Not much of an edition war, actually. At least, not here, where I’ve turned off commenting.
A couple of months back, someone on the Twilight: 2000 fan forum asked about the relative merits of the game’s second and fourth editions. Having just written up characters for all four editions for the 2025 Character Creation Challenge, I’ve been thinking idly about this subject again. Here’s my take on the best features of each edition:
First edition wins for timeline and setting. It has the deepest library of official publications from which to draw and consequently is the best-developed world. When I’m running T2k, I base my world on the setting presented in the 1e materials, with an alternate-history break point occurring in the early 1980s. I generally like percentile systems, but the mechanics herein are just… odd… in a number of places.
Second edition, specifically its v2.2 iteration, wins for play-by-post. Its mechanics have deeper levels of detail, but that slows me down too much when I’m trying to run a realtime game. I’ve found a number of players willing to try it but none willing to master the rules. Its life path system also tends to generate characters who aren’t competent enough to succeed consistently at the sort of adventuring the setting calls for, so some house-ruling is often necessary for me.
Third edition, i.e. Twilight: 2013, is where I have both some bias and an emotionally complex response. As the lead rules designer, and probably the most visible member of the design team still involved with the T2k fan community, I’m still more than a bit sore about the game’s shitty reception among the existing fan base. Having said that, I also acknowledge that a lot of the mechanics I developed are better suited for computer-mediated play than tabletop pencil-and-paper gaming. Where 2013 sits for me is mainly a source for strip-mining conceptual elements to port to the other editions. Justin Stodola’s work on the ballistics model still sings. The gear library adds the fiddly “what’s in his pocketses?” bits that appeal to my inner twelve-year-old poring over U.S. Cavalry catalogs. I occasionally think about returning to the initiative system to tweak it to feel more like X-Com’s action points, but that would require creative effort better expended elsewhere.
Fourth edition is my current go-to for in-person (or VTT) play. It has enough detail to satisfy my usual groups, none of whom are particularly obsessive about tactical minutiae, and it runs smoothly and quickly enough that I can get an eight-player group through a firefight in a single session with time left over for investigation, exploration, and roleplaying on either side of the combat. It also, generally speaking, offers characters who can be made broadly competent enough to contribute meaningfully outside one narrow niche.