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This News and Rumor is one is for those old school Twilight:2000 players.

I picked up a batch deal of the Twilight: 2013 stuff from Drive through RPG's the other day, then went over to 93 studio's websight and found out that they were going out of business and that Mongoose of all companies was picking this game up. After I went over to Mongoosepublishing.com, there are a few posts, and a state of the game comment from the guy over there, so it's official...

I get in here from time to time with posting and all, but didn't see anything mentioned about that here, and it being the new year and all, 93 studio said they are closing up shop.

I'm not a fan of Mongoose at all, since the Starship Troopers situation, as well as the way that they handle thier other products, so lets hope that they don't crap all over it like they do with most of thier products.

How about you? what are your thoughts on this sort of thing, even from the standpoint of a dog like mongoose? Do I give them a second chance to screw me, or do I forget them and stick with the old school stuff off of Feebay?

Interesting news. I was a huge TW:2000 fan back in the day and the system was pretty well thought out. I wonder if they will update the timeline to the current with the 3rd WW taking place from different causes.

It was a pretty cool game. I actually played a lot of it on the computer.

If they make miniatures that might make this more interesting. Otherwise I am not so sure how this will do from a business point of view.

I liked it but you spent so long making a character only to watch said character die the first time you were shot...I put it up there with Call of Cthulu, nice game but zero fun for people that like character building.

That's not entirely fair though as your character can die in an RP game whether it be Deathwatch or one of the White Wolf RP games like Vampire/Werewolf. If some PC characters do not die then the GM is not very good.

This is not much of a surprise, since Twilight: 2013 was roundly eviscerated by critics for some truly abysmal world-building. I wonder what Mongoose with do with it, though. The basic premise of the game is irrevocably dated and there's very little demand for RPGs of its kind on the modern marketplace.

Generalstoner wrote:That's not entirely fair though as your character can die in an RP game whether it be Deathwatch or one of the White Wolf RP games like Vampire/Werewolf. If some PC characters do not die then the GM is not very good.

First of all, not all RPGs are about combat and killing. Second of all, not all RPGs which do include combat are about PC death. While PC mortality is totally OK in a game, it is also possible to WANT to tell a story about a band of heroes who succeed. Plenty of games have the THREAT of PC death, without having PC deaths. To use a personal example, I ran a weekly D&D game for the last two years, and never had a PC die. All of them (but one) were on the verge of death multiple times, but no one ever died. Heroic interventions were often necessary (by other PCs, not by me), but no actual deaths. I think all of my players thoroughly enjoyed it, and I think I am at least a better than average GM.

Ultimately, the complaint is not about PC death. The complaint is about a system which has a great deal of character creation time and energy, which is undone by one bullet. It's fine to have a highly lethal system if character creation is quick, and character development is easy. It's fine to have a highly lethal system if there's a lot of stuff to do which doesn't involve exposing yourself to that lethality (Call of Cthulhu, where you can spend a lot of time investigating and exploring and learning). It's fine to have a highly lethal system if you have some way for the players to intervene in that system for their characters (Deathwatch, with burning Fate points, GURPS with Luck, etc.).

But on the other hand, if you have a system where you can spend a good deal of time creating a character, and the system/setting then demands that you put that character into situations where he can die pretty much immediately, a lot of people aren't going to like it. It's not as bad as the old Traveller system, where you could die DURING character creation, but it is still a frustrating waste of gaming time.

Ok.

This is a little from Wiki on Twilight:2000, for those uninitiated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_2000

One of the things that was great was that the character generation was pretty streamlined that you could take about an hour or so and put a guy together, and then get stuck in with what came in the box. The material that was provided gave GM's and players food for extensive playing, a feeling that both player and GM had a stake in the world, and that games could go great as either one off's, or in succesion, where your actions had impact on the game world at large.
One or two of the things that sucked about the original system was that the combat rules... sucked. Both in terms of mechanics, and in the real world of playing a game, combat either dragged out for an hour, or it boiled down to, "Hey, your guy just got shot in the arm with a 120MM cannon and took a couple of hit points to your arm, leg, chest and head. You were wearing this and that, You were hiding in a vehicle, which was hidden in a woodline, so you only took a couple of hits, but your helmet and vest are wiped out..." (True story example.)
The second edition didn't do much favors to the material, even though the game had a tight premise, a great amount of material, and the storylines that were to be had hit hard and had the potential to be graphic. The combination of the Merc line gave it some help, but the demise of GDW didn't help the game system, If I remember at the time, GDW had some great titles in the mix, and along with tem, numerous heavy hitters of the industry were going the way of the dodo, either because of the new advent of computer games, or the shake and bake gaming "Giants" that cropped up becuase of click games, devovled D and D, and others, to upstarts that took old titles and crapped all over them. ( FASA, WOTC, WIZKIDZ, Mongoose, Etc.)

As to the whole, " Oh, your guy died too quickly, so the game sucked." That was an issue with most RPG systems, and still continues to be an issue today. In any game you play, this comes to a head when you either have crap GMing, or if you have weak sauce games to begin with.

Some of my favorite gaming didn't even have to do with combat, on some levels. It was more about "Hey, your teams involved with this and that, how are you going to deal with it." Be it the Keep of the Borderlands, or playing T:2000 in New York City, after having fought your way over half of the east coast through several other interrelated adventures.
I even played a couple of Cthulhu games where it is almost a matter of course to be driven insain, killed, and ate by either your fellow players, or the fun things to be had in the world of Call of Cthulhu. In the new 40K game, your guy can come out of the gate and die in thier first fight. they don't even need to be shot, either. It boils down to the RPG elements that make the game what it is.

I think my favorite is a happy medium, where you make up the guy, go for broke, and play. The dieing is secondary in the story. The play is the thing, so to speak.
If you have a good, or even excellent group, like some of the ones I've had the fortune to play with, that adds big pluses too. SOme of the players, or even some of the GM's bring it to the table and really make playing almost as bad ass as watching a great movie, or playing video games. Of course there are alot of suck GM's too. to the point of making even something as rudimentary as character creation a chore.
I remember when Traveller was a rudimentary 3 or four black books, and almost like a subscription. THAT was almost torture. I played a whole whopping one half of a game of that system. The game died, not the character.
If you are interested in looking over the T:2013 stuff, there is a batch of stuff over at Drivethrough RPG. They have a fair amount of material, if your interested in trying it out, as well.

As a military guy, the game was meh. As part of the T:2000 mythos, it was nice to see that someone was actually doing something with it. I only wish that I could have put pen to paper and put something into the game. I know for a fact that even some of my one off's would have put the generalized generic meh to shame.

As for an outdated game, I'd have to say Yes and No. The issue that I see from my standpoint is that people don't like playing something that they already do in real life, so the game can come in as some sort of a let down to some.
I could easily see playing T:2000 being updated and the stuff from the moduals even being remastered and revamped with updates such as "What happened next..." sorts of things.
such examples I can think of being, What happened to NYC, after you extablished a bastion, a couple of TCP's and a couple of firebases. Does the city then continue to become an excersize in asset management, or do you revamp a new modual, beginning with the successes that were suppoed to have happened after the fact of Modual #1.

Another example would be something like Boomer. There were a couple of hairy situations in character, where you had several options develop for nearly worldwide ramifications, yet they were not evolved, nore were they dealt with in the endgame. Red Star, Lone Star? the same thing. They ended up the game trying to do a couple of SITREP books, but they devolved into nice fluff, without any real relevence.

I like game systems that have a beginning, middle, and end-ish. When you do to players like you do with things like Shadowrun, D and D, hell, even T:2000, where you pretty much cut your own throat as a game, then expect people to come back and relearn a whole new way of play, especially in the advent of the Mongoose thing, I as a paying consumer am left kind of miffed. Who's fault is that? the players? The GM?
Is there any real thought other then bottom line profit given when people do that?
What do you think of D and D with thier near WOW mentality, or the advent of regurgitating it as an almost computer driven game?
Are P and P games well and truly dead, as Mr. Sprange would have you believe? or is there a chance for a reprieve and resurgence, as FF is leading us to really believe?

I was part of the writing team on T2013, not hugely involved with the world building side of things but peripherally I guess. the bulk of it was in place before I joined. I mostly did the fiction (which was then edited to buggery in one case to make it read like I didn't have a clue about geography) and the equipment section.

The nature of the apocalypse in 2013 was subject to a few heated discussion in the back rooms of the T2013 forums while the game was being written. The issue was that the design team and our stash of political / military / informed hangers on couldn't find a single reason for the world going boom in a modern setting that wouldn't sounds forced. Russia had no call to nuke us, The Chinese didn't either. And the groups that potentially had the will to do so didn't have the capability. So we were stuck with going back and creating something that left the world as devastated at the T2K nuclear exchanges without being able to say that the two big boys on the block getting annoyed with each other. We could have gone back and re-hashed the original T2K setting, dropped the game back into 1999/2000 but that would limit what the gear fondlers could select and left out a lot of interesting technological developments that make survival a little more viable.

My other issue, after the game was out the plans for future releases changed focus from world building that would have filled out a lot of the blanks and explained why a few of the more outlandish choices in the history (the Chinese invasion for example) had come to pass, to gun books. which was the point at which I sort of dropped out of the team (I had a few world books part written and was being asked to focus on firearms manuals.

Am I glad someone else has the game now? Yes, but only because I'm a monster T2k fan. It was the first RPG I GM'd age 12 and it's still a world I go back to even now. I'm running a T2Kesque campaign every Thursday night currently.

What do I hope they do with it. TBH I'm a fan of just going back and re-writing the original T2K history and setting the game back then but making it more palatable / possible for people from other countries to see themselves as the good guys rather than having the Russians / Chinese being the big bad as we have to remember that some of the countries that used to be the enemy during the cold war era are now emerging markets for RPG games.

Either way, i look forward to the new system with some interest and trepidation.

When you pick up a game secondary and are able to use the material by license, does that license include all of the original material, or just the name rights? Even when the game first started out, were there no plans for upkeeping the canon, or already established background and world?

I for one really don't want mongoose anywhere near the game, with the craptastic track record for failure that they continually spin as success. If anything, I wouldn't mind buying this one out and revamping the original game with upgraded and updated material. If one were so inclined, where does one go about receiving the permissions to revamp outdated and out of issue games?

Does anybody know exactly how Mongoose stays in business? I want to like them, but they do seem to have a nasty habit of, for lack of a better word, killing a lot of great ideas.

Polonius wrote:Does anybody know exactly how Mongoose stays in business? I want to like them, but they do seem to have a nasty habit of, for lack of a better word, killing a lot of great ideas.

They put out a lot of stuff, mostly in the RPG market, and do so relatively cheaply, I think. I know when I was into A Call to Arms they had a pretty healthy web-following on the forums, although at times it seemed like it was mostly a couple clubs using the forums.

Polonius wrote:I want to like them, but they do seem to have a nasty habit of, for lack of a better word, killing a lot of great ideas.

Sounds like the GW philosophy of company management...

I assume it's more that Mongoose has a few 'cash cow'* and does a lot of experiments, trying to expand. They were a big d20 OGL company for a while, as I remember, doing everything from their own splatbooks to pocket rulebooks of the OGL material. I'm kind of ambivalent about them, personally, but certainly have no ill will.They brought back Paranoia, after all.

*not meant in a bad way. One of the few things I remember from that business course I took many, many years ago is that one stage of a product or product line is the 'cash cow' when it produces cash regularly for minimal risk.

T2000 was great and one of the most frequently played games when we were yound uns. It pretty much died for me when I joined the Army though and figured out that no matter what my mechanical skill was the damn hummer wasnt going anywhere without any glow plugs...

As for Mongoose getting it well they are a company I really really want to like but no matter how good the ideas seem at the time Ive pretty much accepted the fact that the idea is going no where and will be unsupported and left hanging in the breeze.

I played original T2000 when it was first released in the mid-80s and had some real world relevance. That all went away in 1989, of course.

I remember enjoying it at the time, but not as much as other, fantasy/SF role-playing games such as RuneQuest or Call of Cthulhu.

T2K had a gun nut appeal, because all the weapons were real world. The setting was drab and miserable. There wasn't much point to anything, it was just survival by if necessary killing other people in the same situation as you.

I don't remember anything about the game mechanisms, but I think some of the old generation RPGs have aged badly. There's no reason why a good background can't be updated to a modern set of rules, though. A military based game like T2K poses the dilemma that the effect of modern weapons makes it important never to get hit.

TW:2k came out and then the movie Red Dawn. That next weekend we started our own campaign set in a Colorado town that lasted to Graduation. Best campaign ever.

Grot 6 wrote:When you pick up a game secondary and are able to use the material by license, does that license include all of the original material, or just the name rights? Even when the game first started out, were there no plans for upkeeping the canon, or already established background and world??

When I was working on it everything had to be passed by the current licence holder. All we had was a right to create a game using the name and basic concept. depends what Mongoose have negotiated I guess.

As long as they don't turn it into a D20 modern setting I'll be happy. Though that being said I still play most of my modern games using the old Chameleon Eclectic "Millennium's End" system.