GAMES SYSTEM OVERVIEW 2004

GAMES SYSTEM OVERVIEW 2003

GAMES SYSTEM OVERVIEW 2002

GAMES SYSTEM OVERVIEW 2001

Paranoia XP

Welcome Citizen to the glorious world of Your Friend, The Computer. The Computer is good, The Computer is kind; the Computer is your friend. Stay alert! Trust no-one! Keep your laser handy!

If the above is familiar to you, you already know 90% of what you’re in for here. If you have no clue what all that was about, then welcome to a very different role-playing experience.

Setting

You are a citizen of Alpha Complex. You have just been promoted to Red clearance, for turning in your co-worker for treason, and you have now joined the Troubleshooters, the Computer’s most loyal and favoured servants. When trouble strikes, Troubleshooters are the first on the scene, and they can be called upon to do anything, at any time, for any reason. You might be asked to put down a riot in a mess hall, find a High Programmers lost keys, find and execute a known Commie, or go Outside on patrol.

When not on missions, you also work for a service firm. Your service firm also serves Alpha Complex. You might be part of the vidshow production teams of HPD&MC, an engineer in Power Services, or one of R&D’s Live Fire Drill Test Target Dummies.

As you can guess, Paranoia is not a game to be taken very seriously. Try and imagine a 1984 screenplay written by the Marx Brothers, and you’re probably not too far off the tone of the game. Slapstick, random deaths, and a barrage of truly astonishing bad puns make up the meat of Paranoia. Missions aren’t meant to be beaten, merely survived, and that is a challenge in itself. Mercifully, given the ease with which characters can die, you start off with 6 clones of your character. If your GM is up to scratch, expect to be on clone 6 at the final debriefing. At the debriefing, you can expect clone 6 to be volunteered for Reactor Shielding Duty, promoted, demoted, shot, or all of the above at once.

Survival skills in Paranoia are boot-licking, lying, stitching colleagues up, and laying blame elsewhere. Combat skills do enter into things, but by and large, Paranoia combat is such a random thing, and the GM so biased, it isn’t worth worrying about it. Drama and heroism wins the day, not planning, so wade in with an idea that sounds cool, and chances are it will work. Cautiously hide behind a plan of elaborate tactical brilliance, and something heavy will land on you, guaranteed.

Most games demand that you work as part of a team to achieve a goal. Not this one. If you make it to the debriefing, you will get killed for failure (you WILL have failed, trust me on this), unless you’re the only one there. If you’re the sole survivor, you can blame all the failures on the dead guys, and expect a healthy promotion. Put simply, get them before they get you. It’s the only way to get ahead in Alpha Complex.

The New Edition

The original version of Paranoia produced probably the single finest pre-written adventure ever published, The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues, and the second edition produced a whole slew of classics as well, the dungeon crawls of Orcbusters, the Vulture Warriors of Dimension X series, and The People’s Glorious Revolutionary Adventure. Each one was a masterpiece of lowbrow comedy, and even if you never played them, they were worth just reading for the fun of it. The XP version has a lot to live up to.

There are a lot of changes between the previous versions and this one. The earlier editions were written in the 1980’s, and very much reflected the times. This version has been updated to reflect more modern issues.

Characters used to be part of one of 9 or 10 service groups, vast monolithic bureaucratic nightmares that produced or maintained everything in Alpha Complex. Now, nothing is quite so simple. Each service group is made up of up to a dozen service firms, each service firm being in actuality dozens of small companies that all compete with each other. Yep, your friend The Computer discovered the joy that is the internal market. Your characters can now earn money, and actually get paid to go on missions. Wealth is still of virtually no importance, since there’s precious little worth buying, but it is something else to compete over. There are more mutant powers available, a greater breadth of skills to choose from, and more detailed backgrounds for the various secret societies. The secret societies now hold far more political power within Alpha Complex, taking over control of various service firms in which they have a vested interest. The bureaucratic run-around in any given service firm is now even more complex, because a given clone has loyalty to his firm, and the secret society that backs it.

Perhaps the biggest change in this version though is the development of game styles. The game has rules for three styles of play.

Zap play: This is where most moderately experienced role-players start. Freed of the constraints of having to co-operate with people, Zap players blow each other’s hands off at the drop of a hat, make wild accusations of treason, and never actually quite make it to their briefing room.

Classic play: Paranoia as it was meant to be; bad puns, random deaths, business as usual. Players will actually attempt some kind of mission, might survive it, and will have the mother of all slanging matches in the debriefing room. Everyone will be volunteered for Reactor Shielding Duty.

Straight play: This is the new one. The puns go, the deaths go and the wild accusations go as well. Well there is still humour in straight games; it is pitch black in tone. Players are competing, but they compile detailed files on each other for blackmail purposes, and accurately document treasonous activity. They follow the mission brief carefully, and may actually achieve something. They amass wealth, climb the promotion ladder, and have actual careers. Short ones, but they do have them. In straight play, cash rewards have real value, because you can purchase more clone replacements for your character, and live longer. Campaign play becomes a possibility, albeit in a twisted bureaucratic nightmare. This game is closer in tone to something like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and similar darkly humorous takes on 1984 et al.