I've been on a Half-Life 2 kick lately, what system would be ideal to run a campaign set during the Combine occupation of Earth? Has groundwork even been done on statblocks for, say, synths or soldiers?
>>97945459>I've been on a Half-Life 2 kick latelyMe too. Though I am interested in wargames set in the HL2 universe.>what system would be ideal to run a campaign set during the Combine occupation of Earth?Savage Worlds might work.People always say GURPs but I wonder if it is genuinely or as a meme response like how /g/anons say "install gentoo."
>>97945493I've heard some very good things about Twilight: 2000. It's got a similar tech-level and everything from what you see in the games. Combine Tech would be a bit finicky to figure out, but my friend who was interested in running Twilight was suggested GURPS - Ultratech, so that might be the ticket.
>>97945459Video games.
>>97945493For matters of gun combat, if you are deeply autistic, GURPS is a legitimate choice. If you are deeply autistic in general GURPS is a legitimate choice. If you love subsystems and hate corebooks then GURPS is the system for you. Personally I'd take BRP over GURPS any day of the week for I am autistic but also forgetful.>>97945459I don't know if there's a HL2 thing out there, there probably is. But if it was me I'd just pick my favourite among>BRP\Delta Green>Twilight 2000>Cyberpunk 2020>Traveller (any)>Choice of indie gun combat gameand go to town. Because the setting is so dark and the Combine is so ludicrously powerful, it makes more sense to play it as a lethal thriller\mystery game, or a heist game Cyberpunk-style. If you're a human, even a human with experience and training in fighting the Combine forces specifically, having a shootout with any transhumans should be a serious event. Metrocops are mooks, transhumans are threats, and since the Combine drops drones, heavy armour, and aircraft over seemingly trivial challenges to their authority; I think combat should be a last resort.>But what about all the complex rules for alien weapons and technology???Considering the average human has no fucking clue how this works and it's all blyat unknown technology, I'd run that like Call of Cthulhu\Delta Green; you don't know how it works and there are no rules for it because the best you can do is roll some sort of "xeno tech (combine)" check to see if you can modify it for your use or even understand what it does. Gun to my head I'd run it as a Traveller MG2e campaign and lift DG weapon rules, but also anyone familiar with Cyberpunk 2020 could just run it like that as a weird gutterpunk game where your enemy are all reskinned corporate soldiers.
>>979454591) Interlock / CP2020/REDProbably the better one about firefight against combine, less for all the mumbo alien jumbo things as Portal, Gravity Gun, Lying cakes and other shit2) BRP. Less Firefight fun, more skill dice roll fun. You can try to homebrew Mythras for the ultimate experience.3) Gurps / Genesys. Granpa Gurps and Edge Genesys can do anything if you want it and your heart is pure and sinless.
>>97945522>>97946959Seconding Delta Green, you get to make characters with a healthy spread of pre-war skills (since the sterilization of Humanity was a plot point throughout the games) and combat against anything tougher than a Metrocop would be lethal and savage. Humanity has managed to reverse-engineer *some* Combine tech (drones and unpaired guns, mostly) but that technology is so few and far between that you should be comfortable homebrewing it into hand-wavy alien nonsense. You don't need stats for a Hunter's flechettes, you only need to know they kill you in a way so clean and total that you wish your buddy exploded into a thousand gory giblets instead.Cyberpunk 2020 would give the PCs a better range of technology and vehicles, but most of the game's aspects (cybernetics and biotech) would be unavailable to PCs. That's an issue, since (speaking for games in general) you want to find a system that doesn't have whole segments carved away because it "doesn't fit the setting." Again, Delta Green works for this since alien/supernatural tech is beyond you, and you're primarily playing around with investigations and heists using human contacts (very common throughline in Half-Life 2) and pre-war tech.THAT SAID,A lot of this advice is predicated on you playing something set before HL2. By Episode 2 the Combine are cut-off and isolated and the uprising has well-and-truly begun. For that, Twilight 2000 works very well because it's much more of a, "surviving innawoods as a mix of civilians and vets."
Honestly I'd be more up for running a HECU survival crawler in Black Mesa or something. The unit itself has potential for doing a lot of fun stuff if you want to insert some other weird stuff happening outside of the combine occupation. Maybe an alternate timeline where Black Mesa led to to a Stargate SG1 situation rather than a curbstomp.
