Twilight 2000 Tips

[RobertFisher]

I never played Twilight 2000, but I recently acquired some second-hand copies of it. (1st edition, I think.) I've been thinking of getting my group to give it a try.

So, do any of you who've actually played the game have any tips? Any rules weirdness to look out for? Any situation that commonly comes up that's not explicitly dealt with in the rules? Anything else?

 

[Elliot]

When I played it years ago, my players never got on with the whole military rank/chain of command thing despite agreeing to abide by it and watching Tour of Duty avidly!

 

[phydaux]

Yeah, same here. In my traveller Merc campaign, I INSIST all the PCs be the same rank. This pisses some players off ("Oh, but I WANT to be a GENERAL....") but not as bad as the OTHER players would be if their characters had to take his orders.

 

[DrSkull]

In my Traveller mercenary campaigns I insisted on using "chain of command", and found it wasn't that big a deal. THe last one I had it set up so everyone had 2 characters (ground guy and space guy) although I doubt I'd do that again.

We had enough variety of function that most everyone had an area in which to shine. One guy was the unit "owner" and handled PR and so forth and made policy decisions, but was lousy at combat. Another guy was the troop leader a third guy the ship captain, and another guy was the cutter pilot par excellance. I thought it worked pretty well.

So, if you use chain of command, make sure you give everyone a specific realm where his expertise trumps the need for "orders".

------------------
Dave "Dr. Skull" Nelson

 

[phydaux]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by DrSkull:
So, if you use chain of command, make sure you give everyone a specific realm where his expertise trumps the need for "orders".

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

My old GURPS gaming group (the one that wouldn't play GURPS: Traveller until AFTER I moved away, grumble, grumble) fell upon a similar solution -

Each players character would have his "stchick" and the other player characters would know to stay away from that whild making their characters and roleplaying.

So, we'd always have one guy who was "The Professor" and maxes out knowlege skills and such. Another guy was "The Physical Guy" and could run and jump and fight and stuff. One guys was usually "The Face" and had languages and social skills, etc.

I usually played "The Generalist" who could do a lot of things but not do anything as well as any of the other "specialists."

I worked that into my Traveller Merc campaign by having "specialists" like Heavy Weapons, Demolition, Comunications, Combat Medicine, etc. I requiored each character to pick a specialty and STRONGLY recommended no one double up. Then with everyone the same rank (Staff Sgt.) it was just a matter of making sure there was plenty for each specialty to do each session.