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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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 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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