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Hi all -- new here, this discussion is what finally got me to make an account! I think it's a fascinating game design discussion because it highlights both the problems and the unique offering of the Twilight world and why it has persisted for so long... but is also hard to get on the table!

It's a lethal setting and, unless you are a very forgiving GM, tends to almost require players to have a fairly good knowledge of tactics and survival. Much like the real deal, learning on the job is likely to end badly. Which in turn makes it hard to find players in the first place and harder still to keep them engaged if their characters keep dying. So in recent years I've transitioned to more heroic/cinematic settings that don't feel the need to be so "gritty."

Related, but not the same, is the desire for minutiae in technical details. The irony is I think this is more important to gamers (of all sorts) than it is to most people in real life. I've known actual SF soldiers who could care less what service rifle they were handed or what accessories they put on it. Then there's the other end which agonizes over each and every detail. I think this second facet has been mostly served by media and less by reality... certainly less than the reality of surviving in a post-apocalyptic realm where the main requirement is "does it work or not?" Most 19 year olds in the sandbox don't have the luxury of caring, either. So I say treat all functionally equivalent weapons as more or less the same, minus a stat point or two here and there, and give them practical distinctions that bring out personality where it matters. Enable a burst action, or a full-auto action. Make one weapon unwieldy or awkward to reload and another one particularly reliable (I know what I'd choose).

I've run into an equal mix of players that are the more munchkin sort that love loot and love anything that gives them a 1% mechanical advantage until they get to the next 1% or whatever. And then the reverse, people who do not know or care about these details and are there to roleplay. Needless to say, there's some tension at the table when the two types intermingle, so I'm in favor of any system which smooths over that divide and keeps people coming back. Simple, understandable terms that enable tactical options (at some benefit or cost) achieves that.

Personally, I favor functional abstraction that provides meaningful distinction without detracting from gameplay. As a player, I don't particularly want to track my 22 bullets -- oh wait, did I remember to mark off the 5 that I used last encounter? As a GM, I very much extra do not want that. Particularly as we know that some players will try to fudge things in their favor through "absent-mindedness" whenever they can. What works just as well, with far less fiddlyness, is just tracking a general "state." Do you have a surplus of ammo, a normal load, are you running low, or are you critical? Anyone who has served in a fireteam will recognize this both for its simplicity, speed, and functional implications.

I'm using this in my current system which is intended really only for tabletop combat, and it works. It could work just the same for food, fuel, medicine...

Welcome to the forums, omnipus!

You share some very interesting ideas! For certain, a system that tracks a general ammo "level" instead of tracking every single individual bullet could be a great compromise - not to mention, convey a considerably more realistic "feel" for the setting.

So far, I'd just seen it as basically a choice between a traditional bullet-by-bullet tally, or something akin to the completely random "I just put a full magazine into my rifle but due to a bad turn with the dice, the first shot I fired turned out to empty the mag" system e.g. ALIEN has.
And given those options, I'd prefer the first one, every time...

But what you suggest would seem much preferable to either! Could you share some details of how your system works?

Twilight 2000 has been a long time, for those who want a lot of crunch and hyper detail, those rules exist. I for one am very interested in exploring that world with some simpler but innovative rules that speed up the game and leave more time for role playing and storytelling in the world of Twilight 2000.

I think having differentiation among the player characters is important. The rules need to support enough differences that the players are not all twins. As their is no magic, or psionics, a greater breakdown of skills and abilities, with an appropriate points to spend seems the answer.

I hope it does not use stickers like Forbidden Lands. I also hope that the scale of the encounter map is not too large. I do not think the designers should make the assumption that travel will be very fast, or even that the players are equipped with vehicles or even if that are that they are travelling fast. If the players are travelling fast and travel through multiple hexes in a day just let them have multiple encounters, perhaps with the disadvantage of missing things, ambushes ect.

Really looking forward to the game.

Hi Everyone,

Looking forward to this game too. Personally, I think in between the various games Free League has published so far, we have many of the components that Twilight2000 require. The whole experience, trekking across territory with limited resources (requires tight resource management - ammo, fuel, food) sounds very similar to Mutant: Year zero. Equally, base building is included in several of the games has (M:YZ, Forbidden Lands, Coriolis) and should be pretty straight forward to adapt. Personally, I think it might be cool if you would be allowed to choose whether your base is mobile (a caravan of vehicles, a ship or even horse drawn carts) or stationary, like an old bunker or castle. Scrounging the countryside for supplies, foraging for food etc is all included in Forbidden Lands. The whole sandbox experience from existing games is also perfect for Twilight2000. I agree tech/vehicle will be important, but I thought this was managed well in Coriolis, so again shouldn't be hard to adapt.

One of the challenges I see is with character. In many of the existing games, there are multiple races, professions, talents/powers etc. This allows for the creation of diverse characters. How can you make characters stand out in Twilight2000, especially if tech is pretty streamlined and you want to keep it realistic/down to earth? Sure, there are different military roles the characters may have had, but is that enough to make memorable characters that stand out?

Food for thought.

Fredrik

So far, I'd just seen it as basically a choice between a traditional bullet-by-bullet tally, or something akin to the completely random "I just put a full magazine into my rifle but due to a bad turn with the dice, the first shot I fired turned out to empty the mag" system e.g. ALIEN has.
And given those options, I'd prefer the first one, every time...

But what you suggest would seem much preferable to either! Could you share some details of how your system works?

Thanks!

My system is for a tabletop system on a slightly larger scale (ie, multiple squads, 30 seconds to a minute per turn), so it wouldn't directly translate. But essentially every unit is in a green/yellow/red/black ammo state, and that state determines the default "aggressiveness" when shooting, or how much lead you fling downrange. Ie, the game bases values on behavior: when you're loaded up with ammo you're pretty liberal with it, and as you start to run out, you become much more stingy. On each attack, there is a chance that your ammo state will degrade. You have options available to give 'em both barrels, so to speak, trading a higher chance of ammo loss for a greater chance to hit on each roll. Once you hit black status, the only option is to get resupply from another unit.

So, it leans a little bit more towards your ALIEN example, but with a little more nuance. But, like I said, this is on a bigger scale than what really feels "right" for an RPG I think. For instance, I don't track reloads at all; it's assumed that's happening when it needs to happen and does not have a significant impact on anything. In an RPG, you'd want more granularity. A turn scale in seconds rather than a minute. I still think something conceptually similar could be adapted, although at the moment I'm not totally certain how. But I definitely also think that tracking every bullet is even sillier than abstraction, even if "realism" is your goal. While you're in a fight, you don't have that level of knowledge, and neither should players or characters in most cases!

One of the challenges I see is with character. In many of the existing games, there are multiple races, professions, talents/powers etc. This allows for the creation of diverse characters. How can you make characters stand out in Twilight2000, especially if tech is pretty streamlined and you want to keep it realistic/down to earth? Sure, there are different military roles the characters may have had, but is that enough to make memorable characters that stand out?

I think this is a fundamental problem of the setting, or any realistic/modern setting. "God created man, Colonel Colt made them equal." Realistically lethal guns remove a lot of the nuance of characters by necessity.

That said, I always appreciated the old GDW character-building systems which walked you through the entire history of the character and gave a lot of possible hooks for background and personality.

I also think that good roleplayers can create meaningful, memorable characters with really no mechanical incentive or basis whatsoever. It's great when a book provides guidance on how to do that, and ideally systems it can hook into to support those decisions, but fundamentally I've found they're always based around obligations, motivations, and morals. Systems that support and encourage those lend themselves to more believable characters than those that don't.

I'd say that adapting your system to a per-magazine basis rather than per-unit or per-combatant could be a way to go.

[going into stream-of-consciouness rambling mode]
Say you have the same four levels - "full-ish", "somewhere in the middle", "almost run out" and "empty". Say then that for every three attacks, your level goes down by one - unless you get the fumble die, in which case you drop one level immediately.
Ammo could perhaps be found in "levels" ... you could find e.g. four levels of 9mm Parabellum, which might enable you to e.g. fill one empty mag to "full-ish" and have one level left to top up another magazine, or fill two empty mags to "somewhere in the middle"?
The obvious drawback from a standpoint of realism is that a level would then always be a level, no matter what weapon you'd apply it to - but one single "level" in a 36-round SMG mag would represent a greater number of actual rounds than an older pistol's entire magazine! ...so scratch that. An alternative might be to define the levels on a per-weapon (or even per-mag, for weapons with a choice of magazine sizes) basis. Then ammo would be found in rounds, and it's up to the players to decide which weapons or magazines they put them in - ten rounds could represent four levels for the pistol magazine, or one level for the SMG mag.
The next obvious drawback is that this creates an incentive for players to always go for the smallest mags possible. There would be no reason for anyone to want the 100-round drum for their CBJ MS - you'd still only get a maximum of nine attacks from it, so you might as well have the 20-round mag; then those 100 rounds would give you up to 45 attacks! So ... one might instead consider having one level represent a different number of attacks for different magazine sizes. For an eight-round mag, you could get two attacks per level; for an 18-round mag, three.
Here I see a need to differentiate semi-automatic or bolt action weapons from fully automatic ones. An 18-round mag in a Glock 17 could give you three attacks per level; the same mag in a Glock 18 could hardly give you more than two. And a 30-ish-round magazine in a full-auto weapon would give you three attacks per level. One might also consider how to handle when people fire short, controlled bursts at full auto, vs. just spraying ... I'm sort of assuming controlled bursts for normal attacks, but perhaps a "spray" consumes one full level?
But say you switch to single-shot fire (assuming your weapon has a selector). Then you could conceivably get, say, eight or ten attacks from one level. The 100-round drum could give you eight attacks per level ... but I'd say anything more than five starts to be too much bother to faff around with.
So ... say you cap it at five attacks per level. A magazine could thus give anything from one to five attacks per level, set at the weapon's default firing mode. Go from full auto to single shots, you get one attack more per level; go from single shots to full auto, you get one attack less.
So for instance, for full automatic weapons one might divide it so that a ≤10-round mag gives 1 attack/level; an 11-20-round mag gives 2 attacks/level; a 21-40-round mag gives 3 attacks/level; a 41-70-round mag gives 4 attacks/level; and a >70-round mag gives 5 attacks/level. (Some weapons might have special rules ... e.g. the HK G11's 45-round mag would be a 4 attacks/level mag at full auto, but a 2 attacks/level mag in burst mode, whereas the M16A2's burst mode would still make it a full auto weapon with a 3 attacks/level mag, but without the spray attack option.) For a single-shot weapon, the division might be that a ≤5-round mag gives 1 attack/level; a 6-10-round mag gives 2 attacks/level; an 11-20-round mag gives 3 attacks/level; a 21-30-round mag gives 4 attacks/level; and a >30-round mag gives 5 attacks/level.
For ease of bookkeeping, I'm thinking that you should never keep track of fractional levels, other than specifically for counting down the attacks to the next level; you never keep book of them, or carry them forward anywhere. So for instance, if you cease a firefight or switch mags "mid-level", remaining attacks at that level are lost, and the mag drops to the next level. Or, if you are at "full-ish" with a three-attacks-per-level mag, make one "controlled burst" attack, and then make a "spray" attack, the spray consumes the full "somewhere in the middle" level and leaves you at "almost run out"; the two attacks you nominally had remaining at the "full-ish" level aren't carried forward. And eight rounds in a 36-round SMG mag can only count as a "almost run out" 3 attacks/level mag, never a "full-ish" 1 attack/level mag.
Not mathematically perfect; the numbers don't mesh everywhere ... but might still be workable, and would seem to tick most of the boxes, as far as I can see...
...or something like that. That's what came to mind anyway, off the top of me noggin.
[exit rambling mode]

I could see using ammunition-shaped tokens at the table to keep track of the attacks...

.

But I definitely also think that tracking every bullet is even sillier than abstraction, even if "realism" is your goal. While you're in a fight, you don't have that level of knowledge, and neither should players or characters in most cases!

.
I've never been in a real, live, life-or-death firefight, but I participated in countless training exercises using blank ammo in the military, armed with a variety of weapons. Not the same thing, I know; far from it, but as close as I've ever been to it, so that's the experience I'm basing my musings on.

And in those situations, yes: with the fully automatic weapons, you could never know exactly how many shots you had left in your magazine. But I feel you always did have a fair hunch of where your ammo level was ... at least, once you were past the total "noob" level. And given a choice between the completely random binary system and tracking individual rounds, I feel the latter clearly represents the lesser evil - it comes at least a bit closer to how I actually remember it.


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EDIT:
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To mitigate the "wall of text" above, I'll summarise my ramblings in a more easily ingested form:

Magazines have four levels:

• 3: "full-ish"
• 2: "somewhere in the middle"
• 1: "almost run out"
• 0: "empty"

.
Rules are as follows:

• Each level allows a certain number of attacks, as per weapon.
• Once that number of attacks have been made, the magazine drops to the next level.
• If you roll a fumble on your attack roll, the magazine immediately drops to the next level.
• Spraying fire at full auto will consume one full level of the magazine’s capacity.
• Fractional levels aren’t tracked or carried over beyond counting down the attacks to the next level of the current mag during the current firefight.

.
Example 1: If you are at Level 2 with a three-attacks-per-level mag, have spent the first attack of the level, and then roll a fumble on the second attack, the level immediately drops down to Level 1 - the last attack at that level is lost.
If however you have expended the first two attacks of the level, and then roll a fumble on the last attack, the mag immediately drops down to the next remaining level, being 0 – the magazine is now empty, and must be switched.
Example 2: If you cease a firefight or switch mags with attacks remaining at the level you are on, the remaining attacks are not carried over, and the mag is considered to be at the next level below.
Example 3: If you are at Level 3 with a three-attacks-per-level mag, first make one "controlled burst" attack, and then make a "spray" attack, the spray consumes the full Level 2 and leaves you at Level 1; the two attacks you nominally had remaining at Level 3 aren't carried over.
.

Individual weapon stats will state:

1. how many attacks each level represents, for each magazine size available for that weapon
2. how many rounds refill one level, for each magazine size available to that weapon

For weapons with auto/single shot selectors, the stated number of attacks/level assumes short bursts fired at automatic. Switching to single shot increases the number of attacks per level by one, to a maximum of five attacks per level. If the magazine already has five attacks per level, the number of attacks does not increase.


In writing out the weapons stats, the following guidelines are followed:

Full auto weapons:

• ≤10-round mag – 1 attack/level – min 2 rounds to fill 1 level
• 11-20-round mag – 2 attacks/level – min 4 rounds to fill 1 level
• 21-40-round mag – 3 attacks/level – min 8 rounds to fill 1 level
• 41-70-round mag – 4 attacks/level – min 15 rounds to fill 1 level
• >70-round mag – 5 attacks/level – min 25 rounds to fill 1 level

Some weapons will have special rules:
- the HK G11's 45-round mag would be a 4 attacks/level mag at full auto, but a 2 attacks/level mag in burst mode.
- the M16A2's burst mode would still make it a full auto weapon with a 3 attacks/level mag, but with no spray attack option.

Single-shot weapons:

• ≤5-round mag – 1 attack/level – min 1 round to fill 1 level
• 6-10-round mag – 2 attacks/level – min 2 rounds to fill 1 level
• 11-20-round mag – 3 attacks/level – min 4 rounds to fill 1 level
• 21-30-round mag – 4 attacks/level – min 7 rounds to fill 1 level
• >30-round mag – 5 attacks/level – min 9 rounds to fill 1 level

I would say that all of that substantially overcomplicates it, to the point that you'd be better off going back to just tracking actual bullets all the time.

Using the basic system of "roughly how full is this magazine" would work. You're right that hugely varying magazine sizes make this a problem, however. In a non-RPG, I consider it a non-issue. Bullets, like money or food, tend to budget themselves. In other words, if you have them, you spend them. If you start to run low, you put yourself on a budget.

I personally am very happy with a system that gets the feeling right, with leeway for narrative at the expense of mechanical precision. I even encourage this in my tabletop rules. Tell a little ongoing story about why the dice showed what they did. "I fired again and again, chipping away at the corner of the wall he was hiding behind. I finally hit him just as the trigger goes click." It's easier to GM this sort of game (with decent players), it's more fun to share in the collaborative fiction, and it builds trust.

But, it simply doesn't work if you have munchkin/adversarial players. My solution is simply to not play with those people and not to invite them to my games. It is a tougher problem if you're publishing an entire book, especially if the book in question has a 30-year history of appealing to rivet counters.

So my solution would be "keep track of how many total actual bullets you have in the right calibers, but during actual gameplay we use this abstract system." Only go back to the numbers in between battles, when you have 3 empty magazines and 2 half empty ones and need to take ... consult weapon chart... 68 rounds out of your stash. Don't have them? Then you start with some magazines at yellow or worse.

Best of both worlds? I know there will still be some players that think they are super soldiers who hit every shot and count every bullet as it is fired. Those people are wrong (unless they have some incredible attribute) and I would simply use the authority of the GM to explain so.

Such an improvised seat-of-the-pants narrative approach -- and simply excluding the munchkins and others who don't "get it" from the table -- sounds really great for people like you and me; who have been playing RPG's for some time ... perhaps since the GDW editions, or even earlier.

But I'm assuming that Fria Ligan would prefer not to print the advisory "recommended for experienced role-players only" on their box. So, with respect for the fact that we've all been beginners at some point, some type of formalised system to also "ease" beginning players (and GM's!) into some kind of at least semi-narrative approach to handling ammo consumption during firefights would probably be beneficial.

As resource management in general -- and ammo very much in particular -- is a critical component in the Twilight setting, I feel that part ought not to just be left blank in the rules, as seems to be done in most other YZE games (where it isn't handled with a random binary full/empty system). Especially bearing in mind the reality of, and expectations stemming from, the property's 30-year history of appealing to rivet counters.

Didn't like what I came up with? That's completely fine with me! I just wrote down the first thing I came up with, as I came up with it (hence the back-and-forth rambling wall of text) just to get something down as a starting point, so it wasn't meant as a serious proposal for actual rules anyway.

Which begs the question however -- bearing in mind that this thread is about what we'd actually like to see (or not) in the published YZE edition of Twilight, rather than what house rules we're going to use for it -- what would you propose? Or would you just go with only having decent players, and leave it at that?

Like Omnipus, I came up with an ammunition status type system for handling 'large' (platoon sized) combats, since I really wasn't going to track ammunition individually for 50+ combatants. If the new edition features any sort of rules for that situation ('Ruins of Warsaw'?), I think that is the way to go.

Regarding individual character ammo use.
In practice, I'm not sure that there is a real problem with tracking ammo. It may reflect my age and the age of the games I've previously played, but I've tracked arrow use in Runequest, for example. Yes, you need to trust the people you're playing with (but hopefully you do).
This (each character precisely knowing their ammo state) may not be fully realistic, but brings home the limited resource situation they find themselves in. It's easy enough for one player to be 'quartermaster' and track group supplies, such that at the end of a combat encounter, each other player says 'I used 24 rounds of 7.62*39' (or more likely, '24 rounds for the AK') or whatever, and the quartermaster tracks off the resupply from the group stash.
Bear in mind also that the player group have to track food and fuel too, and depending on how the rules fit together, healing time for wounds/disease, wear value for vehicles, etc.
Again, this is a limited resource, 'make-do-and-mend' environment, so is (vaguely) a resource management game. Trying to simplify that sort of moves away from some of the core aspects.

A couple of other thoughts:
1st edition didn't track rounds of ammo, it used 'shots', where 1 shot was (approximately) 3 rounds of ammo. I suspect the main driver for this was the (then new) adoption of the M16A2 with its three round burst. Notably, 2nd edition switched to actual rounds of ammunition (which if I recall correctly was driven by player demand).
We may be guilty of saying 'well, us old-timers could track ammo use, of course, but these you whipper-snappers just can't handle it...'. This level of 'crunch' may make new 4th Ed different to other RPG systems, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Also, one other thing triggered by Omnipus's line of 'super soldiers that hit every shot': how often should the target be hit? As I understand it, most (small arms) shots fired in a combat situation don't (hit, that is).
Should most shots miss, but should there also be some form of suppression mechanism? Or a 'moral hit' where near misses don't inflict physical harm, but build up to the point where the character or NPC goes to ground / retreats / surrenders?
(A critical hit means your bullet strikes home; a 'normal hit' inflicts one fear point (or whatever you want to call it); when fear => the NPC/character break point, they...run away/surrender/whatever)