Any status yet?

[PBI]

The point, though, kaladorn, is that those weapons had either been phased out of the regular force (and dissapeared from the reserves by 1990) or were never issued. As I read it, the initial weapons list/kit list is supposed to be items that were officially issued. If a CF character wants to buy an M-60, for example, he can, but he can't pick it for free.

Also, as far as I know, Canada destroys all retired weapons, except in certain special cases, like the limited numbers of FNC1s that were sold, but that's really not much to do with the issue of accuracy in the game

All I'm really asking for is that the basics be correct. Things like skill levels can be subject to interpretation, but physical issue of pre-war kit is not.

 

[kaladorn]

I guess my counterpoint is this: At the time the game was written, it was projecting into the future. Who knew then that we wouldn't be using the M16 (as such) or that we would be using the C6 and C9 instead of the M60 and M249? I mean, we could equally well have done so. And I never viewed what you had at the beginning strictly as 'issue'. You are supposed to be some kind of veteran and you pick things up.

As to the 'disappeared', our armouries had Enfields tucked away in lockup, so I don't doubt that the 'disappeared' C1 SMGs and other items may yet lurk in a few weapons lock-ups.

Canada probably does destroy surplus weapons (though I might point out that my FN that I was issued in 1987 had a minting date of 1956, so to get to achieve 'surplus' status takes some considerable period of time... I think even the Third Imperium would have been jealous...). Mind you they don't always get all of them, inter-unit and inter-district politics being what they are.

Physical issue of kit that post-dated the issuance of the game could have been correct... though it would have been more sensible to extrapolate from what the actual situation was. I mean, C7 and M16 are the same in the granularity level of the game. Ditto M4 and C8. Ditto M249 and C9. C6 and MAG. The only one very not-right is the M9.

Now, having said all of that, I still agree with you - if a new version is coming out, getting kit lists and such right is probably a nice touch.

 

[PBI]

If you're talking about T2K 1.0, Kaladorn, I'd agree with you, but the later versions were issued in the 90s. I, too, used C1s and SMGs that were almost as old as my parents (and .30 GPMGs, too), but those were gone by 1990, and, in fact, had been gone from the reg force by 87-88 (the C1s and SMGs, anyway). We never used the M-60. Ever. We used the LAR (FNC2).

I own 2.0, and 2.0 still lists weapons never used by the CF (M-60 and the M9), and weapons that were no longer in issue. That's what needs to be corrected.

One last point about kit issue in the game. 2.0, at least, specifically identifies the free kit that a character starts with as being kit that was issued before the war, so that stuff needs to be accurate (it wasn't). The stuff that folks pick up after, that's what the character's starting money is for

Or a kind GM

We do agree on the main points, we're just arguing the specifics now, but yeah, I think the point has been explained and I hope the new version will be a a bit more in line with reality. Not that the original wasn't; the original was closer to reality than most other games. It's just that there were/are a few errors (and not nitpicking ones, either).

 

[kaladorn]

I hated the FNC2. Too heavy. But then I wished for the para model of the FN.

Even 2.0 can skate on the whole 'issue business' in that the game takes place in 2000+, and that is post release. They can always argue, though perhaps somewhat ineffectually, that issue kit might have changed before the actual game-time. Who knows? But certainly it wouldn't have taken much to get it right.

My big complaint with 1.0 was that it was almost impossible to kill someone with a HTH attack or a pistol shot. The scheme for alloting damage (and the requirement to use 3 round bursts, which was *never* something I trained for... single shot is still the norm for CF training as of last time I checked, even with the C7) was vexing. Especially for pistols. THAT was something I really disliked.

I really wish I could have procured a copy of 2.2, as I'm told it was the best of the lot.

Hopefully the new version will be fun and interesting and have reasonable rules.

 

[PBI]

I never got 2.2, but thankfully in 2.0 the three round burst thing was changed, though they still did put a burst governor on the C7 (which it does not have).

2.0 is very very deadly. I ran a pure infantry character, 8 or 9 terms in the infantry and one lucky head shot almost ended the game for me

Which is good, that's how it should be

 

[imported_Sgt_Biggles]

I agree. The original T2K had some game mechanic problems and several general accuracy issues. I was also annoyed by the low damage pistols caused, and applied damage overall. My home games used a d10 for damage instead of the d6. Most of my players lost characters to the infamous head shot.

The combat system, including damage, is straight from the Traveller handbook. Penetration rules were added to allow armor to have a realistic game affect. Combat in Traveller and consequently Twilight, is exceptionally deadly. Not only do you lose Stamina whenever you get hit, you also loss Lifeblood. Personal armor helps, but getting hit with a 5.56 round is going to do real damage regardless of your personal armor level. On the other hand, you wont be able to take out an AFV with 5.56 round. Just as in actual combat, cover, becomes a critical component. Players who are used to charging a machinegun position will get dead real fast.

The weak spot in the games combat system is still hand to hand. Traveller left most of the unarmed combat abilities out. Twilight has included them as an optional component, though I suspect most everyone will utilize them. There will be Feats which allow a single attack, unarmed, melee or single shot, to score an instant kill, or unconscious, result given certain conditions. A character wants to silently take out a sentry. A successful Move Silent vs Listen lets the character with the feat make the equivalent of the coup-de-grace (sp) attack (A bit different but basically the same), and you have a dead sentry. The same could be done with a silenced .22 or MP5.

So, if you think the Traveller combat rules are reasonable then we are off to a good start.

Craig

 

[kaladorn]

PBI:
still did put a burst governor on the C7 (which it does not have).

Yes it does! We call it the human finger and trigger control.

There were lots of things the game didn't represent - how many mag-mods are there for M16s? and AKs. And the mags for UZIs weren't close the the available selection. etc. There were lots of things to complain about, though on the whole, as you observed before, still more accurate than a lot of other games. And I *loved* the colour plates of the vehicles in the vehicle (equipment?) guides.

 

[kaladorn]

Penetration rules were added to allow armor to have a realistic game affect. Combat in Traveller and consequently Twilight, is exceptionally deadly. Not only do you lose Stamina whenever you get hit, you also loss Lifeblood. Personal armor helps, but getting hit with a 5.56 round is going to do real damage regardless of your personal armor level.

Yes, except that this may not be the case. With some of the new inserts and armours out there, it may well be possible to shrug off hits from anything smaller than a .50 BMG. I've seen pics of armour that stops sizeable rifle rounds without notable 'backface deformation'.

So if what you say is the case, then they're not keeping abreast of modern armours (now, if we're still back in 2000, then maybe that's fair, but if they are trying to modernize and move it up a year or five, then that isn't true anymore).

 

[imported_Sgt_Biggles]

Currently there is no personal armor available that will stop a high velocity 7.62 rnd, even as an insert, and still allow the wearer to function in the capacity of ground soldier. There are some ceramic composites being tested and show promise, but not yet issue.

There is another consideration when applied to game terms. An insert, even if capable of stopping up to a .50 rnd, only protects a specific part of the body. The majority of the body has either no protection or much lighter. In game terms, when a round hits a target damage is subtracted from Stamina. This is not real damage. It represents near misses and the effort required to “duck and roll” or dodge out of the way. There is no specific hit location selected in Traveller or T20 twilight, making the whole damage application rather abstract. Even with a specific location selected, say the chest, the entire chest is not protected so the possibility of real damage is possible. With the T20 combat rules, any hit has the potential to inflict lifeblood damage. You don’t have to exhaust all your stamina first to get seriously injured or dead. Armor reduces the damage to lifeblood, either by stopping a protected location hit or fragments and ricochets. Even if wearing heavy armor, a hit to a protected area hurts. When a target gets hit in a protected location there is blunt force trauma sustained, or a loss of lifeblood. Game vs Real.

The T20 Twilight follows the original story line instead of being moved forward to say 2020. That decision was made by the owner of the game rights, Marc Miller. In essence, it becomes an alternate history. With that said, certain events will change slightly based on real world events. Also the assumption (mine actually) is many of the weapons systems which were experimental and not released until the late ‘90s or early 2000’s, where pushed through. Other weapons systems were scraped. Mostly small arms requiring computer components. I am hoping to achieve a strong mix of modern weaponry missed in with the actual weapons available.

Whew…that was a mouthful.

Craig

 

[Anthony]

Originally posted by Sgt_Biggles:
Currently there is no personal armor available that will stop a high velocity 7.62 rnd, even as an insert, and still allow the wearer to function in the capacity of ground soldier. There are some ceramic composites being tested and show promise, but not yet issue.

Hrm. All the body armor manufacturers who offer inserts claim to have NIJ level III inserts, which will stop high velocity 7.62. Many offer NIJ level IV inserts, which will stop 7.62 AP. I guess this boils down to your definition of 'allow the wearer to function'.

 

[kaladorn]

You're right some of the new inserts aren't commonly available, and aren't issue. But they are out there and I have heard it said some of them will stop 7.62 from an MG. <shrug> YMMV.

OTOH, you are of course right that inserts are weighty and not entirely protecting.

Myself, I prefer damage resolution with hit locations to the abstraction. You know where you are hit, it is more 'gritty' and the character can imagine the types of impediment it should impose. And sometimes the armour will save you. Other times, ouch.

 

[imported_Sgt_Biggles]

I like hit locations also. I have been toying with adding a sidebar for hit locations but receive really mixed opinions about it. Do you leave Lifeblood alone with each hit which does LB damage lowering it reguardless of location. Or do you have a modifier? A head shot doubles LB damage and arm or a leg cuts LB in half? Is the extra record keeping worth the effort? I dont know. In the original Twilight I like the idea of a leg hit becoming a miss if the legs were behind enough cover.

I have added an aimed shot effects table. If a character takes the time and penialty to "call" a shot, whether to hit a pistol out of a badguys hand or drop a bullet between the fellows eyes, it can be done. In my own play testing it is very popular.

Thoughts?

C

 

[imported_Sgt_Biggles]

Originally posted by Anthony:
...Many offer NIJ level IV inserts, which will stop 7.62 AP. I guess this boils down to your definition of 'allow the wearer to function'.

You’re right. However, the Lvl IV is bulky and heavy, severally restricting upper body motion, even with a small chest plate inserted. My son-in-law has an uncertified Lvl IV plate he wears while acting as front guard for convoys in Iraq. His unit was given several sets for field testing. (Off Subject: This is good and bad. Its good he has it, but in order to be properly field tested he and his team need to get shot.)

In game terms the higher level plating adds to AR but lowers Dex based skills. (See the T20 Traveller armor stats) I have taken a bit of writers prerogative and fudged a few real world facts for added playability. Time and future playtestors will let me know if it works or not.

Craig

 

[PBI]

I prefer hit-specific damage over abstract. I think the way T2K handled it was quite good and I'd like to see that remain in the new incarnation. Getting hit in the chest is a lot more serious than getting hit in the leg (at least immediately). Otherwise, we'll be playing Twilight D&D.

As for called shots and the like, there should be a hefty negative mod based on what one is trying to do (much easier to aim for the centre of the mass than the head), similar to the Btech handled targeting computers; if the shot was successful, all damage was applied to the location targetted.

 

[kaladorn]

I think called shots at range ought to be hard. If the other guy doesn't know you are there or you are are close in, they get a lot more likely.

If you are hit in someplace particular (and most times, this is the case!), you should sustain appropriate damage. Limb hits that don't hit a major artery are somewhat debilitating, but not immediately life-threatening. If they do enough mechanical damage, they can impair motion or use of apendage. Really, you come down to having real damage include shock, damage to the blood system (ie ruining its integrity and letting you exanguinate) and mechanical damage to the limb or area in question that impedes use.

If you get hit in the head, for instance, effects could include stunning, concusions, impeded vision or hearing, loss of balance, and if the hit is bad enough, skull fractures, brain damage, permanent organ damage to eyes or ears or teeth/mouth/throat, and of course potential for blood loss issues, especially in neck hits.

If you are hit in the body, you can take damage to lungs (making them collapse or fill up, thus making cardio stuff tough), heart (well, that's pretty bad...), stomach (you can usually live with this, but infection comes and it hurts a lot), kidneys, liver (ouch... bleeding, infection... but not usually immediately fatal). Spine hits will paralyze you or partially paralyze you either temporarily or permanently and/or give you the chance to have further excercise on your part make things worse.

Shock can put you down from a small simple wound you weren't expecting or you can shrug it off and keep going through a series of fairly serious wounds. Blood loss can lead you into shock and unconciousness, or if the performations are small enough, your body's internal compensation systems can mitigate and slow the loss and get you to a meta-stable condition, assuming you don't beat yourself up with too much activity.

Detailed wounding is tough to do right... I saw games which said things like:

Head Hit: Take double normal stun type damage, one point five time lethal damage, x% per point of damage of passing out (a save to wake up after dX rounds), x% chance of vision effects, x% chance of hearing effects, etc.

This leads to a bunch of die rolling. But it makes the combat very vivid and leads to characters who aren't necessarily going to die getting a glanding shot off the skull and passing out sometimes. Or staggering around off balance and with really impaired visual abilities. That can be quite a lot of fun to roleplay!

 

[TKalbfus]

So combat tends to get complicated, and character generation becomes a slow and arduous process, since you have armies of these characters, getting replacements for killed or wounded characters is tough. A wounded character is even tougher than dealing with a dead one. Were talking about the aftermath of a nuclear war, I don't know if there are any MASH units you could send wounded characters to. The ability of combat soldiers to take care of their wounded is going to be fairly feeble. Sometimes the best they can do is slow down their dying, and while such characters are dying slowly they slow down or burden the units ability to move around and attack. People carrying the wounded in stretchers can't fire their guns at the enemy if they come under attack. There might be a doctor around, but he's going to have to get his medical supplies from somewhere. France is one possibility, Switzerland is another. Of course there may be hospitals left over, but they would have been heavily used after the initial nuclear attacks. A few years afterwards they would need to be restocked and staffed by skilled medical profesionals if they are to be any good, and getting medical supplies from places that are still civilized to these hospitals is going to be tough work. The good news is that there are alot of pharmaceutical companies based in Switzerland, no doubt there are factories their too and assuming that Switzerland stayed neutral in World War II and was not attacked, they ought to be running a lively export business. The hard part is trucking these supplies through the chaos to the places where they are needed. Sounds like a mission the PCs could undertake, don't you think? The other part is finding something to pay the Swiss in order to buy their stuff. Gold perhaps. I think gold might be worth something like $200 an ounce in the T2000 campaign. Their are alot of ruined banks and vaults which may contain gold, alot of people would be looting them and bring it to the swiss to buy their stuff. The Swiss would tend to accumulate alot of golf and because of the population reduction and the fact that gold isn't much good in and of itself, the value of gold would be reduced. But perhaps the T2000 book says something about this.

 

[PBI]

I'm not sure what your point is, Tom. There was nothing terribly complicated about combat in the original rules( all three sets), except for automatic fire, nor was NPC generation a problem, as they merely had a pool of hit points or whetever, with head shots and things of that nature causing damage to be multiplied, IIRC.

 

[montanakennedy]

Originally posted by PBI:
There was nothing terribly complicated about combat in the original rules( all three sets), except for automatic fire

and armor combat in V1.0

 

[kafka47]

Just wondering if anyone has heard when FFE is going to get its act on the road and release further reprints. I have tried emailing Marc with not so much as a whisper back. If others have access, perhaps, even the Red Phone directly with the General Secretary Marc himself...perhaps, we could avoid WWIII. Although, most on this thread would not really want that. -

 

[PBI]

Originally posted by montana kennedy:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by PBI:
There was nothing terribly complicated about combat in the original rules( all three sets), except for automatic fire

and armor combat in V1.0

</font>[/QUOTE]Not possessing 1.0, I'll take your word for it and count myself lucky