Anyone care to explain the color codes of security clearances?
The headline refers to the tabletop paper-and-pencil roleplaying game PARANOIA, originally published in 1984 by West End Games (New York City) and recently republished as PARANOIA XP by Mongoose Publishing (Swindon, UK).
PARANOIA is a satirical science fiction RPG set in an underground city, Alpha Complex, ruled by an insane Computer. The Computer has imposed an unbreakable system of security clearances that represent how much it trusts a given citizen. The security clearances are keyed to the colors of the spectrum. The lowest security clearance is INFRARED, meaning The Computer doesn't trust you at all; INFRARED citizens wear black. RED Clearances is the next highest, followed by ORANGE, YELLOW, and so on up to VIOLET. Above VIOLET Clerance are the illustrious High Programmers, the ULTRAVIOLETs, who can program The Computer itself. High Programmers wear white.
PARANOIA sold over 150,000 copies in its first couple of editions, and the new "XP" edition has been well received. You can find out a lot more about PARANOIA at the fan site Paranoia-Live.net, and follow the progress of the game on the PARANOIA development blog.
If you like online roleplaying games, check out the rules for a Wiki-based game called Lexicon, designed by Neel Krishnaswami. Earlier this year I ran The Toothpaste Disaster, a Lexicon game using the background for the PARANOIA tabletop roleplaying game. It was great fun, and there are many other Lexicon games around the Web now.
sadly TSR has gone downhill since being eaten by the [WotC] group [...] TSR jumped the shark with Ravenloft, not to mention Spell Jamming.
As others have pointed out, TSR published the Ravenloft and Spelljammer campaign settings long before Wizards of the Coast bought TSR. More to the point, many fans regard the Ravenloft setting as one of the high points of the TSR years, because of its sharp sense of the Gothic horror genre. Wizards sold the line to White Wolf Game Studio, which continues to publish it under its Arthaus imprint.
As for Spelljammer, that was my own favorite AD&D campaign setting (along with Al-Qadim, the Arabian Nights setting). I had great fun writing the first Spelljammer module, WILDSPACE. Unfortunate much of the support line failed to live up to the premise's potential.
As I understand it, NASA (like other government agencies) routinely awards the contractually specified "merit bonuses" to its contractors, even when the supplied equipment is late, comes in way over budget, and/or doesn't work. Does anyone have a Web link where we can check to see if Lockheed does in fact get its merit bonus for this particular screwup? Or is this information kept secret?
Electrolite is a blog by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, one of the leading book editors in the science fiction field. His blog is now almost all Democratic politics, occasionally as seen from an SF fan's perspective but always from a viewpoint of solid common sense.
Peter Linnell:
InDesign has progressed remarkably, but really given the resources Adobe has at its disposal, it should [be] no less than stellar.
Uhh...? Is this to imply that InDesign ISN'T stellar? Every Quark and PageMaker layout artist I know who has tried InDesign CS has moved to it with a glad heart. It's a great program.
So far it sounds like Scribus is setting the bar at beating PageMaker and Quark. That's great, but when Scribus also overtakes InDesign, that's when I'll cheer loudest.
I wish the Firefox page had easy front-page links to both the Extensions list and the Plug-ins list. Maybe I missed the link, but the most convenient way I know to find the plug-ins is through a search engine. Does anyone know why extensions and plug-ins have to have separate pages?
Is this game based in any way on Jean-Luc Goddard's film Alphaville?
Not that I'm aware. Dan Gelber, the New York fan who created the Alpha Complex setting in 1983 for his roleplaying campaign, has never discussed his influences, that I know of. I would guess George Lucas's THX-1138 would be on his list, along with Logan's Run and The Prisoner. I doubt he was familiar with Alphaville, nor with Stanislaw Lem's 1971 novel Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, a quintessential PARANOIA setting.
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.
If he owns the Sun, he's liable when the next solar flare knocks out communications satellites. He could only allow flares of a certain magnitude, to comply with zoning laws.
1) If we're so great we survive until the sun starts to turn into a red giant, then we would be doing the universe a favor by spreading.
Well then, let's revisit this argument in five billion years, shall we?
2) Would you rather we satisfy our brute animal urge to kill things with multi-TRILLION dollar budgets, or our animal urge to explore with multi-billion dollar budgets?
To say nothing of the absolutely monstrous arrogance of people like you, who literally argue for the death of the human race because misanthropy and cynicism are so much easier than a little effort and thinking in a longer term than the next presidential term.
Nice flame, though it doesn't seem to relate to or follow from anything else you wrote in your post, and it certainly has nothing to do with what I wrote. I didn't exhibit misanthropy, cynicism, or arrogance, let alone monstrous arrogance. But what the hey, I'll try some now.
Destroying big asteroids doesn't require human spaceflight; it requires missiles. If you seriously worry about solar flares extinguishing humanity, dig a hole.
Show me this multi-hundred-billion-dollar spaceflight budget. Oh, wait, you can't.
The Mars exploration and habitation plan NASA proposed in the 1970s had a total price tag around $450 billion, as I recall. Do you think the price tag has fallen by now? Really? With the ISS total cost likely to hit $66 billion for a white elephant in low Earth orbit? Bush's NASA budget asks for $910 million just for initial preparations for a return to the Moon or Mars. If you think this won't turn into hundreds of billions before we have our first Martian hometown, well -- maybe a little monstrous arrogance is justified here.
Modern proponents of human spaceflight always seem to fall back on two arguments: (1) Get off the Earth so humanity won't go extinct when we blow up the Earth, and (2) exploration is an inherent human instinct.
(1) If we're so stupid we can destroy the only planet we live on, I don't see how we're doing the universe a favor by spreading.
(2) Satisfying an inherent human instinct shouldn't require a multi-hundred-billion-dollar budget. If you have an instinct to explore, check out your city sewer system, or look into the obscure corners of the Mandelbrot Set, or play an online game. All these activities satisfy the brute animal urge to get into new places.
In my experience, people who argue for human spaceflight on the grounds of "instinct" haven't examined their positions closely. They seem remarkably similar to religious ideologues.
Given that Lucas's THX-1138 was an obvious and pivotal influence on the paper roleplaying game PARANOIA, it is perhaps on-topic to mention that the game of a darkly humorous future is returning to print this August in a new edition from Mongoose Publishing, as previously covered on Slashdot.
The new PARANOIA XP edition emphasizes the Alpha Complex sort-of economy and a new consumerism very much in tune with THX-1138. You can follow the development of the game on the PARANOIA development blog.
I think this comment misses Bruce's point. As a reading of past Viridian notes shows, Sterling doesn't want to stop all use of nuclear, he doesn't want to return to 17th-century labor-intensive agriculture, and he doesn't tell Lovelock "No, you're wrong."
Bruce is pointing out that Lovelock ignores the historical mishandling of nuclear, and that Lovelock offers no practical solution to actually make any of this happen: "Okay == let's say your argument has convinced me. So get me a written quid pro quo that actually cuts carbon emissions way past Kyoto limits, and I'll risk the Chernobyls. Do you have the clout to give us one of those == or would you rather just pester hippies, Hollywood, and reporters?"
And then, at the end of the piece: "This nuclear nostalgia is all well and good, but what we need is genuine industrial policy agreed on by the powers-that be. A new Kyoto, genuine international agreement with coherent steps to deal with the menace. Otherwise we just glow in the dark as we die of the heat, and what's the point of that?"
What really makes me cringe is when I see an AOL address on the website of someone who owns his or her own domain name. Why can't you just use your domain name email? Why would you admit that you're an AOL subscriber? my brain screams.
Try the decaf, friend. I have my own domain and I still use my AOL e-mail address -- because I've had that same address for over a decade, and changing it would be bad for my business.
Hey, I'm an AOL subscriber AND I have a lower Slashdot ID than you! If your brain was screaming before, that must make your brain want to choke. If it turns out my karma is better than yours, will your brain commit hara-kiri?
Exploitation is not a dirty word. Coercion is a bad thing (if you can spell it) but everybody exploits and this is a good thing.
The fallacy of this viewpoint is the assumption that exploitation and coercion are separate. Maybe in some airy theoretical world, but not on this particular planet. The problem with the fallacious viewpoint is that you can use it to justify child labor, inhuman working conditions, and chattel slavery. "Hey, it's just 'exploitation,' the same way I exploit my skills or the farmer exploits the land, so stop complaining and shut up, okay?"
Comparing the "exploitation" of your skills with, say, child labor in Hong Kong -- that's just word games. There is very little exploitation of human labor in the Third World (or, to use the new politically correct term, "the South) without overt or implicit coercion, not to mention numerous human rights abuses.
"Don't blame the corporations for doing what all corporations do. You might as well blame the wolf for killing the sheep." Please! Corporations are human enterprises, not imponderable forces of nature. If we have problesm with corporations, the solution is not to sigh heavily the way we would about an earthquake, but to change the institution of the corporation. It's not like trying to move a continent or stop the sun in its tracks, and to make it sound impossible is to be complicit with the abuse.
Face it - they're going to sell more copies of "Dr. No" with Ursula Andress wearing the New & Improved High Resolution Digital Bikini than they are of Singin' in the Rain, starring Gene Kelly and the Incredibly Vivid High Resolution Raindrops.
By that criterion, Cyd Charisse could help sales of Singin' in the Rain.
MtG isn't really a PnP RPG at all. Couldn't you have invited Steve Jackson or one of the White Wolf people?
As another reply observed, there's a lot more to tabletop gaming than roleplaying games. I hung out with Richard Garfield sporadically for most of 1994 while I worked freelance with Wizards of the Coast in Seattle. I can testify to Richard's deep love and comprehensive knowledge of board and card games. Just as important for this panel, Richard can analyze and articulate what makes games work. He's one of the most creative and intelligent people I've ever known, as well as a really nice guy. I'm sure he'll be an excellent choice for the panel.
UK programmer, maintainer of perl.com, and Anglican missionary Simon Cozens has re-rendered the 10th-century Japanese classic Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon as a blog. It works waaay too well.
It's a gag game, and as long as you take down your fellow citizen, who cares if you get vaporized as well? Is there going to be an attempt to address this problem, or are the people we play with just curs?
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.
What a strange thrill to see GLOBBO (my second boardgame, published by Steve Jackson Games in 1983) mentioned on Slashdot. Rights to GLOBBO are unexpectedly still available, so if you know of any interested publisher....
I'm not related to Jim Varney, that I know of. I'm sorry to report that he died of lung cancer at age 50, February 10, 2000, at his home in White House, Tennessee. He was a very funny man and a gifted performer.
Are you prevented from calling it just plain PARANOIA for copyright reasons? Or is it that you wanted to separate the new version from the old?
We aren't prevented from calling it anything we want. We do want to distinguish it from past editions, but the "XP" name is provisional. Any loyal citizen who provides a better name will earn a commendation point.
Slashdot Mirror
The headline refers to the tabletop paper-and-pencil roleplaying game PARANOIA, originally published in 1984 by West End Games (New York City) and recently republished as PARANOIA XP by Mongoose Publishing (Swindon, UK).
PARANOIA is a satirical science fiction RPG set in an underground city, Alpha Complex, ruled by an insane Computer. The Computer has imposed an unbreakable system of security clearances that represent how much it trusts a given citizen. The security clearances are keyed to the colors of the spectrum. The lowest security clearance is INFRARED, meaning The Computer doesn't trust you at all; INFRARED citizens wear black. RED Clearances is the next highest, followed by ORANGE, YELLOW, and so on up to VIOLET. Above VIOLET Clerance are the illustrious High Programmers, the ULTRAVIOLETs, who can program The Computer itself. High Programmers wear white.
PARANOIA sold over 150,000 copies in its first couple of editions, and the new "XP" edition has been well received. You can find out a lot more about PARANOIA at the fan site Paranoia-Live.net, and follow the progress of the game on the PARANOIA development blog.
If you like online roleplaying games, check out the rules for a Wiki-based game called Lexicon, designed by Neel Krishnaswami. Earlier this year I ran The Toothpaste Disaster, a Lexicon game using the background for the PARANOIA tabletop roleplaying game. It was great fun, and there are many other Lexicon games around the Web now.
As others have pointed out, TSR published the Ravenloft and Spelljammer campaign settings long before Wizards of the Coast bought TSR. More to the point, many fans regard the Ravenloft setting as one of the high points of the TSR years, because of its sharp sense of the Gothic horror genre. Wizards sold the line to White Wolf Game Studio, which continues to publish it under its Arthaus imprint.
As for Spelljammer, that was my own favorite AD&D campaign setting (along with Al-Qadim, the Arabian Nights setting). I had great fun writing the first Spelljammer module, WILDSPACE. Unfortunate much of the support line failed to live up to the premise's potential.
As I understand it, NASA (like other government agencies) routinely awards the contractually specified "merit bonuses" to its contractors, even when the supplied equipment is late, comes in way over budget, and/or doesn't work. Does anyone have a Web link where we can check to see if Lockheed does in fact get its merit bonus for this particular screwup? Or is this information kept secret?
Electrolite is a blog by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, one of the leading book editors in the science fiction field. His blog is now almost all Democratic politics, occasionally as seen from an SF fan's perspective but always from a viewpoint of solid common sense.
Uhh...? Is this to imply that InDesign ISN'T stellar? Every Quark and PageMaker layout artist I know who has tried InDesign CS has moved to it with a glad heart. It's a great program.
So far it sounds like Scribus is setting the bar at beating PageMaker and Quark. That's great, but when Scribus also overtakes InDesign, that's when I'll cheer loudest.
I wish the Firefox page had easy front-page links to both the Extensions list and the Plug-ins list. Maybe I missed the link, but the most convenient way I know to find the plug-ins is through a search engine. Does anyone know why extensions and plug-ins have to have separate pages?
Not that I'm aware. Dan Gelber, the New York fan who created the Alpha Complex setting in 1983 for his roleplaying campaign, has never discussed his influences, that I know of. I would guess George Lucas's THX-1138 would be on his list, along with Logan's Run and The Prisoner. I doubt he was familiar with Alphaville, nor with Stanislaw Lem's 1971 novel Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, a quintessential PARANOIA setting.
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.
If he owns the Sun, he's liable when the next solar flare knocks out communications satellites. He could only allow flares of a certain magnitude, to comply with zoning laws.
Well then, let's revisit this argument in five billion years, shall we?
None of the above.
Nice flame, though it doesn't seem to relate to or follow from anything else you wrote in your post, and it certainly has nothing to do with what I wrote. I didn't exhibit misanthropy, cynicism, or arrogance, let alone monstrous arrogance. But what the hey, I'll try some now.
Destroying big asteroids doesn't require human spaceflight; it requires missiles. If you seriously worry about solar flares extinguishing humanity, dig a hole.
The Mars exploration and habitation plan NASA proposed in the 1970s had a total price tag around $450 billion, as I recall. Do you think the price tag has fallen by now? Really? With the ISS total cost likely to hit $66 billion for a white elephant in low Earth orbit? Bush's NASA budget asks for $910 million just for initial preparations for a return to the Moon or Mars. If you think this won't turn into hundreds of billions before we have our first Martian hometown, well -- maybe a little monstrous arrogance is justified here.
Modern proponents of human spaceflight always seem to fall back on two arguments: (1) Get off the Earth so humanity won't go extinct when we blow up the Earth, and (2) exploration is an inherent human instinct.
(1) If we're so stupid we can destroy the only planet we live on, I don't see how we're doing the universe a favor by spreading.
(2) Satisfying an inherent human instinct shouldn't require a multi-hundred-billion-dollar budget. If you have an instinct to explore, check out your city sewer system, or look into the obscure corners of the Mandelbrot Set, or play an online game. All these activities satisfy the brute animal urge to get into new places.
In my experience, people who argue for human spaceflight on the grounds of "instinct" haven't examined their positions closely. They seem remarkably similar to religious ideologues.
Given that Lucas's THX-1138 was an obvious and pivotal influence on the paper roleplaying game PARANOIA, it is perhaps on-topic to mention that the game of a darkly humorous future is returning to print this August in a new edition from Mongoose Publishing, as previously covered on Slashdot.
The new PARANOIA XP edition emphasizes the Alpha Complex sort-of economy and a new consumerism very much in tune with THX-1138. You can follow the development of the game on the PARANOIA development blog.
And you can also use it to heat a two-story house!
I think this comment misses Bruce's point. As a reading of past Viridian notes shows, Sterling doesn't want to stop all use of nuclear, he doesn't want to return to 17th-century labor-intensive agriculture, and he doesn't tell Lovelock "No, you're wrong."
Bruce is pointing out that Lovelock ignores the historical mishandling of nuclear, and that Lovelock offers no practical solution to actually make any of this happen: "Okay == let's say your argument has convinced me. So get me a written quid pro quo that actually cuts carbon emissions way past Kyoto limits, and I'll risk the Chernobyls. Do you have the clout to give us one of those == or would you rather just pester hippies, Hollywood, and reporters?"
And then, at the end of the piece: "This nuclear nostalgia is all well and good, but what we need is genuine industrial policy agreed on by the powers-that be. A new Kyoto, genuine international agreement with coherent steps to deal with the menace. Otherwise we just glow in the dark as we die of the heat, and what's the point of that?"
Try the decaf, friend. I have my own domain and I still use my AOL e-mail address -- because I've had that same address for over a decade, and changing it would be bad for my business.
Hey, I'm an AOL subscriber AND I have a lower Slashdot ID than you! If your brain was screaming before, that must make your brain want to choke. If it turns out my karma is better than yours, will your brain commit hara-kiri?
The fallacy of this viewpoint is the assumption that exploitation and coercion are separate. Maybe in some airy theoretical world, but not on this particular planet. The problem with the fallacious viewpoint is that you can use it to justify child labor, inhuman working conditions, and chattel slavery. "Hey, it's just 'exploitation,' the same way I exploit my skills or the farmer exploits the land, so stop complaining and shut up, okay?"
Comparing the "exploitation" of your skills with, say, child labor in Hong Kong -- that's just word games. There is very little exploitation of human labor in the Third World (or, to use the new politically correct term, "the South) without overt or implicit coercion, not to mention numerous human rights abuses.
"Don't blame the corporations for doing what all corporations do. You might as well blame the wolf for killing the sheep." Please! Corporations are human enterprises, not imponderable forces of nature. If we have problesm with corporations, the solution is not to sigh heavily the way we would about an earthquake, but to change the institution of the corporation. It's not like trying to move a continent or stop the sun in its tracks, and to make it sound impossible is to be complicit with the abuse.
By that criterion, Cyd Charisse could help sales of Singin' in the Rain.
As another reply observed, there's a lot more to tabletop gaming than roleplaying games. I hung out with Richard Garfield sporadically for most of 1994 while I worked freelance with Wizards of the Coast in Seattle. I can testify to Richard's deep love and comprehensive knowledge of board and card games. Just as important for this panel, Richard can analyze and articulate what makes games work. He's one of the most creative and intelligent people I've ever known, as well as a really nice guy. I'm sure he'll be an excellent choice for the panel.
UK programmer, maintainer of perl.com, and Anglican missionary Simon Cozens has re-rendered the 10th-century Japanese classic Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon as a blog. It works waaay too well.
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.
What a strange thrill to see GLOBBO (my second boardgame, published by Steve Jackson Games in 1983) mentioned on Slashdot. Rights to GLOBBO are unexpectedly still available, so if you know of any interested publisher....
I'm not related to Jim Varney, that I know of. I'm sorry to report that he died of lung cancer at age 50, February 10, 2000, at his home in White House, Tennessee. He was a very funny man and a gifted performer.
We aren't prevented from calling it anything we want. We do want to distinguish it from past editions, but the "XP" name is provisional. Any loyal citizen who provides a better name will earn a commendation point.