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Most gamers, even if they’ve never played the game, are familiar with the concept of Paranoia. But if you really don’t know anything about it, a little background may help. Everybody else can just skip to the next section.
Paranoia is a roleplaying game of a “darkly humorous future.” In the game, PCs are citizen of Alpha Complex, a vast futuristic underground home of humans who have survived some kind of planetary disaster. Alpha Complex is run by The Computer, a well meaning but insane machine who is convinced that (1) everyone is out to get it and (2) Communists and traitors are everywhere and must be destroyed and (3) Alpha Complex is utopia. Alpha Complex is thus a kind of “negative utopia,” but one that owes as much to Monty Python as to George Orwell. PCs take the job of Troubleshooters working for The Computer. Troubleshooters get assigned missions that are usually ill-defined, treasonous, impossible, or all three. During the course of failing to complete their missions, they attempt to gather evidence that each other are traitors so that they will be found blameless when they kill each other off. PC death is so common in the game that every character has six clones—identical copies that take over when the previous clone is, inevitably, killed.
What I didn’t like
On the whole, I’m happy with this product, so I want to start off pointing out the two things that didn’t please me.
Appearance and visuals
Illustrations are okay. They’re in the traditional style of Paranoia: cartoony black-and-white drawings of almost all men trying to kill each other or avoid being killed. More variety might have been nice, but they do establish the flavor. No one’s going to buy this book for the art, though.
Nor are they going to buy it for its overall visual impression. The page layouts are very dense with text in three columns. Main text is in a small sans serif font that’s readable at this small size, but the overall effect is that every page looks like a burden. This is ironic, because this game is about as light as commercial RPGs come, but the lack of white space doesn’t make reading the book, or flipping through it, as fun as it should be.
Organization
Here the book really disappointed me. It’s simply hard to find what you’re looking for. The book is divided into four major sections: first the brief player’s section, then three sections for the GM: GM’s information, the sourcebook, and the sample mission. The division between player info (how to make characters, a few general tips, and quite deliberately not much else—informed players go against the spirit of the game) and GM info is fairly sharp and logical. The lines between the other sections are less clear. The general GM section and the sample mission section both present an outline for standard missions that could probably be combined. The description of The Computer’s personality is put in the GM section instead of the sourcebook, but the descriptions of mutant powers (fairly rules-y) is in the sourcesbook.
Complicating this less-than-obvious division of material is the lack of useful tools to help you find what you’re looking for. I said “lack of useful tools,” not “lack of tools.” There are tables of contents—one at the start of each section. That means you have to know where a section starts to find the TOC, and if you’ve guessed the wrong section, it still won’t help you. The one-page index in the back of the book is far too skimpy to be helpful. I’ve tried to find about six different things in the book since reading it, and the index has never helped.
Two examples of my struggles with poor organization: early on somewhere there was a mention of pregenerated characters in the book. I wanted to look at them as I read the character generation instructions, but I couldn’t find them. I flipped to the start of the GM’s section, but they weren’t mentioned on the table of contents. I tried the index, but it didn’t help. Eventually I discovered the separate TOC for the “mission” section and found them.
Later, after reading the whole book, I wanted to find the specific debt level at which The Computer forecloses and wipes out your character. Again, the index didn’t help. It wasn’t in the player’s discussion of money and equipment, nor in the “economy” chapter of the GM’s section. Finally I just started skimming through the book until I found it—under “clones.”
What I liked
This is a quality game. If you’re interested in Paranoia, you will like what you get here. I’m not necessarily going to list every positive feature, just the ones that really stand out to me.
You get what you need, and what you pay for
$40 still seems like a lot to me, but the advantage of the dense text mentioned earlier is that in 250+ pages you really get what you need to run a Paranoia series. The player’s section gives just enough to let the players get started and make them eager to learn all the info in the forbidden GM’s section. It even makes it really clear that of course they’re going to go ahead and read the GM’s section, but they should absolutely not read the mission or reveal that they’ve read the GM’s section.
For gamemasters, you’ll find what you need for whatever your style is. Freeform GMs will find lots of fiendish inspirational material. Those who are more comfortable with some kind of rules structure will have plenty to work with for all common game situations, including game mechanics for resolving accusations of treason. (Those mechanics are particularly clever because the accusation is treated like a variation of combat: the accusation is an “attack” and the consequence is a kind of “damage.”)
Of course the book promises lots of additional information in forthcoming supplements, but I’m not left feeling like I have to go buy six more books before I can put together a respectable game. All the essentials really are here.
The game is flexible
Paranoia XP explicitly names three play styles, “Zap” (very frenetic and silly—almost like a Toon game), “Classic” (still highly comic but with some gestures toward believability), and “Straight” (more satiric than slapstick, with the possibility for long-term character survival, development, and discovery). All three styles have always been possible with this game, but naming them allows the game to present subtly different rules for each style. Some mutant powers are more appropriate for one style than another, for instance.
To facilitate “straight” gaming, this edition presents the possibility of more than six clones per character. Characters must purchase each additional six-pack of clones after the first (six-pack #2 costs 6000 credits, and the prices go up from there to [INSUFFICIENT CLEARANCE]). This allows for the possibility of a more satiric game in which PCs might eventually discover some of the real conspiracies controlling their lives.
The game is fun
Personally, I’ve GMed a lot of games where either everything was totally freeform or the character sheets and dice were thought of as broad guidelines. I’m just not one to spend a lot of time looking up a rule or worrying about whether the final modifiers are +3 or +4.
That said, at times I do get a craving for a roleplaying game, where the fun of telling an interesting story is complemented by the fun of rolling exotic dice and maybe scoring a critical success.
Paranoia XP really manages to make the game elements fun, something a lot of RPGs have trouble doing. First, it takes all the pressure off by repeatedly telling both players and GMs the only rule: the GM is always right. This allows the GM to do whatever is necessary to keep everybody entertained. Since rules fights aren’t entertaining to most of us, they’re simply forbidden. Anyone trying to argue about the rules quickly gets branded “traitor” and terminated. The character gets terminated, that is.
Yet part of what makes the game fun is that the line between player and character is deliberately blurred. This is illustrated in the most important mechanic of the game, “perversity points.” Perversity points act as the equivalent of experience points, karma points, or character points in a lot of other games. They can (theoretically) be used to buy long-term improvements in a character, but most of them get used during the game to affect probabilities. (The rules encourage the use of poker chips to keep track of perversity points to allow for rapid earning and spending.) If I want another player to fail, I can spend 3 perversity points to give her a -3 modifier on her action. (Or I can spend 3 to give her a +3 bonus, though that’s probably less frequent.) None of that is particularly unusual, but perversity points belong to the player, not the character. If you run out of clones, you take your perversity points with you to your new character. You can spend perversity points on actions your character isn’t present to affect.
In addition to increasing the chaos and betrayal of the game, perversity points make the game more fun by making the GM’s job one of telling a funny story instead of looking up rules. Once an action is announced, the player’s perversity spending, not some to-hit table, determines the final modifier. The GM then interprets the modifier: “Let’s see, that’s a final -5. Just as you’re about to fire, your cell phone rings, throwing off your aim and sending your target diving for cover.” To get the GM started, the rules provide several helpful examples of different levels of modifier for different situations and how they might be interpreted.
Most of the mechanics provided are fun, efficient, and quick. Players can roll up a new character quickly (essential in a game like this), and most charts are full of amusing results. The damage system of combat does seem a little unnecessarily-complicated to me, though I think the intent is to replace a “hit points” system with something easier to understand. I suspect that GMs who like it will learn to use it quickly, and those who don’t will fake it.
It’s funny
Of course, that’s the whole point of this game, so it had better come through in the humor department. It does, though. Not only is the game funny to play, it’s funny to read. Examples are funny, rules are funny, pictures are funny. The rules decline to give an example of play from Paranoia, instead providing a “non-example of play” showing what “some other game” (a very familiar fantasy RPG) would be like if played with a Paranoia mindset. (Sample quote: “Wizard: Don’t anybody move! I’m not only leveling accusations, I’m leveling my Wand of Fireballs against all three of these traitors.”)
And the game never takes itself too seriously. Every odd-numbered page has a bit of flavor text at the bottom (example: “We’ve got a termination authorization form with your name on it!”), and when the book goes for several pages without any illustrations, the flavor text starts scolding the book! (“Too many pages in a row without artwork constitutes treason!”) Whenever the rules present an obligatory promise of more information in a forthcoming rulebook, it adds, “If we remember.” And throughout the book, the designers will frequently make patently lame excuses for not doing a more thorough job, implying that they didn’t really try very hard/ were lazy / ran out of time. In all these cases, the truth is that more just isn’t needed: they give the GM just what’s needed, and do it having fun all the while.
Overall impression
Despite its visual and organizational flaws, this is a solid RPG that’s a lot of fun to read and looks to be great fun to play.
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