Twilight 2000 v2.2 - Playing the Game - Clean Procedures & Structures

I have been playing some more Twilight 2000 2nd edition recently and it has been quite fun. The setting has always been reasonably compelling in terms of its premise, and the detail around that premise has been satisfactory enough to get a game out of it.  Mixing military, survival and exploration themes in a plausible way in a modern setting isn't necessarily so easy, but the game gives it a good go.

 

However, elements of the execution of this in practice are not good. I have some issues with character generation, equipment and overall calibration which I will write about another time, but here I want to concentrate much more on how the game is actually played.  I have tried to codify it so it has a more logical flow - please have a look at this page for details.

Fundamentally, Twilight 2000 v2 resembles a hex crawl game.  Unlike a very traditional hex-crawl, the players and characters know the approximate shape of the world and the local environs but not the exact shape or contents. I think there is a hidden premise in the game - there certainly is when I play it - that the Twilight 2000 world both is, and is not, the world of real life. The big cities, even small towns are there, but it doesn't have fidelity down to area/village/street level, so players and GMs aren't expected to research every area in which the world takes place, hence farms and villages can be generated as random encounters. Of course, there is nothing stopping you from trying to take the level of granularity down further especially in the age of Google Maps, but I don't think the expectation in the rules is that you will do that. The level of expectation of fidelity probably - definitely guessing here, based on the scale of the supporting materials - got lower between Twilight 2000 1st edition and 2nd edition, even.

Almost all of the mechanics one would need for a hex crawl are in there: movement rates & quite detailed encounter tables, rules for survival (food, fuel, fatigue, sickness) etc. The most recent version of the game (edition 4, which I have not played yet), because it is explicitly designed as a hex-crawl, has a free hex map of Poland (and Sweden) to download. So 4e recognized the logic of where this game needed to go and went there, which is possibly a vote of confidence in the idea that the same design logic can be applied to earlier versions.

However, although almost all of the individual mechanics are there, the structure is emphatically not. And I am not on about the explicit lack of 2e hex maps or anything as relatively trivially as that. No, I mean the way the rules are organized within the rulebook makes using it generally difficult. They aren't optimized for play; it would be some excuse if they were optimized for learning but they aren't really done that way either, although the organization of the book makes a little bit of sense in terms of the latter. And I think this lack of structure really diminished the amount of times I played it when it was first out: it felt like, it was, quite hard work to get a game out of it compared to games where it was all more obvious what one should do.  When you add in to that the individual complexity of certain mechanics (explosive weapons for instance) then the game just becomes too much, even though most of the individual rules are quite well done and thought out.