15 cents a page in 1985 dollars, for those keeping scores, issues of Marvel and DC comics were at their mid 80s price of 75 cents an issue, a jump from the 60 cents in the early 80s. Wonder how your unit's intelligence officer reacted to Team Yankee, though I don't remember if you get a broader understanding of the war besides the point of view units.When T2K originally came out way back in nineteen eight-[mumble], I was an active duty soldier in the US Army.
It INSTANTLY replaced all other RPGs in my squadron's geek crew [squadron = battalion, I was in cavalry unit]. It was awesome! We got all the toys and none of the 'stupid shit' our commanders laid on us. Yes, I know now that there was a purpose to most [but certainly not all] the stupid shit, but 19-year-old me was wholly ignorant of that fact
And yes, it WAS surreal to think that the 8th Shock Army across the way could cross the line and that we'd all be stranded in Europe without a way home. That was the first reality check the game gave us. I was reading a bunch of the stuff one night on Charge of Quarters duty and got to talking to the staff NCO who was my boss that night. I told him about the Great Game [the GDW strategic house game that provided the bridge between T2K and 2300AD] and the strategies used by both sides. When I mentioned that 90 percent of the nukes targeted oil production, transfer, and storage facilities instead of the 'usual suspects' that most pundits thought would get hit, he thought about it for a second and said, "Damn... Given everything we know about their capabilities, that a pretty damned good guess as to what they'd do."
The next day, the squadron S2 [the battalion intelligence officer] asked to borrow the game to Xerox the canned history. And this was back when there was exactly THREE Xerox machines in the whole squadron... one each for Operations, Intelligence and Personnel. The cost per copy was something like 15 cents per page in 1985 dollars and the Army accounted for every single cent of it.
[The Star Fleet Battles guys were cutting their ship diagram books apart with X-acto knives and carefully putting the pages in document protectors so they could play the game using grease pencils]
So, yeah, T2K rang a lot of bells way back when. And as we dug into the rules it became clear to us just how easy is was to die from utterly non-combat related causes. One guy in the Bradley IFV gets a cough and all the sudden everybody in the crew has pneumonia and there isn't a vial of antibiotics within 10 square klicks.... And that's not even getting into the NBC [CBRN to Europeans] causes, or social breakdown problems [banditry, farmers being driven off the land so no harvests, even cannibalism].
T2K can definitely give you the hooah-gasm, and it should at times, but it should also have those dirt-level sobering moments that remind your characters are much a part of the problems Poland/Sweden is suffering as the Communists are. No matter how noble your intentions, the locals would probably be a whole lot better off if you'd never come there to begin with.
Did your T2K group's characters make it home? Mine did, the Going Home module was one of the few we actually played through as opposed to just me as GM using it for background. Even took the train. Then they played around with Armies of the Night. I read through Howling Wilderness, and that just exceeded my bleak threshold at the time.