So I had some idle thoughts about Paranoia again lately, which kind of fits into the global zeitgeist.
I mean the roleplaying game of course, although who's to say really?
The game has gone through a few editions over time, and I feel it has risen to thematic relevance again in a way I didn't think possible ten years ago. 1/?
[#]ttrpg
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Paranoia was a child of the cold war, and it cast the player characters as troubleshooters tasked with working for the good of the Alpha Complex (a domed city/underground base) by the all-mighty Computer.
Troubleshooters find trouble, and they shoot it. What trouble? Communists, traitors, mutants, conspiracies, communists, malfunctioning equipment, communists, commie mutant traitors, etc.
2/?
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There is a certain conceptual purity in the setting of the first edition that none of the later editions really managed to capture again: you see, the Computer is insane and believes itself and the Alpha Complex to be under constant attack by communists, mutants, or any other menace.
The joke is that every single character in the setting is a member of at least one conspiracy, as well as a mutant, all the while Alpha Complex is the model of a communist society.
3/?
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Unfortunately, as is often the case with roleplaying games, later editions had some serious conceptual drift set in. 2nd edition was technically close to the original, just a bit cleaned up from the rules side, but already was a bit too "haha look how funny we are" in it's writing.
It didn't help that later books of the edition went with painfully unfunny pop-culture parodies and an unneeded metaplot.
Well, it was the 90s.
4/?
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5th (actually 3rd) edition went all the way in on the silliness of the setting, and managed to be so painfully unfunny that people still don't want to acknowledge it's existence.
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Paranoia XP tried to be better, and at the same time update the setting to the 2000s. Including the xp part of the title, which they had to drop after Microsoft complained.
And it's not a bad game, but it doesn't reach the conceptual purity of the original. For one, gone is the whole joke of people in a communist society fighting against communism. All of a sudden there's a (joke) economy, and an internet-equivalent, and different service firms, and forums, and and and...
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For another it's too detailed. There was really no reason to get into all kinds of details on how Alpha Complex actually worked.
Except there was. If there's one innovation in those rules it was...
...no, not perversity points, which were like bennies in other games but with a stupid name...
...no it was the acknowledgement of different game modes you could play Paranoia in, which changed the mood and even the used rules to accommodate whatever you wanted.
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Classic games were supposed to be similar to the earlier editions, Zap games were supposed to be all about mayhem, and Straight games could still be pretty ridiculous, but would be games about actual people standing against bureaucratic nightmares
(The best-received Straight scenario is called Hunger and puts the characters in charge of a Miracle of food production based heavily one The Great Leap Forward and all that implies)
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I lately have been thinking an acknowledgement of people playing the same game in different modes might be helpful in the hobby. People seem to get tripped up by discussions about that other fantasy game pretty often.
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Anyway, there was another 25th ct edition in 2009 which made the interesting decision to split the books into different clearance levels (red-level troubleshooters, blue-level internal security/police, and ultraviolet high programmers).
From what I have seen it's a cleaned up version of the XP system.
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There were two further editions that I kind of missed in between. 2017 brought the Red Clearance Edition, which replaced Communists as the threat the Computer was going against with Terrorists. Which seems rather ill-advised to me.
Which explains why a recent "Perfect Edition" seems to have reverted to using Communists as the Computer's big threat.
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Which is fitting, because the last few years a certain section of society has made communism and everything remotely connected (e.g. free education, socialized healthcare, general empathy for other humans) into the target of some sort of witch-hunt. Which means all of a sudden the game is... well, topical. Not necessarily in the way it was presented as originally, but topical nevertheless.
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Of course the people that make all those claims about communism don't have a clue about communism in the first place, but you know what? So do the Communists in the game, which mostly work on the reasoning of "well the Computer says it's bad so there must be something to it" and due to future imperfect try to combine whatever they know about Communism from the computer with the works of John Lennon and Groucho Marx.
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And one of the thoughts I had lately was that the rules really don't matter, and I actually don't like any of them. Because they never really did.
(Paranoia might have been the first ttrpg to put a lampshade on it, by making open knowledge of the rules treason and grounds for termination of the character. Which is slightly less serious than it sounds because everyone got spare characters anyway. The Computer knows the value of backup copies)
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The fact that Paranoia as a game often is much more defined by its worldbuilding, and the narrative rules of its scenarios (call to meeting, mission briefing, get equipment, get R&D prototypes, do mission, blame each other on debriefing) than by the actual rules of the game is telling. In fact the rules have switched between being based on percentile, d20, and d6s depending on edition, and I literally just had to look up which one was which because it's not important and never was.
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I have been thinking of just taking a few bits and pieces from each edition and make my own house rules of the game. Considering how light some of the earlier editions are it could come down to a very basic zine-like rulebook of 8-10 pages.
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I might have to mention that the Red Clearance edition also uses special dice (which I hate in games) and special card decks (which I also hate).
They seem to have gotten rid of that for the Perfect Edition
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In other words it allowed for actual campaigns to be played in Paranoia, which considering the high rate of attrition of characters in the previous editions, always was a bit of a challenge.
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As an aside: there actually was a 6-issue #comic series back in 1991. A pretty dark one from what I remember, that took the source material much more serious than the game itself did.
Well, to be fair, it concerned the lives of the clone family of King-R-THR 1 to 6, so at least the tendency for punny names from the #ttrpg was kept in.
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Speaking about conceptual drift in roleplaying games: they are kinda prone to it, aren't they?
I think the main reason is because you never know what players and DMs make out of your rules once they are left alone with them.
The big example is of course #dnd, which started as a supplement for a tabletop wargame (the box even having space for the Chainmail rulebook), and ended up... well... gesticulates at the tabletop rpg hobby in general
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but you can see that in a lot of games. Have you ever compared the 1st edition of #Vampire the Masquerade with later editions? Those are drastically different games. The rules are roughly similar, but the whole concept changes from 1st to 2nd ed.
1st ed. is a game about lonesome vampires in some American city, going to hunt for prey, fighting to stay (un)alive.
There's only 7 clans specified at all. It even proposes you set the game in Middle-Earth instead.
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ok, and it had heavy Ars Magica connections at that point, both of which were published by White Wolf at the time.
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I mean, if you read the 1st ed. VtM you might come away with the impression that Vampires and other supernatural beings were, you know, RARE in the World of Darkness.
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@kyonshi
Pick your next words wisely citizen.
I'm always listening.
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@kyonshi so the last time I played a round. i did not really explain the dice rules and everything worked fine. The games plot structure helps a lot and lot of situations don't even need a diceroll.
Thank you for that nice tread :)
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@kyonshi You could easily make a FATE spin on Paranoia, I suspect, or even go so far as to make it a Fiasco playbook. Because, as you said, the rules REALLY don't matter.
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@kyonshi when i was a kid, during a big TTRPG encounter, some people came with a fork called *Paranoia that was, basically a character sheet with 6 smiley faces, and a place to write your conspirationl, and that was it. All the rest was plain and.simple roleplaying. It has been the most funny iteration of a game.i have ever played. And we were like 10 or 15 people in that table.
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@kyonshi I really like Paranoia a lot, but I think that the "rules don't matter"-mantra has done more harm than good to the game and its reputation.
I think for the humour in Paranoia to really work, players still need to buy into the idea of the game following rules and not just the whims of a fickle GM. (Which was arguably the original edition's main thrust of satire.)
Once the game is treated as pure GM fiat, it becomes a painfully unfunny pantomime of a "comedy RPG".
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@Georgios and I think that's part of the conceptual drift I mentioned. It needs rules. What rules though is not important, but it needs some that the GM holds onto.
But starting with 2nd edition you can see the tendency of the books to claim the GM can do what he wants.
This is also why I think the "perversity points" of XP were stupid, because they were supposed to be given for being entertaining. I think this goes against the whole idea of Paranoia as a bureaucratic comedy of errors.
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@kyonshi I think that drift is at least in part due to the "folk story"-style way of teaching people RPGs.
The "GM does whatever they want"-approach might have been useful to break people out of a rigid understanding of what an RPG is and how it ought to be played. ("Like D&D, right?")
And to some extent, when I used to run Paranoia I ran into the same problem, just from the other end. I had to teach players to let go of their rigid ideas of what Paranoia is and how it ought to be played. :)
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@kyonshi That's always a deal breaker for me. I will not buy additional dice to play any game, regardless of what it might have to offer.
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@kyonshi The Computer is your friend, citizen. Never let it be suggested otherwise.
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@kyonshi To be fair, between first and second edition they figured out who their paying audience was and adjusted with great rapidity!
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@kyonshi ahahahaha i could talk for DAYS about how vtm transforms book to book across the 1e era
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@zozo please do if you'd like... because I am really not an expert.
I actually for the longest time only had the 1st ed. book, which became weird when I tried to play with people who had a completely different approach to the game.
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@zozo @kyonshi When I first got interested in actually learning the VtM RPG, I did start with the first edition. And then got first confused, and then very disappointed that "personal horror" ended up a meaningless buzzword that was not actually pursued as the game expanded.
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@yora @zozo yeah I had a short campaign once where "we are playing in Constantinople in the Dark Ages" could well have been "we play DnD murderhobos but only go out at night"
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@kyonshi @zozo With Shadowrun, at least we all thought we had lived up to the premise when our team of infiltration specialist burned down the target warehouse, lost a third of our people, and eventually made our escape without ever having found the package we were hired to retrieve. 😄
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@yora @zozo yeah but Shadowrun... you know, Shadowrun also had conceptual drift happening. It's not quite as noticeable, but 1st ed. was VERY Seattle-centric, and also had a focus on the literal cyberpunk aspects of the setting (you were assumed to be a generally "good" character who wouldn't mind helping people and fighting the good fight against the evil megacorps. In other words: hooding was supposed to be the default)
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@kyonshi @zozo And of course we all know how D&D became pretty much unrecognizable in the mid 80s despite barely changing the rules.
(Though changing the XP system was a rule change with major gameplay impacts.)
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@kyonshi For Paranoia, it's because wildly incompetent people took over the writing from the original, admittedly flippant and hard to follow, authors who moved on from WEG's ongoing poor pay. There's no reason to use anything but 1st or maybe 2nd, the OG game works fine.
With loose Braunstein D&D, AD&D became so different and strict because Gary was fucking Dave out of credit/shares. 2E because Lorraine was fucking over Gary. 3E because WotC was fucking over indie games.
[#]ttrpg #dnd #paranoia
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@kyonshi There's not a critical mass of Paranoia players for an OSR, but there are indie games like it (and I'm still working on mine, out real soon now).
Letting game companies exist and continue to make hack-work of a game designer's vision is the problem. Make your own thing or GTFO.
[#]ttrpg #dnd #paranoia
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@mdhughes what indie games do you think are like it? I'd be interested.
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@kyonshi The serious one is A/State, it's a slightly weird urban horror/fantasy city with treachery and paranoia (lowercase). Cyberpunk 3E & RED feel very openly Paranoia-like; Mike still writes it so it's his vision shifting over time.
I'd have to dig in my Misc games folder, there's a robot RPG which blatantly has misinformation from Humans and central control. Several cyberpunk games have taken up the built-in treachery mechanic, tho I think some now are Among Us-likes.
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@kyonshi dnd kinda shares with Vampire the fact that both experienced Death of the Author in the most contrarian way... except where Gygax (and then Hasbro) embraced the playerbase slamming nails with the butt of a screwdriver, Achilli never stopped condemning the "evil muchkinist muchkins" that "debased" his fanged misery tourism game for actually fun things like Vampions or cloak and dagger games as the city's primogen... which happened to be the gross majority of his market.
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@kyonshi Yeah, there's no shortage of unnecessary changes between editions. It's either the now deeply lost pop cultural references or the ones that try to run the setting as long term, very dark comedy. Neither really hits the mark of the original.
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