Paranoia XP Tabletop RPG 'Goes Gold'

Costik writes "Paranoia XP, the new version of the cult tabletop RPG which first debuted in 1984, and in which a 'well-meaning but deranged Computer desperately protects the citizens of Alpha Complex, a vast underground city, from all sorts of real and imagined enemies', is done, and will appear at Gencon Indy later this month. The interesting aspect is that it was designed 'in public,' using a weblog, an online forum, and a Wiki, with enthusiastic support from the community. Fans of the game wrote text, debated rules, proofread, ran statistical analyses, and even wrote a computer simulator to test the game's paper-and-pencil rules. Allen, the game's designer, says 'We borrowed the tools and methods of open-source software development for a paper game, and it worked brilliantly.'"

Comments

Re:I've often said it:

[Kenegan]

Experiences will always vary. In the hands of a psychopathic GM, Bunnies & Burrows can turn nasty and Rocky & Bullwinkle may become more bloodbath than party game.

Allen and the massed forces of the Paranoia fanbase have turned out a game that better caters to differing styles of play. You can continue to play old style blast 'em til they glow games, but the background is broader with support for less frantic and casualty-heavy styles of 'straight'-play.

I would recommend that you give it another go if you get the opportunity.

Re:I've often said it:

[DaveTheTriffids]

I will readily admit that I haven't really gotten into the resistance side of the game, so it may be that all the rest is to try to force the player into becoming a rebel.

Looks like you may have been playing it wrong -- or, if that seems too prescriptive a verdict for a free-form roleplaying game, then at the very least I'd say you've been missing out on a lot of the fun. Isn't trying to hide your activities on 'the resistance side of the game' the whole point of it for players?

InFiNiTy CoMpLeX - Paranoia themed online shooter

[Anonymous Coward]

(posting anon so as not to karma whore)

As I mentioned in the earlier article on this, anyone who enjoys Paranoia may also enjoy a knockoff game called InFiNiTy CoMpLeX that was on MajorBBS systems years ago, you can still get there:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=97463&cid=8332 036

Re:I've often said it:

[Allen Varney]

Paranoia is a great way to entertain someone for a few hours. Unfortunately, that someone is going to be the GM, and everyone else is going to wind up hating him or her, and to a lesser extent, each other.

I'm the principal writer for the new PARANOIA. The new edition of PARANOIA changes the relationship between Gamemaster and players from open malevolence (as established in the 1987 second edition) to a more interesting Skinnerian psychology. Briefly, the GM should condition his players, using a wide variety of tools explained in the rules, to reinforce behaviors he likes and punish behaviors he doesn't.

Presumably the GM wants to condition the players to play more PARANOIA. He does so by letting them have fun, allowing them to occasionally win through despite obstacles (temporarily, anyway), and rewarding them for entertaining him and the other players.

The GM's attitude should be a lofty, Olympian amusement at his players. This, I hope, will discourage bad experiences of the type you report.

Re:I've often said it:

[Colazar]

Now I know what many of you may be thinking: Just because I had a negative experience with Paranoia doesn't make it a bad system. I'll point out that I've had a particularly long string of bad experiences with Paranoia, even with GMs who, in other systems, do quite well.

The thing is, the ability to GM a game of Paranoia well has no correlation to the ability to GM in any other system.

Back in college our gaming group was co-founded by someone who loved to GM, but was absolutely horrid at it. We all avoided his games whenever possible. And then he roped some of us into a game of Paranioa, and it was amazing how fun it was.

In Paranoia, it's OK for the GM to be harsh, unrealistic, and arbitrary, as long as he can keep the "cartoon logic" going, and is funny about it. It's definitely a different set of skills.

Re:Tabletopism

[Takyn-U-RUN]

If you're wondering about the computer simulator, I can let you know some more about it, since I wrote it. It's just a simple, dumb combat simulator, where Troubleshooters shoot Commies and vice versa until one of them is all dead. No backstabbing, no running away, no using mutations... not very Paranoia at all.

But of course, the point of the combat simulator wasn't to make a Paranoia game, it was to help Allen balance out combat. You could adjust the amount of damage done by the weapons, the protectiveness of the armor worn, the penalties that different levels of woundings gave you, and various other important-to-game-balancing stats like that. It was a very simple project, but I'm glad that he/Mongoose got enough use out of it to think it worthy to put in the press release.