I’ve been running a campaign in the Free League 4th Edition of Twilight: 2000 for a few months now. There’s a lot to like in this system. There’s also a set of rules for wilderness travel. That’s an unfair attack… the fact is I haven’t really found a hex-crawl system that seems like more than a distracting pain in the ass after a short period of time. In this case, about four sessions in, I was already pretty dissatisfied with it. It’s not bad exactly but it is… a hex-crawl system. With all the usual flaws: lack of meaningful choices, accounting for what every character is doing all the time. Maybe there’s people who really like that and I’m just not a Hex-Crawl Guy. Maybe. But to me it gets very rote and repetitive and, what’s worse, it absolutely distracts players, GM — err sorry, “Referee” — from whatever story, clues, etc were actually happening!
So, a few readings of AngryGM and a long series of YouTube watch-next recommends, I’m back with renewed confidence that I’m not crazy and furthermore, that this can be improved on. I’m going to be working on that sort of in real-time here, post by post.
Doing the Research
Let’s start with fundamentals. T2K is a “realistic” military game so let’s make sure we’ve got our facts right. Luckily the DoD has done a lot of work for us.
FM 21-18 to the rescue! Let’s use the 1990 edition for a start.
Now, this document is mostly dedicated to what it takes to march a whole battalion or brigade or company without losing your weapons platoon or getting run over by opposing traffic and so on. A lot of it isn’t super relevant to our group of 4 or 5 intrepid post-apocalyptic wanderers (although it’s probably all knowledge and experiences they might have had!). But it does give us some good numbers to work from and is full of tactical considerations… ie, choices!
4 kph on foot by road in the day.
3.2 kph on road in bad visibility (including night)
2.4 kph cross-country by day.
1.6 kph cross-country in bad vis.Cool.
We’ve got plenty of other useful tidbits in here, like expecting a rest halt for 10-15 minutes per hour during the march, expecting an 8-hour marching day (32km on-road), max recommended forced march distances, and more. Again, these numbers assume you and your closest 100+ armed friends, so a little variance can be expected when You’re On Your Own.
Regardless, we’ve got a verifiable baseline to work from now and can start getting to work.