 rules, I can't say if V1.0 is different. Always assumed the "War Term/War Starts" roll is the draft roll for civilians. We had a few folks develop civilian careers, I think the best I remember was a 3 term doctor who then had the war start and the lost the roll for that last term for whether the war started.

I always felt it was unfair that the career ends for folks drafted from civilian careers would stop any promotions so they are basically very junior officers or very junior enlisted folks when the war starts. So we had house ruled that you create a civilian and the war starts, you had promotions rolls you have equivalent to how many terms you had on the record sheet before the war starts. However, fail a promotion that is where you stopped at; it was an attempt to balance out things for some of our players that pointed out things like battlefield promotions or even folks "buying" their way in because of previous life experiences the military gave promotions to a certain level.

I would also note that per the character creation rules, you don't have to stay full time military and could pretend your character is a National Guard or Reservist who drills actively. So you could do a term or two in the military and then switch to a civilian career only to see yourself activated due to the war starting. Which again the rules are strict about, but can be house ruled to say that once you selected say armor in your first term. When the war starts you can't magically jump to become a pilot; unless you did all the pre-reqs. So you would have to do your war term in armor with the promotions.

As to the rank, we never played that much amongst the group with rank; only when the GM's called for it in dealing with NPCs. Otherwise, the only real reason for rank is what you had as "spending" cash prior to the start of the game to buy equipment. Since it was 5k multiplied by number of terms for an enlisted guy and 10k with the same multiplier for an officer.

As to the tactics question as a PC. Really I used to be in the military and was given some basic weapons handling skills and some basic self-defense skills as well as how to handle myself while on patrol on a flight line with the military. Yet, I didn't do it that often in real life and our training was something akin to about every 2-3 years to learn how to shoot and how to use some basic forms of cover and concealment while defending the flight line. So there is no real need to know combat tactics in a game like T2k. Reverse the question in a game like Shadowrun, do you really need to know tactics of how to be a hacker to understand what you are doing jacking in to the net in that game What about tactics of being a Paladin in some fantasy game like DCC or DnD Most of this is going to be good story telling and a beneficial GM to say what could work and might not work, let alone hand wave away maybe a bad roll by the PC or even the GM to allow the game to run well.

As to the diversity of the game. That is going to be complicated discussion and can really go sideways fast. There has been a discussion, IMHO, with in the TTRPG communities on a whole about how diversity can or can not work well; for at least the last decade. Everything from how DnD and other fantasy works could do better about allowing various races like Orcs and Elves and such live without straight animosity. Even some op-eds or long form essays in various magazines about how fantasy tropes of racial biases were born from colonialism. Similarly, trying to get more women involved or even allowing LGBTQ+ communities to exist without being a Mary Sue or not an overt stereotype in the campaign has been difficult. There is nothing, in the rules that says you can't be a woman or that you can't be LGBTQ+. That should be completely up to what the GM and the Players want to play or how to play it.


As to my problems recruiting players to game T2k or its derivative Merc2k on the table. Just been how old the rules are and how crunchy some of the rules are in doing things like trying to figure out combat, movement, and some other important things like scrounging or distilling. I have tried to scale in those rules as we going to get further into the campaign on over to just saying that even though the rules are old there are still active players in AD&D campaigns still using AD&D rules that were published only a few years before even T2k was published.

Finally, I think it is just that where I am living right now the two most popular games systems are DnD and Pathfinder, with Shadowrun or Mutants and Masterminds a very close third or fourth (depending on the polling). Anything else is forgotten about or poo'd on by folks. Heck I have tried to get a GURPS game going set in near modern era of mercenaries and do something like "The expendables" like campaign. Only to see no bites because it isn't the cool thing on the shelf that you can see at any FLGS or at Barnes and Noble.

[unipus]

I haven't looked closely at the v4 rules but, IIRC, I've heard that they can produce less wimpy civilian characters than previous editions. Hopefully someone who's tried the v4 rules out, or at least looked at them a little more closely, can confirm (or deny).
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I haven't run any civilians through the slightly revised beta version but the alpha version still had this issue to some degree. On one hand, you always get the same number of skills per term as a military character. On the other hand, those skills were not often/always the most useful ones you're going to want in the setting... unfortunately even with only 12 skills there are still about 4 standout, must-have skills that seem just much more useful all the time. In the alpha a bunch of civvy careers did have access to the Recon skill, for whatever reason, which was nice for them but seemed pretty silly. Now that is gone and instead you get a few more general choices that anyone can take at any time (Driving, Stamina, and one other I'm forgetting).

When war breaks out you can either be drafted (in which case you receive access to 2 levels of military skills of some sort or another), or remain in your civilian career (with some justification). Technically I believe the rules as written said you HAD to enlist unless you met a few exceptions but I tossed that out right away for anyone who could come up with a good reason. If you DO stay in your civilian career, the starting gear you have access to is almost universally much, much worse.

Finally, military (and now with the beta, agents) are the only ones that get access to Coolness Under Fire increases. Which can be a pretty substantial advantage that I find kinda hard to justify gating exclusively behind mil careers.

So, it's definitely possible to do, and have a decent character result. But it's still almost certain to be an objectively worse character in some ways. I don't personally think that matters a whole ton, but if you play with munchkins then expect a different reaction probably.

[Rainbow Six]

I dont think any individual campaign has to be military centric. You can run a ~Jericho type campaign focusing on a towns efforts to survive pretty much as Kato outlined and legitimately call it T2K in my opinion but trying to gen up a civilian character using rules as written is likely going to restrict your options. Ditto on the Red Dawn style campaign - if you want to play a 17 year old High School student using V2 RAW youd start with background skills only, so four skills with two points in each one. So if you want to run one of those campaigns youd need to homebrew some character generation rules. Or maybe use the 2013 mechanics. (As an aside, looking at the V2 core rulebook again this morning to check I was remembering the rules for 17 year olds correctly, I note it specifically states on page 19)

Nothing in these rules prevents a character from entering the game at age 17, although we cannot imagine why any player would want to do so.

I think another factor that tends to make the game more military centric is what the players are looking to get out of it. I only play by post now and in my experience in a lot of games theres a significant percentage of players who only contribute when a gunfight starts. Anything not combat related and theyre largely absent. So I think theres an element of knowing your group and what theyre comfortable with.

[The Zappster]

On the subject of rank and lack of military know how. My group had only one player who had any military experience. When in a structured environment were rank was an issue and a decision has to be made (for any gane, not just Twiligh/Merc) The PLAYERS would all throw in their 2 pence worth and come up with the plan, this is also the time the GM could advise on tactics (assuming they know any, but if your running a military themed game you probably have an interest. Let's face it, we all end up running the game we most want to play) then armed with an plan this would be the order from the ranking CHARACTER. This way everyone gets a say in the game. However iirc, it's written in the books that rank in T2K is no longer what your character achieved in the peace time military. The leaders recognise that the military is now small teams of survivors who will follow the person they have the most respect for.

[3catcircus]

Remember at the time it was released they didnt even have special forces yet, or at least ones that were detailed out - they were introduced with the RDF Sourcebook. People forget that because its been a long time since the game was originally introduced.

Now you can build special forces characters on day one. Given the original scenario especially as it builds into Krakow I could see a character being a Green Beret that either had got separated from the unit going after Reset or a survivor of the ambush - or was from a unit that was supposed to meet up with them and got steamrollered by the Soviet attack just like the 5th did.

At the time of V1's release, the real world was highly concerned with a nuclear NATO-PACT exchange involving heavy divisions slugging it out in the Fulda Gap. Lots of armor, mechanized infantry, and aviation. Those heavy divisions have a lot of overhead - doctors, lawyers, water technicians, mechanics, audio-visual techs.

A quick look at the ORBATs for the time show the 5th ID with 5 armor and 5 mechanized infantry battalions, a cavalry troop, an air cav regiment, an attack aviation battalion, two aviation regiments, divisional artillery, a combat engineer battalion, an air defence battalion, a divisional support unit, Military Intel battalion, and a company each of MPs and chemical troops.

There is plenty of opportunity there for someone to, say, play a local cop who is now in an MP company or Doc Smith who is in the DISCOM medical support battalion. Although doc smith might outrank Sgt Jones, Sgt Jones is the only combat troop left in the ragtag band, Sgt Jones calls the shots when dealing with tactics. Or Mrs. Kielbasa who was the former mayor's wife and a reservist in the former Polish army who defected calls the shots when interacting with the locals.

I just don't see a need to worry about rank, nor do I see a need to allow players to want to play green berets unless they're going to come up with a plausible reason. If you're playing a MERC campaign, or setting the campaign in Germany where you'd have 5th SFG, that's a different story.

[3catcircus]

Sure, you CAN. You can also beeline it west and with a bit of luck have achieved your goal within days. I'd argue that if your goal is to fall back to organized units and you spend months adventuring around Kalisz then you're either not very good at adventuring or you're not very good at setting goals. :P

Or, more likely, you're enjoying the game and willing to break immersion a bit to keep it going rather than the break the game to keep immersion. In that sense, all the stuff you posted as "requirements" really aren't... they're wishlist items that some players may want or even demand, but they are not fundamental to general enjoyment of the game or setting.

Requirements in the sense that Twilight:2000 requires work on the part of the GM to actively manage it because most players don't have direct knowledge of how the US military actually does things - their only exposure may be through WW2 movies and such. *Now* it's more likely that they have greater knowledge sources but less actual experience. Compare this to, say, D&D, where no one has ever fought in a medieval army...

[3catcircus]

On the subject of rank and lack of military know how. My group had only one player who had any military experience. When in a structured environment were rank was an issue and a decision has to be made (for any gane, not just Twiligh/Merc) The PLAYERS would all throw in their 2 pence worth and come up with the plan, this is also the time the GM could advise on tactics (assuming they know any, but if your running a military themed game you probably have an interest. Let's face it, we all end up running the game we most want to play) then armed with an plan this would be the order from the ranking CHARACTER. This way everyone gets a say in the game. However iirc, it's written in the books that rank in T2K is no longer what your character achieved in the peace time military. The leaders recognise that the military is now small teams of survivors who will follow the person they have the most respect for.

The other thing to consider: in real life, outside of specialized units, the officers think they're in charge. The senior NCOs are actually in charge. The E-4 Mafia, however, is who gets things done...

[unipus]

Requirements in the sense that Twilight:2000 requires work on the part of the GM to actively manage it because most players don't have direct knowledge of how the US military actually does things - their only exposure may be through WW2 movies and such. *Now* it's more likely that they have greater knowledge sources but less actual experience. Compare this to, say, D&D, where no one has ever fought in a medieval army...

Yeah but on the other hand there are a LOT of people who know D&D VERY well. Probably as well or more so than hardly anyone knows the US Army. People with years (or decades) of game knowledge and sourcebook knowledge. So short of having "lived" it they definitely have more than a passing understanding of the world and how it works, and a functional/mechanical understanding far beyond that.

This is actually one of the reasons I don't really play D&D, but I digress.

[3catcircus]

Yeah but on the other hand there are a LOT of people who know D&D VERY well. Probably as well or more so than hardly anyone knows the US Army. People with years (or decades) of game knowledge and sourcebook knowledge. So short of having "lived" it they definitely have more than a passing understanding of the world and how it works, and a functional/mechanical understanding far beyond that.

This is actually one of the reasons I don't really play D&D, but I digress.

I think the difference is that in a fantasy RPG, everyone is readily willing to suspend disbelief the same way. In a game with "realistic" conditions, the suspension of disbelief is tempered by each person's experiences. I was playing in a TW:2K game years ago with high school friends. Fast forward after we graduate when one of my friends was fresh out of Army boot camp and MP school . Those M16A2s in the v1 rules No good - because he actually trained with M16A2s and insisted we create rules for them that reflected an accurate rate of fire. The v1 rules show a ROF of 4, and each "shot" is actually 3 bullets, while the M16A2 only fires single shot or 3-round burst. Up until then, we didn't know - all we saw was M16 and basing it understanding off of Vietnam-era information with the full auto M16A1...

[Raellus]

I think the difference is that in a fantasy RPG, everyone is readily willing to suspend disbelief the same way. In a game with "realistic" conditions, the suspension of disbelief is tempered by each person's experiences.

That's a really good point. I think this also applies to knowledge. For example, as a 12-year-old, the v1 history seemed entirely plausible to me. I didn't question it at all. Later, after I studied history in college, I started to notice some holes. IMHO, that's why a reality-based game needs more realism in its setting and rules to allow players to more readily suspend disbelief.

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[3catcircus]

That's a really good point. I think this also applies to knowledge. For example, as a 12-year-old, the v1 history seemed entirely plausible to me. I didn't question it at all. Later, after I studied history in college, I started to notice some holes. IMHO, that's why a reality-based game needs more realism in its setting and rules to allow players to more readily suspend disbelief.

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Yep. Factual errors are easy to rectify. Speculative alternative future history is fun to imagine, but difficult to maintain once that history has actually occurred. And that's a choice people have to make - play in a never-was past campaign, or a what-if future campaign... The 1631 book series does this very well because enough time has passed that one can take poetic license with the history. Much more difficult when people are still around who remember it differently because they actually experienced it (kinda like today's youth espousing the virtues of socialism to elderly people who escaped from it... &#129300

[unipus]

Even harder since we're living in the age of disinformation now, and people have come to wildly different conclusions regarding the very same events. Hard to have common ground on some topics of plausibility. For instance, it seems an issue some folks had about the V4 background was that it portrayed a somewhat incompetent US President/leadership/response. Some people apparently consider that implausible. In the interest of not starting a political discussion, I'll say no more.

But basically, history wouldn't be very interesting if it wasn't full of unprecedented events. Things that happened that seemed impossible that, in retrospect, become completely normal. That Suez canal thread was just posted. Probably most people before last year would have thought it would be pretty silly to say that a single ship would accidentally block the Suez canal for weeks, causing a global response, economic shift, and supply chain problems. And yet.

Lots of things that happen within military planning, day-to-day operations and workplace etiquette, and internal politics similarly boggle the mind... unless you've seen them firsthand. A lot of this stuff is cultural and really really hard to sell in any other way. So I agree with you there that the GM's hand in providing that detail and flavor is a big factor in running an enjoyable game, but it mostly depends on everyone's expectations. And I still think that's the same in most games. You either do the work to present a realistic, believable world, or you don't. Whether that's research or clean-sheet invention. I can certainly see the difference in games I've run or played in where I've been able to invest the time and effort to do that versus other ones where I tried to wing it, or didn't really understand the setting.