Slashdot Mirror
Paranoia RPG Returns in New Edition
Allen Varney writes "The classic tabletop roleplaying game PARANOIA, originally published by West End Games in the 1980s, returns in a new edition this August from Mongoose Publishing. PARANOIA, the game of a darkly humorous future, is set in an underground Alpha Complex ruled by an insane Computer. I am writing and (re)designing the main rulebook, under direction from original PARANOIA co-designer Greg Costikyan, with contributions from novelist and game designer Aaron Allston. I'd be happy to answer questions from Slashdot's gamers."
Mmm, hot fun.
Is the computer still your friend in this edition?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Is there any other type?
i like this from their website. i found it quite humorous.
One Hasbro(R) to rule them all
One Hasbro(R) to find them.
One Hasbro(R) to bring them all
And in the darkness bind them
Parker Brothers(R), Milton Bradley(R), Selchow & Richter(R), TSR(R), SPI(R), Avalon Hill(R), and Wizards of the Coast(R) are registered trademarks of Hasbro, Inc. Their use here is not to be construed as a challenge to their trademark status.
Paranoia! Late night playing sessions in the dormitory bathroom (helped the atmosphere of the game somehow). Jeez, what a game.
Of all the old roleplaying games, the only one I still own and cart with me when I move is Paranoia. I'll probably never play it again, but I can't bear to get rid of such an entertaining rulebook.
Good luck with the next edition. It will be hard to write a book that stands up well next to the original.
Phiwum's law: anyone that names an obvious law after himself and then puts it in his own sig is just pathetic.
- Dave #2
Have you got your copy of the Paranoia RPG, citizen? What's that? The old version? SCRUBBERS!
what color paper is the book going to be published on?
Its worth pointing out that the story/idea behind Paranoia was also the primary basis for Resident Evil. The original coders of Resident Evil had been playing Paranoia literally for weeks prior to writing the game. I know from personal experience. :)
The most intriguing part of the game for me was the encouraged use of screw your buddy notes. AKA FYB notes, these were fun because you really did get the feeling that everyone was out to get you and this prompted you to scribble off another note the to GM to perfrom a preemptive strike on your team mate because he was obviously a communist.
Pretty widgets? What pretty widgets?
Anyone trolling this article must report to the nearest execution booth. Have a pleasant day, citizen.
Alas, Babylon.
Knowing about the game is FORBIDDEN. Not knowing about the game is RESTRICTED.
Please report to the nearest termination center.
Thank you!
I pulled out my old second edition Paranoia stuff one night with the group I played D&D with. They had never even heard of the game before, but got the hang of it quick enough. Within the first 30 minuets 2 players were already down 3 clones apiece, several others had lost a clone, and a major reactor leak killing several thousand citizens resulted from an over entusiastic attempt to retrive a bag of crunchy-time algea chips from a fission powered snack machine. Even if I never get the chance to play it, I will definately be buying the book.
In short, it's the best pen and paper RPG ever made. Not that I am biased or anything.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
As a long time Paranoia player (I love Randy the wonder lizard), is there going to be a beta testing program? Where can I sign up? And are the modules going to be updated as well? What mods to the tech trees are you going to add considering "pre-whoops!" developments like the Internet?
Reporting a Commie Mutant Traitor expressing seditious doubts of the Computer's benevolence!
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I think this is the only time I've ever seen a product-existance-denial actually be in-character.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I recently forked over $75 for a set of the original first edition Paranoia because our local gaming group was getting way too obsessed with their stats and game mechanics. The ensuing pandemonium and infighting didn't solve the problem, but at least it entertains the game master, which is the point of it all, right?
I'm especially happy to hear that the new edition won't be using d20. I've been using Active Exploits, a free, diceless game system, and it has worked very well for keeping the game fast and simple -- an essential for Paranoia.
There are also some excellent resources for individuals who want to play Paranoia online; Paranoia-RPG is probably the best place to start.
And, finally, if Paranoia tickles your fancy and you want to try a different comic genre, check out Atlas Games' Over the Edge, a lightweight conspiracy game that makes Fox Mulders' wildest guesses seem tame.
Weapons of Mass Analysis
Well, I don't remember the "official" Alpha Complex song, but there was one that got bounced around a bunch of my college buddies that was sung to the tune of the "Oscar Meyer Weiner" song.
Oh, I'm glad I'm not an Alpha Complex commie,
That is what I'd really hate to be
Cuz if I were an Alpha Complex commie,
All the citizens would shoot at me.
Or this one, to the tune of Billy Joel's "Piano Man":
It's 9 o'clock in Computer time,
A communist crowd shuffles in
There's a White-Class sitting next to me
But I'm not cleared to look straight at him...
Let's not go there, though. That was a silly time.
"Linux doesn't exist. Everyone knows Linux is an unlicensed version of Unix"- Kieren O'Shaughnessy
Now I know that the article is mainly about an update to the RPG rules themselves, but I can't help but think how awesome a computer game set in that universe would be. One of the great points of Paranoia is that you go in knowing you're probably going to die a number of times, so you get really attached not to the clones, but to the game play. There are levels of sorts, but not in such a way that the game is about leveling up, so it would still be fun for new players (and/or yourself when you've run through your clones). With the "unseen enemy" angle, you can constantly have the goals of a troubleshooter changing so it would never get stale. The article states rights have been sold for a text version, but if someone wants to make a killing they should snap up rights for a graphic version.
killing several thousand citizens resulted from an over entusiastic attempt to retrive a bag of crunchy-time algea chips
You'd be a lot safer sticking to soilent green. In fact, there was a lot more of the stuff around after this accident. Not sure why.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
GET YOUR WEAPONS READY! --DR.LIGHT
This is going to be fun!
Like Slashdot with dice!
I may have heard of Paranoia once or twice in the past, but this is the first real discussion I've read of it, and it sounds like something worth looking into.
:)
:)
I used to be a hardcore tabletop gamer, but I stopped several years back for a whole heap of reasons. The only gaming supplies I still have are a set of stock DnD dice, a couple of first edition DnD books (my ex roommate needed money), the Lunch Money* CCG (best. CCG. EVAR.), and the HOL** manual and expansion.
If the Paranoia rulebook is even HALF as entertaining as the HOL manual, I'm buying two- the article links paint the game up into a similar category, which is good- this is the first I've even thought about tabletop gaming in months.
Good thing there's a gaming store about three blocks from work.
* Lunch Money : You play a catholic schoolgirl on a playground. You beat the crap out of your opponent(s). Suggested to use consumable items such as M&Ms as life counters. You buy the deck and you get the whole game- none of this Endless Diarrhea of Expansions that other CCGs suffer. Also an excellent card based hand-to-hand combat system.
** Human Occupied Landfill. The most heinously WRONG gaming manual ever written.
The Paranoia rule book (2nd Edition) actively encouraged the gamemaster to ignore the rules. It was one of the few RPGs I played (AD&D, Mechwarrior, various GURPS) that emphasized having fun above all else. I hope the new edition stays true to this spirit!
That - and I loved the wry satirical and self-referencing tone in which 2nd Edition was written. Sometimes I would sit and just read the rulebook for fun! Reading it as a teenager, I learned a lot about both pop-culture and serious political thought ("Imagine a world designed by Orwell, Sartre, Kafka, Stalin and the Marx Brothers...")
Basically, if The Onion did a sci-fi RPG, it would be Paranoia.
Can't wait to see the new edition!
and remember...THE COMPUTER IS YOUR FRIEND! ALL HAIL FRIEND COMPUTER!
in black citizen, as befits your infra-red security clearence.
Is there any point in asking questions?
We all know we won't have a high enough security clearance for the answers.
Infared
Red
Orange
Green
Blue
Indigo
Violet
Ultaviolet
Posession of any colour tinfoil hat above your clearance is treason, but so is knowing that. AUGHHH. (Goes off to the confession booth with a laser pistol as I am a good citizen)
Well there is this song:
You can find similar songs here
Sapere aude!
Human Occupied Landfill is definately a more interesting read - but I always found myself more interested in actually playing Paranoia. That game rules.
Not even close...see the PARANOIA Computer is completely and clinicly insaine, where the ones from Matrix and Terminator were only compulsive.
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Long live Pax Computer!
That said one of the things I most enjoyed about playing paranoia was the lack of character generation. You could generate a chracter if you wanted, but what was the point? It was going to be dead soon. This got rid of the four hour character generation marathons caused by people taking 20 minutes to decide if they wanted to buy an extra flask of oil or a ten foot pole with the last of there money. More games ended before they started due to the fact that character generation bogged the night down so bad the adventure never got started and no one was hooked to come back the next night. Paranoia was great, people got together, you handed them a character, they read it for ten minutes and bam you were playing and having a good time.
So I guess the question inherent in this babbling is. Are you going to keep the preferences for pre-generated characters in the new edition?
Papa Legba come and open the gate
If you had to "*smiles*" it implies that you were not smiling. Happy citizens are always smiling. Are you happy citizen? Only Commie Mutant Traitors would ever be in a non-smiling state.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Thanks to the vast improvements in modern graphics capabilities, it'll now be a side-scrolling platform game, a la "Super Mario Brothers." Other than that, however, no major changes are planned.
In high school, my friends and I would play all sorts of things. I ran a Shadowrun campaign, another ran a Star Trek RPG, another ran a Rifts campaign, etc. We'd switch it up pretty regularly, keeping it all fresh.
One of the guys decided to do a one-off Paranoia game. Here's how it started:
COMPUTER: Troubleshooters! Report to briefing room B-X-37-Y for your mission briefing!
ME: Friend computer, where might one find riefing room B-X-37-Y?
COMPUTER: What is your clearance?
ME: Red, friend computer.
COMPUTER: You are not cleared for that information.
Analiese: [sarcastically, momentarily channeling her D&D character] Well, I cast a spell to locate the briefing room.
ME: Argh! Mutant powers! Shoot her shoot her shoot her!
[Much expendature of Red lasers into Analiese.]
Analiese Clone #2: [arriving] You guys all suck.
ME: Argh! Questioning the wisdom of Friend Computer! Commie traitor! Shoot her shoot her shoot her!
[Much expendature of Red lasers into Analiese's second clone.]
COMPUTER: Well done, citizen! You are now cleared for Orange access.
And things degenerated from there. I don't think we made it out of the briefing room.
Sounds about right to me. In a first-time Paranoia party, if they survive all the way to the mission briefing room, you are clearly doing something wrong. :)
Warning: The following text is classified ULRAVIOLET. Do not read if you are not a Game Master. Should you accidentally make out some of the words as you scroll by, terminate yourself immediately. Your clone will be commondated for your loyalty.
One campaign which I designed that I never get tired of running with new groups of players is a scenario where key high-level people in Alpha Complex who were members of the "trekkie" secret society conspired to have a fully-functional "Enterprise" built. The party is sent up to command the bridge. Lots of great conflicting interests from secret societies (The "Whovians" consider it blasphemous and want it destroyed, for example), lots of tech that can go wrong: There are the insanely dangerous transporters. All five clones are stored in stasis on board for faster activation from the captain's chair (now you know what all those buttons are for!) An android First Officer who suffers from MPD (fans of different eras of Star Trek wanted him to be like different "logical" characters from the series, so one moment he talks and acts like Spock, the next like Data.) Lasers are replaced with "Phasers," which penetrate reflective armor, but are prone to "overload" and violently explode.
I even wrote an element of the campaign where they actually encounter a "Klingon" opponent, but the one party that lived long enough to encounter them never even turned on the view screen. When they were detected by the ship's sensors, the conversation between me and the guy playing the Communication Officer went sort of like this:
"A red light starts blinking on your console."
"Does anybody else seem to have noticed."
"No, everybody else is too preoccupied"
"I ignore it then."
A few minutes later...
"The light has begun blinking again, faster this time."
"I unscrew it and pretend nothing is wrong." (Note: clearly an experienced Paranoia player, that one!)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I like Paranoia, but I like it in much the same way I like HOL or Orkworld. Great read, fascinating ideas, but is it actually playable? The best summary of Paranoia's problems I've seen amounted to basically, "Paranoia feels too much like a private joke between the author of a given adventure and the gamemaster." To players things (notably death) seems a bit arbitrary. The jokes often aren't comprehensible if you don't have context that only the GM has. (The "disco" scene in Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues comes to mind).
If Paranoia is just social commentary and satire, well, that's and interesting read, but it's a basis for a game I play more than once. If it's about humor than the jokes need to be visible to everyone; I'm not going to play a game to amuse my GM. I think that the core game play of Paranoia is supposed to be about the struggle to survive in a bureaucratic nightmare, but that's not the feeling I've gotten from the games I've played. It's unfortunate, because it's such an appealing premise.
I see a lot of potential, but I've never seen it pay off in actual game play. Maybe I've just been unlucky and didn't have GMs up to the task (I've been in love with Shadowrun since the second edition, but only recently actually played in a game I enjoyed), but Paranoia seems like a fundamentally difficult game to get right. The only "famous" module I've played was YCBBB. YCBBB is is generally held to be one of the best modules for the game. What I saw wasn't terribly impressive and appeared to have a strong "private joke between the author and the GM" element. (To be fair, given that the players weren't haven't alot of fun, we stopped playing after only a few sessions.)
So, is the accusation that Paranoia is a private job between the creators and the GM fair? Is there any truth too it? Is Paranoia fundamentally an extremely difficult game to run? Are you changing anything to address these concerns (including possibly working to clarify incorrect perceptions)? What do you feel is the key attraction to playing for players?
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Those lyrics were written by Warren Spector, my collaborator on the early Paranoia adventure Send in the Clones. Truth! Warren has since become a well-known producer of computer games, including Deus Ex, and runs the game studio Ion Storm Austin.
PARANOIA XP will use an updated and simplified version of the rules from PARANOIA's much admired second edition. The extent of the revision is still under discussion. More precisely, I have to type up a draft of my proposed rules and let everyone involved pass judgement.
In any case, the fundamental precept will remain: Players are not allowed to demonstrate knowledge of the rules. Knowledge of the rules is treason.
o/~ Join us now and share the software
In 1991 West End published a book named Extreme Paranoia: Nobody Knows the Trouble Ive Shot that is set in the Paranoia universe. It is hilarious, and I highly recommend it.
Check out Chad's News
So far no one involved has raised that as a concern. PARANOIA co-designer Greg Costikyan has been inalterably opposed to such thought control for many years, as have I. I'll be writing the rulebook with the attitude that it's better to ask forgiveness than permission.
It's a jab at Windows XP, but when Microsoft originally announced Windows XP, they explained that XP stood for "experience." This nod to roleplaying game terminology ("experience points") warmed my heart.
In any case, PARANOIA XP may not be the final title. None of us could think of anything better. We're certainly open to better ideas.
I'm surprised at you, citizen! Don't you see that traitors are everywhere? The Department of Unspecified Threat Assessment has recently raised the Unfocused Anxiety Index to THREE, and I don't have to tell you what that means.
We will keep the Communists -- that is, the absurdist PARANOIA flavor of Communists established in past adventures -- but we'll also add plenty of new and subversive secret societies, new "service firms" (privatized service groups) in bitter commercial rivalry, and weirdly altered bot behavior provoked by zealous open-source bot-liberation advocates. Among many other things. Trust me -- enemies are everywhere!
But only commies would know that! *BLAM!*
:)
Wheel out Llywelyn_03
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
tenths of books, eh?
so you and your brother played a lot of Synnibar?
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
For example, if you are a group of high school seniors, invite a freshman kid over to play. He will try way too hard, and will be way gullible. If he's not, then congratulations, you actually found one worth keeping.
Always make sure that nobody knows more than one other person present (excluding gamemaster).
It's a lot easier to fear the unknown.
Always take each individual aside and assure them that you are on THEIR side against everyone else.
Everyone wants to feel special
ABOVE ALL ELSE: Don't forget the tactical nuclear hand greandes.
Boom ---- Yeah, way cool about the continuation of this game. This literally made growing up bearable. Reading and grocking paranoia makes it a lot easier to understand the world, and try to keep going. BTW, anyone ever read the six part comic series? Beautiful work, I miss my copies.
HaXXXor.com - Naked Chicks Teach You How To Ha
First, it's not a problem if the players are having fun. Second, the frenzy you describe, recognized among experienced PARANOIA GMs as "Phase 1" play, usually subsides after players play a few (or many) sessions. "Phase 2" play sees players get more into the spirit of the setting, though they die almost as often. By "Phase 3" you see canny political skills emerge. These players somehow manage to wriggle through every deathtrap and succeed in the mission, while disposing of all opposition and ending with commendations and a promotion. They're really something to see, those Phase 3 players.
- The computer is your friend
Basically, every player starts out with 6 clones, a couple of mutant abilities and membership in a small handful of secret societies.The computer is your only friend
Trust the computer
Trust only the computer,
and remember: in all likelihood the computer wants you DEAD
You (usually) start at one of the lowest security ranges (InfraRed) and your goal is to climb to the highest security range (Ultraviolet -> programmer) -- mostly by fixing the damage done by secret societies, commies and mutants.
Oh, and did I mention that exposure of either your mutant abilities or your secret society membership is cause for instant termination??
In any case, my favorite mission occured with a couple dozen of us playing at a science-fiction convention (Orycon, if I remember corectly). Within 45 minutes we had about 8 dead and another dozen or so seriously wounded.
We hadn't made it out of the briefing room.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Just thought I would bring something to the attention of anyone interested in playing Paranoia over the net.
Paranoia-Live is a site dedicated to organizing and carrying out games of Paranoia over the internet, using a neat li'l Java app known amazingly enough as JParanoia.
The game dates from far back in the mists of time; it was originally adapted from a CYOA published in a magazine in 1977. It's a suprising amount of fun for something so small.
I use this to test new compilers and the such; it's a much more interesting variant on 'Hello, world!' (and not a lot more complicated).
File header follows:
* "SpaceGamer/FantasyGamer" magazine.
*
* Article by Sam Shirley.
* Implemented in C on Vax 11/780 under UNIX by Tim Lister
*
* This is a public domain adventure and may not be sold for profit
*
* $Source:
* $Author: tjcoppet $
*
*/