Tag: Paranoia

Continuing our wallowing in nostalgia, this time we’re going back to 1984. In more than one way, as it happens – because we’re going to be looking at Paranoia!

Yes, Paranoia, to this day the world’s premier comedy roleplaying game! It’s got a special place in my heart, in fact, since lazily snarking at stuff is my default mode of commentary, and Paranoia is written entirely in that tone. In fact, I wouldn’t wonder if I didn’t semi-consciously imitate it for a lot of sections in Monstrous Mishaps. It’s honestly a bit odd that not more games lean into the ridiculousness that always seems to creep into roleplaying, no matter how straight-faced it tries to be; let’s face it, when you have half a dozen players who are barely paying attention to what the GM is saying and whose most immediately accessible mechanic is rolling attack, things are always going to be primed for farce.

The game came in a box, because again, we’re in The Before Times here, and games always came in a box with a few pamphlet-sized books in it. Possibly by the time the 90s rolled around, it was realised that the GM might need something heavy and sturdy to hit players over the head with if they got rowdy? But regardless, the books presented here are the Player’s Handbook, the Gamemaster’s Handbook, and the Adventure Handbook.

PLAYER’S HANDBOOK

Straight off the bat, we’re introduced to Alpha Complex, a massive underground bunker existing after some vaguely defined disaster, where a population of survivors endure under the guidance of a deranged Computer. People are no longer born, they are vat-grown in batches of six identical clones, and once they’re old enough to work they are assigned a colour-coded security clearance from infrared/black to ultraviolet/white. Any and all information is available only if you meet its security clearance, and knowing too much is treason. All equipment and vehicles, likewise, are painted in the colour of its minimal security clearance, and using (or wearing) something beyond your clearance is treason.

Treason abounds just generally. Some people have hidden mutations, which is treason (did the Computer say you could diverge from the regulated human genome?!). Some people are members of secret societies, which is treason. A nefarious force known as “the commies” is constantly scheming to overthrow the Computer, and lending them any sort of aid and comfort is definitely treason.

The Computer employs special agents called troubleshooters for odd jobs. Troubleshooters are sent at intractable problems and frequently get shot full of holes in the line of duty. Nonetheless, it’s a great honour to be a troubleshooter. The Computer says so, and disagreeing with the Computer is treason. The PCs, needless to say, are going to be troubleshooters. They are also going to be mutants and members of secret societies. This will make their lives very interesting, and probably quite short.

We’re given a brief example of play, which includes the players shooting a squirrel on the assumption that it’s an alien invader (knowledge of anything outside of Alpha Complex is treasonous, you see) and we’re informed of three ways that this game differs from those: firstly, it’s comedic, secondly, the other players are not on your side and in fact probably more dangerous to you than the NPCs, and thirdly, you have five “spare characters” in the form of your character’s clones that means that getting killed isn’t quite so much of a big deal.

Character creation involves rolling a bunch of stats, your Service Group (basically your day job – none of them are all that interesting), your mutation and secret society, and then putting some points into your skills. Stats are your basic ones: Strength, Resilience, Dexterity, Agility, Moxie (intelligence… but this being Paranoia, it’s more like low cunning) and Chutzpah (effectively charisma, but technically more like shamelessness). Skills have an interesting system whereby the first few points you put into them go into increasingly narrow categories before you reach the point where you have skills like “laser pistols” or “fishing.” That’s nicely realistic, in a way that is admittedly probably wasted on this game.

Speaking of fishing, a lot of these are outdoor-survival type skills, actually. I guess getting sent “Outside” and having to scramble to survive in an inhospitable environment without any training was intended as a frequent occurrence?

You make skill rolls by rolling under a percentage with a d100. You can also make straight stat roll, in which case you roll a number of d10s depending on the difficulty and try to roll under a target number. Seems like there was no need for two different mechanics there, but okay. Certain stats also give you bonuses or penalties to certain groups of skills.

Character can acquire five kinds of points over the course of play: skill points that they can invest in more skills, credits that they can use to buy stuff in the limited market economy of Alpha Complex (and in the more extensive black market), commendation points that lets them get closer to a higher security clearance, treason points that lets them get closer to getting put in front of a firing squad, and secret society points that lets them aspire to higher rank within their secret society. The player is not informed when they gain any of the last three kinds.

Before every mission, the players will be given their official orders from the Computer. Each player will also be given secret orders from their secret society, which will likely contradict the official orders. They will also be assigned their equipment. This equipment will often be experimental, faulty, or something entirely different from what it says on the box. Losing or damaging equipment is treason.

The players may be assigned robot helpers, in which case one of the players will be their operator and they won’t take orders from anyone else. The operator can assign an “heir” who’ll take over as operator in case of their demise. This will give the replacement even more reason to accidentally-on-purpose push them over a cliff. However, if the mission failed because the operator didn’t assign a replacement and then got killed, he will be guilty of treason (which doesn’t sound like a big deal given that he’s dead, but his next clone will get treason points for being related to such a vile saboteur!).

The Gamemaster’s Handbook is forbidden for players to read. This is not to say that they shouldn’t, but if they admit to having read it, or show signs of knowing what’s in it, their characters will get assigned treason points for it.

The book wraps with a choose-your-own-adventure segment. Heh. I miss those. Guess we won’t be seeing them ever again, now that video games have gotten able to do the same thing only better. Ah well. Anyway, here it’s a fun way to give a taste for how the game might run. Also, I totally managed to get brownie points from my secret society for killing a guy and also turn in my other teammate for killing him, so that was fun. I got a treason point for asking how my gun worked, though. Apparently that showed a suspicious interest into classified information.

GAMEMASTER’S HANDBOOK

In this book, we get something more like the real score. Turns out, Alpha Complex started out as one of many bunkers built to survive an asteroid impact, but the asteroid’s actual impact confused the Computer responsible for ensuring its safety and made it default to some very old legacy code. These antiquated data banks gave it the impression that it was under attack by “the commies,” whoever those were. It desperately tried to warn all the other Computers running all the other bunkers, but they soon started bickering among themselves and ended up certain that everyone had been co-opted by the commies but them. The result? A hundred different Alpha Complexes, run by a hundred different Computers, all considering themselves at war with each other and all certain that enemy infiltrators are everywhere.

The interesting part here is that there is explicitly more than one Alpha Complex, which I don’t remember as being the case from later books. I think the idea here is that you can blow up one of them and then set the next time in another one without skipping a beat, and that you can change whatever you like from one campaign to the next since it can be set in a similar-but-differing-in-detail complex next door. I think the game eventually decided that it didn’t really need an excuse to have no serious continuity, though.

Clones in Alpha Complex are kept asexual by a drug regimen, and indeed have no idea that sexual reproduction is even a thing – again, new citizens are grown in vats. In fact, everyone is just generally drugged to the gills all the time, all the better to keep them happy (or at least happy-looking enough not to be executed for being treasonably morose).

Living quarters range from barracks where INFRARED citizens live, to dorm rooms for RED to ORANGE citizens, to personal cubicles for YELLOW and then increasingly snazzy digs as a citizen climbs the ladder. The Computer has cameras everywhere (whether they work or not is another issue). Food is algae-based and served in communal cafeterias, with “real” food being available only to high-ranking citizens or through the black market. Personal possessions are limited for most citizens; you can carry all your worldly goods around with you without problem (so much like an adventurer, then).

ULTRAVIOLET citizens are known as High Programmers. They are allowed to actually edit the Computer’s code, so technically they could fix the whole mess if they wanted to… but of course they’re every bit as inept and deranged as everyone else in Alpha Complex, so most of their edits are in pursuit of their own selfish, short-term goals and only manage to create more and more contradictions and inefficiencies to make the Computer even crazier and more erratic.

Next up, stats and skills get detailed a bit more. I’ll note that social skills include such items as bootlicking, con, fast-talk and spurious logic (the latter of which is the only social skill that works on robots). There are also a lot of skills for repairing or modifying equipment (the latter is, of course, treason). You end up with a pretty good idea of what you’re going to be doing, I think.

I do feel that the rules are, again, kind of crunchy and nitpicky for a game that runs mostly on rule-of-funny. I think later editions streamlined things considerably – when your chance to succeed at most things is going to be, approximately, “a snowball’s in hell,” remembering whether to add a +5% to it seems like more trouble than it’s worth.

One skill that stands out is Communist Propaganda, which is kind of like a mental virus. See, if you successfully spout Communist Propaganda at someone, you have a chance to inflicting a few points in the same skill on him… so now he’s a traitor by definition and you can blackmail him. Of course, if it doesn’t “take” then he absolutely knows that you’re a traitor and he will probably turn you in to be executed. Fine times.

The combat section starts with the declaration that Paranoia combat is intentionally simple and streamlined for easier fun! Then it goes on for ten pages of modifiers and weapon types and cover and stun and… uff. Okay, what they mean with it being simpler seems to just be that the damage system is simplified. Rather than having to count hit points, you just note your current state of being. An attack can merely stun you, it can inflict a wound, it can incapacitate you, it can kill you, or it can vaporise you (the difference between the last two being, in the former case reccussitation might be possible. In the latter… not so much).

Different kinds of armour reduce the impact of different kinds of weapons by such-and-such amount. Of particular note is reflec armour, which protects against laser… but only if the armour is partly made from a colour that’s the same as the laser’s. Remember how lower-clearance citizens can’t wear anything of a colour above their own rating? Yeah, turns out that socio-economic boundaries determine how zappable you are.

There are instructions for what happens when you die and one of your backup clones get activated, which all seems a little overly complicated and involves redistributing some skill points and making other adjustments. All very realistic within the premise of the game, but… again again, it seems to halfway ruin the whole point of having clones in the first place, since it means you still have to do some of the work of creating a new character. Again something that I think later editions dropped.

If your treason points rise too high above your commendation points, the Computer will try to execute you! You can attempt to run away and flee from Alpha Complex, but of course even if you succeed that clone is out of the game for good. However, your next clone will get a nice boost to his secret society rank, since he’s related to a hero of the resistance who the Computer could not catch.

Paranoia has insanity rules. Okay, that’s a bit unexpected. They’re not especially well-defined, though; mostly, you have to roll when the GM thinks you’ve had a serious shock, but it can’t be every time you have a serious shock, so… just when the GM feels like maybe having you temporarily cuckoo, I guess? It’s temporary, though; the Computer may be nuts itself, but it’s apparently quite good at getting troubleshooters back into some kind of working order through liberal applications of psychopharmaca.

The mutations get listed… yeah, they weren’t listed in the player’s section except by name. What, you expect to know how your own mutations work? That’s the sort of thing only a commie mutant traitor would know! Take a treason point for even contemplating it! Anyway, mutations strike a balance of being decidedly unimpressive and with a lot of inconvenient caveats while at the same time being soooooort of useful with some creativity. Which tends to be how most RPG powers are, but here it’s presumably intentional. There are things like super-senses, pyrokinesis, mind-reading, the ability to eat and digest any sort of organic matter no matter how tough or toxic.

Secret societies! There are a bunch, and they’re set up to be at each other’s throats far more than they manage to be at the Computer’s. There are hyper-capitalists, machine worshipers, nature nuts (who have only the vaguest idea of what “nature” is, since they’ve never actually been Outside), mutant supremacists, and of course a few who just want to smash things up in interesting ways. Not all secret societies are even anti-Computer, per se – there is even one that worships it as a god. Membership in those is still treason since it’s unsanctioned, but you won’t get executed if you’re found out to be a member. Instead, your superiors will just file it away for if they ever feel like executing you for some unrelated reason and need an excuse. Stalin would be so proud.

There is a section of GMing advice, which is basically to do a lot of things that would make you a bad GM in other games. None of that “remember, you’re not the players’ enemy” here – you are absolutely supposed to be out to get the players and screw them over in every inventive way you can think of. In particular, you know how it’s usually best practice to set the players up and make sure they understand the situation, and interpret their actions in light of the fact that their characters are competent and non-suicidal? Yeah, we don’t do that here. The player characters are ignorant, frantic, drugged up, and the products of a dysfunctional society where everyone works at cross purpose. When they try to do anything the least bit complicated, you should demand specifics of their approach. And if they ask someone for help, then so sorry, but that information is not available at their security clearance.

Still, you are cautioned to not go too far with it. The players should usually have a chance to pull off some kind of win, just an exceedingly slim one.

It is suggested that inspiration from Paranoia scenarios can come from five genres: detective mysteries, spy thrillers, war stories, future sci-fi, and post-apocalyptic sci-fi. Hmm, okay. I suppose I can see what they mean, but coming up with scenarios for this game strikes me as the hardest part – there is only so many directions you can take a setting that’s mostly a bunch of guys in identical overalls running around a bunch of sterile steel tunnels. That said, the sheer amount of scenarios that have been published for the game suggests it is possible to stretch it pretty far, even if I understand that the writers got sort of desperate during the late second edition…

ADVENTURE HANDBOOK

The adventure handbook, finally, starts off with a long equipment section. This game really does love its freaky high-tech toys, even if it also loves to have them malfunction. There are a ton of weapons, vehicles and bots, and rules for how to include them in combat. Like in most games, it leaves me sort of cold.

Then follows the sample adventure, Destination: CBI Sector. In it, a bunch of pre-gen characters of RED clearance are sent to an abandoned part of Alpha Complex to retrieve a missing robot. Each one, of course, also has been fed some disturbing rumours (accurate and otherwise) about the others and have their own agendas from their secret societies. They are sent along with a powerful NPC who is fully intending to get them killed along the way so they can’t rat him out for not having any intention of going through with the mission.

The mission, even aside from that, is probably impossible. It involves dealing with a rogue High Programmer turned cyborg overlord who has fortified CBI Sector to the teeth. There will be killer robots every step of the way. The players are walking into a near-guaranteed TPK. So… again, pretty much par for the course, as introductionary adventures go, except here it’s probably intentional.

Still, while I appreciate the honesty in admitting that the players aren’t supposed to get very far… I do feel like running the game that way would be kind of unsatisfying for the GM? I mean, if the players don’t get to the end, you don’t get to show them the cool stuff you’ve prepared. Or, in this game, the funny slapstick stuff you’ve prepared. It means they’ll miss the joke. That seems like a shame.

Still, I guess that’s a nitpick. The only other comment I have is that the villain, Menlo, stands out for being actually competent and terrifying. I think he might have been the first and last Paranoia villain who was played straight – in every other product I’ve seen, the bad guys are as hapless and fundamentally screwed as the players.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Honestly? Paranoia is probably not my cup of tea, at the end of the day. I’m too soft-hearted to really try to hurt my players, and I’m just not interested enough in the sort of sci-fi that the game parodies – gear porn tends to bore me, and you can’t properly appreciate a parody of something you don’t like on at least some level. Likewise, while I appreciate that the game proves that you can take a fairly limited premise and make a lot out of it, I feel like I’d get bored with Alpha Complex pretty soon. I prefer a setting that’s not quite such a challenge to put some variety in.

Still, it’s certainly fun to read, and I do appreciate it in concept.