GURPS: Twilight: 2000

This would be a tough conversion.

Twilight: 2000 is famous for being a nearly complete catalog of military hardware. You have all sorts of ammunition, guns, tanks, APCs, guns, suppport weapons, and military gear, all laid out for you with complete game stats for everything. By version 2.2, all the kinks were worked out, and this is close to being a modern version of Squad Leader, but on a man-to-man scale and in a what-if World War III.

I could see a GURPS conversion working if you used GURPS for the characters, and Twilight: 2000 for vehicle combat rules, with a skill conversion matrix, sort of like how my Car Wars Classic conversion works. Still, Twilight: 2000 has a lot more going on, in that it is a complete package game. One book and done. Toys to play with for everything. Character creation that takes you through a survivor's life. And then you are on your own.

Twilight: 2000 is the D&D of World War III.

And there are no drones to speak of.

Yes, there is a new version out from Free League, but this is the OG game, down to the millimeter details of the ammunition your AFV fires and the make and model number of the salvaged RPG stored in the back. You are playing escape and evasion with enemy forces, dealing with the next village scared out of their wits at you, and random marauder attacks everywhere as civilization breaks down.

Like any good post-apoc game, trust is the currency you can bank on. Rescue a village's kidnapped people, and you are heroes for a while, with a safe place to stay, your vehicles safe places to park, and your stuff is (mostly) free from being stolen.

Tomorrow is another day, at least until the marauders start dropping mortar rounds in town as revenge, and you are hustling to go find them to finish the rest of the decrepit band off with maximum prejudice. The Navy SEAL and German hostage rescue specialist in your unit will have a ball picking off the mortar team with sniper rifles as your M113 with the 50-cal turns their vehicles into Swiss cheese, and the rest of your team goes in close.

Then, you begin to become a local legend.

Watch out how famous you become, you are bound to attract attention. A detachment of the Soviets may come up to town, saying they mean no harm and are looking for medical supplies for an outbreak of influenza. Do you trust them? Do you make a deal? Do you shoot them, fearing they are infected, too? Every choice has consequences here.

Maybe you will regret opening fire when you should have sent a few and your doctor to meet with their commander to broker a deal. Your team has a chance of getting sick, but delivering what you can spare will foster a more positive disposition between the sides and an agreement to share resources, as long as both sides respect boundaries. Maybe helping them lets peace have a chance for a little while.

Or they could hold your team and the doctor, and you need to go in, rescue them, and realize they can never be trusted. What both sides do matters. The trust you give may be honored, or spit in your face.

GURPS could do this type of game; it would be gritty, hardcore, and real. It has most of the weapons and tech, up to a point, where the pedantic detail of TW2K starts to outpace what GURPS has stats for. There is enough post-apoc info in GURPS to hold its own against TW2K on the rules side.

On the gear side, GURPS tends to be very broadly based and covers a lot. You can get detailed stats on a few of the vehicles and weapons TW2K has, but not really all of them. The best way to do this is to convert TW2K vehicles into GURPS and best-imate the stats. TW2K tends to have more of a "playing with a big box of broken toys" feel, while GURPS is more up close and personal.

My feeling is that with GURPS, much more will be broken down and lost to the ravages of time and war, and it feels like a better game, with a focus less on the gear-head stuff and more on characters. Where TW2K does the 2000 game better, GURPS will do the 2020-and-beyond game, where the world is slowly sliding into a new Dark Ages II, much better.

Given enough time, the world will start to develop feudal trappings again. The borders and nationalities will disappear, and the focus of organized civilization will become farming and storing enough food (on radiation-free land) to let a large population survive the longer winters caused by the debris still in the atmosphere after nuclear war. In 20 years, the winters will be like the Ice Age, and any large population will find it rough going just to sustain more than a few thousand in one small area.

Working guns and vehicles will be the tools of "knights" and the elite. They will be taken care of, maintained like family heirlooms, and passed down to the next generation. Owning a working pickup truck with gas will be like owning a fully barded warhorse, with a team of squires and mechanics who work for the family in its garage-like stables. Gas will be made in small batches and power the few remaining vehicles of the knights and royalty.

This is the game in which GURPS will shine and outdo TW2K.

Part of why TW2K works is that it is still close enough to the war that all this stuff still works. There is still gas. There is still ammo lying around. The limited industry still works because there are people around to run the broken factories. The game has lots of bang-bang left around to play with, like some last gasp of an action movie. Pretty soon, the notion of NATO versus the Soviet Union will be forgotten. It will just be the living and the dead, with the latter side winning the battle.

The entire setting is sliding into another mass die-off of the Earth's population once they figure out that "it really wasn't worth it."

It still isn't.