I'm interested in the genre of pre-1990 games where the gameplay was small military or mercenary squads in historical or contemporary settings. Could be pure RPG or some sort of wargame/tactical RPG hybrid.
I'm aware of:
Commando (SPI, 1979)
Merc (FGU, 1981)
Behind Enemy Lines (FASA, 1982)
Recon/Advanced Recon (Palladium, 1982-88)
(It's interesting that both Commando and Behind Enemy Lines were Origins Award winners for Best RPG rules of the year. This has to reflect the bias of the judges in regards to genre, I guess, as both of these games pretty much dropped into obscurity.)
Did I miss any? Have you played any of them?
Does Phoenix Command count?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Command (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Command)
Quote from: Tod13 on September 02, 2023, 08:29:28 PM
Does Phoenix Command count?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Command (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Command)
Indeed, thanks!
We never played Phoenix Command. It was way, way too complicated. It would actually make a really cool basis of a complete/complex computer combat simulation.
We played Living Steel - a much simplified form of Phoenix Command. The aliens in it were cool. Think Predators, but they weren't after trophies, just wanted to fight. They'd lay aside high tech gear to fight animals, so the fight would be more fun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Steel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Steel)
Twilight 2000 circa 1984 by Games Designer Workshop
Had it, looked at it, and did dick-all with it (1st and 2nd edition, by the way) but after many moons in Uncle Sugar's Oil Stealers' Union afterwards, I think I could appreciate it and do something with the game moreso nowadays.
Depending on how one allows speculative elements, there is:
Twilight 2000 by Frank Chadwick (1984) from GDW
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight:_2000
Delta Force by William H. Keith, Jr. (1986) from Task Force Games
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Force:_America_Strikes_Back!
Freedom Fighters by J. Andrew Keith (1986) from Fantasy Games Unlimited
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Fighters_(role-playing_game)
The Price of Freedom by Greg Costikyan (1986) from West End Games
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Price_of_Freedom_(role-playing_game)
Of these, the only one I've played is Twilight: 2000. It is pretty good, but in my experience, it came down to mostly wargaming. It was hard to get into the role-playing elements in a military command structure.
Quote from: jhkim on September 02, 2023, 09:09:01 PM
Depending on how one allows speculative elements, there is:
Twilight 2000 by Frank Chadwick (1984) from GDW
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight:_2000
Delta Force by William H. Keith, Jr. (1986) from Task Force Games
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Force:_America_Strikes_Back!
Freedom Fighters by J. Andrew Keith (1986) from Fantasy Games Unlimited
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Fighters_(role-playing_game)
The Price of Freedom by Greg Costikyan (1986) from West End Games
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Price_of_Freedom_(role-playing_game)
Of these, the only one I've played is Twilight: 2000. It is pretty good, but in my experience, it came down to mostly wargaming. It was hard to get into the role-playing elements in a military command structure.
Wow, I suspected there were a few more in this genre. And what the heck was going on with the Keith brothers going head-to-head with games in the same genre in the same year?
Flying Buffalo's Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes lands on the edge of this as does TSR's Top Secret and Top Secret SI. HERO's Danger International and Espionage are also in the general territory. FGU's Aftermath is more post apocalyptic but is heavy on detailed guns. Similarly The Morrow Project is a postapocalyptic game with military trained characters and detailed military hardware. ICE's Rolemaster Black Ops from the nineties might be too modern but broadly covers military and espionage scenarios leaning towards counter terrroristm. GURPS Special Forces might also be a bit late but covers a lot of military territory. Year of the Phoenix is a bit of the odd duck as the characters are American Astronauts who awaken above a communist dominated world.
M.I.S.S.I.O.N. was a game by the creator of KABAL. So the rules were probably incomplete, poorly writen, and unplayable but the map sheets were fantastic for the time.
What was the game with the Merc Style overlays by Chameleon Ecclectic? Edge of Tomorrow or something. Again, a little bit more black ops teams.
Millennium's End, I think it was.
Squad Leader might be of interest, though it's a wargame, not an rpg
There was the Merc 2000 supplement for the 2nd edition of Twilight 2000 that stripped out the WWIII assumptions and just made it a mercenary military RPG game. In the end, we ended up playing Merc 2000 more than vanilla T2000.
On the farther ends of the spectrum...
Morrow Project is conventional forces waking up from cryo in a more or less realistic post-apoc world.
Fringeworthy is also conventional forces (especially the early game) doing ring gate exploration of strange worlds years before Star Gate was a movie.
Both are from TriTac Games and gone through several iterations over the years.
As briefly mentioned above, GURPS can be a legitimate option—you have Special Forces, Black Ops, and the entire WWII line of books. Obviously more setting material than mechanics, these various books make it very possible to play a military-oriented campaign with GURPS.
The little-known Submachine Gun (https://www.pigames.net/store/product_info.php?cPath=25&products_id=1091) from 1981.
Quote from: jhkim on September 02, 2023, 09:09:01 PM
Of these, the only one I've played is Twilight: 2000. It is pretty good, but in my experience, it came down to mostly wargaming. It was hard to get into the role-playing elements in a military command structure.
And I'm not really understanding how that hardship exists at all, because my experiences with the game have been totally different. It's part and parcel of the T2K game that the military command structure has pretty much
completely broken down.
Most PCs aren't really even beholden to it anymore, especially if they aren't from local units of the initial assumed setting.
I've run a lot of both 1E and 4E, and I've never run into anyone who had that issue. I've always seen more of an attitude that since they were abandoned by their government in this godforsaken hellhole that they would do whatever it took to get home, and that included utterly disregarding any remaining command structure other than that established in their own group, by their own group, and to hell with anything that got in their way.
And with 4E, most of my fellow gamers were pretty much wanting to play something else because Russian troops invading Ukraine was starting up right at the time I pitched the game. One guy said he felt like it might be a little "too real" right then. I'll have to pitch it again soon since everyone's become less on edge over that stuff now.
Back in the 80's we would play Top Secret and many of the missions involved commando raids on installations. The basic rules don't have much in the way of weaponry, but there were expansions where many of the contemporary arms were statted out.
Later on Top Secret was revamped to Top Secret/SI, which brought the system more in line with the Star Frontiers mechanics. A definite upgrade.
Quote from: TheShadow on September 02, 2023, 08:25:56 PM
Have you played any of them?
I played a lot of
Behind Enemy Lines. It was great fun. Pretty lethal, though. We usually took the approach that each player ran multiple characters. (Often a fire team, but it depended on the number of players and the adventure. There were times a single player ran an entire squad.) I have the boxed set, the British commandos supplement, and the Guns of Navarone adventure.
Quote from: Dropbear on September 18, 2023, 03:04:57 PM
Quote from: jhkim on September 02, 2023, 09:09:01 PM
Of these, the only one I've played is Twilight: 2000. It is pretty good, but in my experience, it came down to mostly wargaming. It was hard to get into the role-playing elements in a military command structure.
And I'm not really understanding how that hardship exists at all, because my experiences with the game have been totally different. It's part and parcel of the T2K game that the military command structure has pretty much completely broken down. Most PCs aren't really even beholden to it anymore, especially if they aren't from local units of the initial assumed setting.
I've run a lot of both 1E and 4E, and I've never run into anyone who had that issue. I've always seen more of an attitude that since they were abandoned by their government in this godforsaken hellhole that they would do whatever it took to get home, and that included utterly disregarding any remaining command structure other than that established in their own group, by their own group, and to hell with anything that got in their way.
And with 4E, most of my fellow gamers were pretty much wanting to play something else because Russian troops invading Ukraine was starting up right at the time I pitched the game. One guy said he felt like it might be a little "too real" right then. I'll have to pitch it again soon since everyone's become less on edge over that stuff now.
I'm mostly a fan of Twilight:2013 because of the system, followed by the 2.2 version. 1e was a little too bare bones for me but it's timeline felt the best. 4e, while it looks like it has great production values, seems like it doesn't get the military realism quite right and I'm also not a fan of the system.
3e's combat system *feels* realistic without getting into Phoenix Command levels of looking through tables.
Regardless of system, I've only ever used rank and chain of command as plot devices. ORBATs have been helpful to explain how disparate troops can make sense in a party, but you don't need to get to "your PC was with 1-77 Armor, so there is no way he has an M16A2. Those were only issued to 3-77 and 5-77 Armor because 8ID was equipped with them a month before the war but 4ID wasn't scheduled to get them for another 6 months."