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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@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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