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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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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