From: eebonar@sn01.sncc.lsu.edu (Dave Bonar)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.advocacy
Subject: Re: Why TW2000 eats wormy dog turds.
Keywords: TW2000
Date: 14 Sep 92 16:22:50 GMT
Reply-To: eebonar@sn01.sncc.lsu.edu
Organization: News and Views from LSU
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.3-4
Nntp-Posting-Host-[nntpd-8114]: sn01.sncc.lsu.edu

In article <1992Sep13.060829.8129@fang.att.com>, bcd@fang.att.com (Brendan Dwyer) writes...
> 
>    TW2000 has got some major flaws to it.  

	Yes it does.  So does every other system.

>They say each charater must eat
>three kilos(6.6lbs) of food per day.  Yeah (said in a Wayne Campbell voice).
>The U.S. Army tries 3500 calories per day per troop.  If you ate 6.6 lbs
>of rice per day that would be more than 3500 calories.  BTW, the Viet Cong
>used to survive on a handful of rice per day for weeks on end.  

	At first I thought this was screwy also.  After some thought I'm
	not so sure.  For one thing, the food requirements given are to keep
	a Westerner (generally larger and thus needing more food) in top
	condition.  If you are willing to accept being slightly underfed,
	and thus willing to accept some drops in stats, you can get by on
	less.  

	Additionally, and more important in my opinion, is that the 3kg
	figure is the carrying weight.  This isn't automatically the same
	as the food weight.  If you're foraging for your 'wild' food I tend
	to think you're finding fruits, tubers, wild grains, and meat from
	hunting/fishing.  In all cases you've got a fair amount of waste
	(cores in fruit, bad parts in tubers or fruit, bones in meat, parts
	that go bad because you don't have a fridge).  You still have to 
	carry this around and it counts in the 3kg.

	Of course you can always stop and prepare the food to render it into
	more carriable state.  In that case I'd say that you're ending up 
	with something similar to 'civilized food' or MREs.  Then you only
	need between 1.5 and 2kg

>Next, a
>M1911 .45 cal pistol does 2D6 of damage per round.  Let's say Chuck "Black
>Death" Licata walks into a building with his M1911 in hand.  Suddenly, a
>Soviet soldier enters the room.  Chuck raises his automatic pistol and
>fires off one round which strikes the Soviet in the head.  Let's  say
>this Soviet is named "Androv the Average" which means he has a constitution
>of 5 (on a scale of 1 to 10).  That means he has a 10 hit points for his head.
>Chuck inflicts an average amount of damage (3.5 pts per die) for a total of
>7 points.  Androv has received a "slight wound" according to the rules.
>Let's say Chuck has a great shot which inflicts 12 points of damage.  Androv
>now has a "serious wound".

	As many people have noted, the damage that guns do to characters
	is too low from a realism standpoint due to playability.  I've 
	solved that to my satisfaction by removing STR from the hit point
	equations and dividing the head hit points by 2.  This effectively
	divides character hit points by 2.  This does make the system more
	deadly.  I like it, but, it does require more planning by the GM
	so that players who are used to the normal rules (I let him shoot
	me in the stomach and calmly shoot him back) don't die too quickly.

>Now I 
>understand why this game never became more popular.

	It didn't become popular because its a niche product.  Its not in
	the big role playing game classes (cyber, fantasy, supers) and
	its put out by a smaller company.

Dave
__________
Dave Bonar
eebonar@lsuvax.sncc.lsu.edu
__________