d20 2300AD ?!

[robmyers]

Originally posted by BMonnery:
There's been a lot of discussion about changing the history over the years, and none of the alternatives ever really satisfied me, the closest being: http://homepage.mac.com/robmyers/jiex/2301/avril/twilight_2010.html

Thanks! I discussed it with a Twilight:2000 newsgroup over a couple of weeks to get feedback on the current situation in Eastern Europe. If Russia joins the EU I'll have to start with a civil war scenario...

Except, how long before this is obsolete?

Bryn

Any scenario will be obsolete shortly after the ink has dried (or the upload has finished). 2300AD's scenario (and Twilight's) has the advantage of being sufficiently detailed to be interesting and provide a good point of departure.

And I'd *love* a d20 version of 2300AD. With d20 modern out, T2K20 and d2300 would fill gaps in the market. 2300AD's style is still contemporary, more so than the last decade or so of SF TV, and despite the constant whining about realism, it has few enough handwaves for the recognizable geopolitics and technology to carry the feeling of realism.

 

[kafka47]

As much as obsolence is built into 2300AD, I think again the idea ought to be accept the timeline, building in big holes for many brave souls to fill with assorted wars. Assume the Twilight War, was not a nuclear exchange but the Years of Turbulence, we now find ourselves in...

And, move the time forward to 2350 with lots of detail for the years 2305 to 2350.

 

[Solo]

Originally posted by kafka47:
As much as obsolence is built into 2300AD, I think again the idea ought to be accept the timeline, building in big holes for many brave souls to fill with assorted wars. Assume the Twilight War, was not a nuclear exchange but the Years of Turbulence, we now find ourselves in...

And, move the time forward to 2350 with lots of detail for the years 2305 to 2350.

I'd suggest starting the games timeline at around 2020 or so and remove the world war III scenario. Leave that to individual GM's (like Traveller does).

Someone suggested building off of d20 Modern. Great Idea, make this another alternate universe for use with that book.

Hmmm...

-S.

 

[robmyers]

Originally posted by kafka47:
Assume the Twilight War, was not a nuclear exchange but the Years of Turbulence, we now find ourselves in...

Just say "The Twilight War of the early part of the 21st Century". That covers up to 2020 or so and is more than vague enough. Or even "the first half of the 21st Century...". The first real major event of the 2300AD timeline, rivalyry-creating wars aside, is the discovery of the Jerome Effect around 2070.

And, move the time forward to 2350 with lots of detail for the years 2305 to 2350.

Nonono. I did a poll on the 2300AD yahoo group: people want the game to start where it left off, with new material beginning in late 2303/early 2304. The most that makes sense to move the timeline is 20 years (for ~20 years since it was published), and that wasn't at all popular.

- Rob.

 

[kafka47]

By moving the timeline, I don't mean that one would not fill in the details from 2304/5 to 2350. But, as a way of by-passing some of the things that would not really make much sense such as Australia not colonized by Asians...which is more likely, than the nuclear war breaking out in Asia scenario... But then again look at TS...

I am really looking forward to the Twilight reprints, as it looks like there is going to be an alternative explaination for the Twilight War...

 

[BMonnery]

Originally posted by robmyers:
newsgroup over a couple of weeks to get feedback on the current situation in Eastern Europe. If Russia joins the EU I'll have to start with a civil war scenario...

Wouldn't know, Kevin Clark has permanently excluded me from it

If you've done any more stuff, can you crosspost to 2300noncanon@yahoogroups.com?

Bryn

 

[TJP]

Sorry to be a grumpy old man, but as long as the 2300AD reprints come out, I don't care. If it would bring new material to the 2300AD universe, then by all means - but if that would cancel the reprints (to favor the d20 version), no way. (As you may have guessed, I don't like d20 as a system.)

 

[MT++]

You want to keep the Twilight War? Easy!

One change from our history: 1980 Jimmy Carter gets re-elected.
Carter firmly believed in the long-standing (and ineffectual) American policy of containment and accomodation with the USSR rather than confrontation and was big on cutting the armed forces' budgets.
These two factors would leave a communist Russia still eager for adventures (and not broken by their game in Afghanistan)
One change and it becomes credible again.
Simply live with it.

"It could have gone the other way, my dear nephew"
"Yeah. But it didn't."
Junior and Tony Soprano

 

[Gallowglass]

Sadly though, d20 is a fact of life in the RPG market and, like the Gorilla that invites itself to breakfast, it gets to do what it wants, becasue no one is going to argue with it*.

The important thing is to find a way to exploit the huge value of the d20 brand recognition, without loosing the established user base. The obvious method is for a FFE license d20 2300, either on the model of T20, or a simple separate "conversion" book that doesn't substitue for the existing 2300 material, just shows how to quickly derive d20 numbers from it.

My problem is whether the few gaps in my collection can be plugged without having to buy everything over again, but that won't be a problem until the reprints actually make it to this side of the Atlantic...

 

[kafka47]

With war on the mind...I came across this Russian joke...

What are the characteristics of a Russian optimistic, pessimist, and realist?

An optimist learns German.
A pessimist learns Chinese.
A realist learns how to use a Klashinkov...

 

[robmyers]

Originally posted by BMonnery:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by robmyers:
newsgroup over a couple of weeks to get feedback on the current situation in Eastern Europe. If Russia joins the EU I'll have to start with a civil war scenario...

Wouldn't know, Kevin Clark has permanently excluded me from it
</font>[/QUOTE]Well it was t2k rather than twi2000@yahoogroups.com .

If you've done any more stuff, can you crosspost to 2300noncanon@yahoogroups.com?
Bryn

Anything good I post on 2300ad@yahoogroups.com gets hoovered up and placed on http://www.robmyers.org/jiex , which is way overdue for an upadate. The last one was the "Art in 2300" series of articles, which started as a joke...

- Rob.

 

[WyldRage]

To get back on the 2300AD or T2K revival.

I would keep most of the background, if not all of it. It simply makes both games alternative histories and it keeps the Sci-Fi aspect of 2300AD and the modern aspect of T2K. WWIII is always more fun between the USA and the USSR .

Now, why have only one of them? IIRC, both games share the same history, and the technological levels in both are close enough to make use of the same rules, with minor variants/adjustments. There could be a "milieu" system like Traveller, with Milieu 0 AT and Milieu 300 AT (After Twilight ). Also, this would make expanding the game line easier, both backward in time (WWII and Vietnam) and forward (who knows?). Making a rulebook, with little background except for a timeline and a few maps of Earth and the nearby stars, would probably be best, if the milieu books don't take too long to be released afterwards.

This said, I do hate D20 with a passion (levels ). So using a new system, one of the old GDW's (I must admit I am no master in this subject) or even T5's, when it is released, would be great.

 

[kafka47]

While most veterans would have no problem with a world where the USSR and USA nuked each other. Afterall, how many us played wargames with the same theme or where Hitler's armies won over the USSR? Personally, I liked Twilight because, it did not assume the superiority of the American way of life.

I played a very bleak version that postulated the rise of a totalitarian feudal state in Western Europe enforced by NATO "peace makers". Whilst, in East Europe, countries disappeared behind the Green Wall (the peasantry) and practice quasi-anarchist lifestyles.

There was also nuclear winter which empowered many countries in the South to industrialize using more effective technologies thereby making a leap ahead. It was in this geopolitical situation that world found itself in after the bomb was dropped. Sadly, I did not have too much to say about the USA and USSR, save we obviously saw a massive depopulation of the cities...turning them into prison-camps, a la Escape from New York or living museums where a shell-shocked population was turning to canabalism to meet one's dietary requirements.

Here the "heroes"/PCs were set to rebuild civilization for the glory of something called Freedom/svoboda

The milieu was based on a short story that I wrote back around 1983.

 

[ctskerry]

I'd love to see a new edition of 2300AD come out, especially if it was supported with supplementary materials.

d20, the old GDW House System, or heck even GURPS would be nice.

Kerry

 

[aramis]

Originally posted by Kerry Harrison:
d20, the old GDW House System, or heck even GURPS would be nice.

Kerry

I'd prefer BTRC's CORPS... easy gun design- official is 3g3. Easy vehicle design, CORPS VDS.

but I dream.

Just a new version of the background, even sans rules, would be good.

 

[TKalbfus]

One of the mistakes of Traveller 2300 was to start its timeline so close to the present so that by 2000 either world war III happens and we won't be here to talk about it or it does not and the whole timeline becomes obsolete. I think we need to create a completely different timeline using the same methods they used to create the first one. Back in the 1980's when it was first published people had this lingering dread of an imminent clash of the superpowers going nuclear. Now for the time being there is only one super power. the timeline will proceed differently from that time forward. The classic Twilight 2000 senario is not likely to happen now, but something else might. What about the War on Terror, what does this presage for the future? From this proceeds a different future. France might no longer be on top of the Heap. (Sorry France) Someone else might, not necessarily the USA, it could be China for example. A lot can happen in 300 years. The Stars would be the same and maybe even the aliens. But the Nations that venture out into space would be different.

 

[Falkayn]

Originally posted by Tom Kalbfus:
One of the mistakes of Traveller 2300 was to start its timeline so close to the present so that by 2000 either world war III happens and we won't be here to talk about it or it does not and the whole timeline becomes obsolete. I think we need to create a completely different timeline using the same methods they used to create the first one. Back in the 1980's when it was first published people had this lingering dread of an imminent clash of the superpowers going nuclear. Now for the time being there is only one super power. the timeline will proceed differently from that time forward. The classic Twilight 2000 senario is not likely to happen now, but something else might. What about the War on Terror, what does this presage for the future? From this proceeds a different future. France might no longer be on top of the Heap. (Sorry France) Someone else might, not necessarily the USA, it could be China for example. A lot can happen in 300 years. The Stars would be the same and maybe even the aliens. But the Nations that venture out into space would be different.

There are a couple of good points here. For one thing, the world today is dramatically different to what we expected even 5-6 years ago, for another the nation-states of today would create different background histories for certain nations of tomorrow. The trick is to start far enough in the future that it is plausible to imagine the world going that way in the time available ...

I have a book at home called Dragonstrike that postulated a possible agressive move by China in the Sea of Japan, specifically to create a situation where international financial markets could be manipulated to their advantage, whilst also boosting their status as a "superpower". It was a serious book written just before 2000, by a journalist and a defence analyst.

The politics described in the book seem VERY far from what we see playing out today, with the situation with North Korea and Iraq (although I wonder if the North Koreans were inspired in their strategies by this book).

Any future 2300AD game will find itself just as invalid as long as it tries to write an unbroken history from now to whenever it begins. Perhaps France will break into separate nations, or the USA change its name, or Texas become a separate nation ... whatever does happen it's unlikely to be what was predicted. The game can either have regular timeline updates to account for current events, or you can handwave these off by starting at some point in the future and not writing the history back to now (although that leaves out some of the more interesting parts of 2300).

 

[Gallowglass]

Whilst the alternate timeline idea is fun in some ways, I think it just underlines that fact that 2300AD is as much it's timeline as its setting or rules; radically change the back story and it starts to unseat some of the key aspects of the "present" of 2300; likewise, change the Near Star List to say Gliese 3.0 and you start to radically alter the astrography; change the rules (e.g. to WEG's d6) and the nature of the game changes again.

If people want a Hard SF, near future game that is "more plausible" (or whatever) then perhaps they should look at Transhuman Space, or write their own. If they want 2300, then surely that means 2300 with some planet wide catastrophe late 20th /early 21st centurey, leading to the political climate as shown and, Gliese 3.0 and other developments not wih standing, a local astrography pretty much as shown in the GDW NSL. Other wise it's a different game!

Rules are easier to adapt, although I think WEG's d6 would produce a much more heroic, anime style game; which could be cool actually, but would be quite different to the style of the original. d20 would need fairly radical surgery - T20 at a minimum (and personally I am sceptical about the need for fatigue/hit points at all, but that's just me) but not d20 Modern... and dual statting would be a must for all those of us who still use the old rules, and to whom presumably the 2300 reprints are aimed (when they arrive ).

Hmm, that was a bit rantish, wasn't it? I think of other peoples rules systems, d20 is the only really viable commercial option (cheap and big market appeal) but I think support for the original rules would be essential (to carry the existing fan base) and I have yet to see a version of d20 that seems ideally suited to Hard SF. And that includes T20, which is the closest by far, but still misses the mark IMO...

 

[TKalbfus]

I don't think the 2300 setting needs World War III in its past. We should decouple 2300 from Twilight 2000. Twilight 2000 can become an alternate history setting where the Cold War continued into the 1990s and led to world war III. From that we can continue to the old 2300 timeline, but that is the alternate histories future, but we can also produce another timeline that begins from the world as we know it now rather than the way things could have been had things gone badly in the 1990's.
2300 mind you is not a post-nuclear-holocaust setting. In the old 2300 timeline the world has long since recovered from the after effects of World War III. The only effect World War III has on the setting is in determining who the great powers of the world are. Since France stayed neutral during World War III, they weren't damaged during the war, While the USA, its allies, and the Soviets were brought down low. France did not so much surpass the United States as it simply remained standing and relatively unaffected by WW III by its "Unexpected" betrayal of the NATO alliance, as a reward for this behavior it became a superpower.
I'd like to start a "What If World War III hadn't happened?" timeline for the 2300 game. I think if you take out World War III a number of interesting things happen. For one the Solar System gets colonized earlier than in the old 2300 time line. The Stutterwarp drive is still discovered. The same planets are discovered, but not necessarily by the French and because of that they are given different names, but they are the same planets. I also have an idea about who might be the preeminent power in the new 2300 setting. How about the Planet Mars? Since Mars was colonized earlier it had time to develop a national identity of its own, it becomes a member of the United Nations. Terraforming of its surface is partially underway and liquid water and plant life now exists on its surface but you still can't breath the atmosphere. Mars at this time has its own interstellar colonies. this is just a suggestion, but colonization of Mars can begin early in the 21st century if World War III does not happen.

 

[Gallowglass]

Variants are fine, indeed part of what makes near future SF fun, but it seems to me that 2300 is built on the assumption that something happens in the late 20th/early 21st Century to derail the current forward march of technology. Dropping it entirely would alter the "present" of 2300 significantly: not a problem for personal campaigns but it would make newly published material incompatible with the previous edition.

Some adjustment is possible, see Rob Myer's excellent article (http://homepage.mac.com/robmyers/jiex/2301/avril/canon_hacking.html), but I think any new edition would be better received if it kept the same baseline assumptions as the previous edition for maximum compatibility. Although a logical early prouct in a new edition would be an alternate timeline sourcebook looking as a few variants of the "canon" setting e.g. without the Twilight War; earth under Kafer rule after the invasion of 2010; the war againts the Eber, whose society never collapsed.