I've recently picked up the new Paranoia (love it) and I'm looking at (re-)introducing my local player group to the fun of Paranoia as a one-shot.
As ever, ideas for the mission are welcomed.
They've previously played How Many Clones Does It Take To Change A Lightbulb and Security Theatre 3000.
With a brand new rules set, I was thinking something simple, but I wanted something a little different to the intro mission(s) - they know Alpha Complex as a setting, so it's more about introducing the new rules and cards than it is the setting (although cerebral coretech will be new to them)
Since dice rolls pop up most often in most RPG systems when doing combat, it makes sense for their (re)intro to Paranoia to follow this logic. Therefore I plan on having them be shot at. A lot.
I had a couple of thoughts for this:
1 - with our movie nights featuring stuff like Dredd and 6 Days, a full on "building clearance special forces" operation sounds like a plan.
2 - Doing that properly, of course, would require them to be much more competent than they'll actually be, being RED-clearance troubleshooters.
3 - Whilst 'attack a building full of mutant commie traitors' opens up a lot of opportunity for the players to be repeatedly and painfully terminated, it doesn't have that true Paranoia-esque 'zing' of creeping terror as you realise how much they've screwed themselves over.
More importantly, the usual rules apply; there has to be a reason for things to happen which makes sense to someone (said someone not necessarily being any of the players prior to debriefing) and you can't just spontaneously kill a clone; they have to in some way actively participate in their own demise, either by poor dice rolls, poor life choices, or both.
Therefore, the questions needed to sort out are:
1 - Who has seized the building and why?
- Obviously 'generic mutant commie traitors' - at least as far as the briefing goes
- Part of me thinks I should come up with a specific group for this adventure (or it's just a single clone who's gone futsie....maybe with his other clones as backup?). This avoids a situation of someone drawing the secret society in question (which whilst funny for me probably isn't for them - things will, in my experience, go wrong fast enough without active sabotage).
- With cerebral coretech being a new thing, DAIV is also a new thing, so might be worth mentioning. I guess it could be virus-related, but then the question is why it's contained (which then basically just turns it into the last mission in the starter set). A non-replicating DAIV that's somehow locked to a coretech serial number?
- As a basic start point, an administration building makes sense. Offices are an 'interesting' environment for a firefight with lots of enclosed rooms and large, open-plan bits. Both low ranking and high ranking clones share the space, Printing facilities mean powered machinery, and file storage areas offer rooms where ABSOLUTELY NO COLLATERAL DAMAGE IS ALLOWED (yeah, right....).
2 - Why are a troubleshooter team, rather than IntSec goons or Vulture Squad, being sent in?
- It's certain death. But the players should at least have some chance of pulling it off.
- The local IntSec personnel are tapped out, dealing with actual crises. Which leads to the possibility of it turning out to be much worse than the supervisor thinks?
- They have a 'cover' for a bunch of RED clearance clones to get in past some initial level of security so the supervisor decided to roll with it rather than risk having someone more important hurt
- The route in is really unpleasant (sewer tubes?) and the Vulture Squad said "no thanks, get some troubleshooter scrubbers to do it."
- There's a time element - a 'proper' strike was being prepared but the mission just got massively more urgent and they're the closest group who know which end of a laser not to point at themselves (probably).
- The team is subject to termination post-operation because of potential DAIV infection or witnessing something inconvenient
- The recruiting party are doing an off-the-books mission.
3 - What should happen?
- Hostages are always good. The higher ranking, the better - although they can't be too high ranking or they'd have their own security and not be relying on trouble-shooters.
- A bomb could work, or - if there's a (currently) hardware-locked DAIV, some sort of transmitter
- I read Altered Carbon many years ago, and loved the Netflix adaption - a lot of the plot elements - a high clearance individual is killed and the memofax jammed, forcing the Computer to switch to an hour/day/week old backup for the next clone, for example, work perfectly well in paranoia.
4 - What options are there for everything to go catastrophically wrong?
- My first thought, if the terrorists are under observation from a forward command post, is how to make the troubleshooters think the command post is the terrorist holdout and storm that, guns blazing.
- If a DAIV is involved, obviously anything they see, hear, feel or are told via coretech messages is subject to tampering once they enter it's area of effect.
Any thoughts or suggestions are greatly welcomed!
As ever, ideas for the mission are welcomed.
They've previously played How Many Clones Does It Take To Change A Lightbulb and Security Theatre 3000.
With a brand new rules set, I was thinking something simple, but I wanted something a little different to the intro mission(s) - they know Alpha Complex as a setting, so it's more about introducing the new rules and cards than it is the setting (although cerebral coretech will be new to them)
Since dice rolls pop up most often in most RPG systems when doing combat, it makes sense for their (re)intro to Paranoia to follow this logic. Therefore I plan on having them be shot at. A lot.
I had a couple of thoughts for this:
1 - with our movie nights featuring stuff like Dredd and 6 Days, a full on "building clearance special forces" operation sounds like a plan.
2 - Doing that properly, of course, would require them to be much more competent than they'll actually be, being RED-clearance troubleshooters.
3 - Whilst 'attack a building full of mutant commie traitors' opens up a lot of opportunity for the players to be repeatedly and painfully terminated, it doesn't have that true Paranoia-esque 'zing' of creeping terror as you realise how much they've screwed themselves over.
More importantly, the usual rules apply; there has to be a reason for things to happen which makes sense to someone (said someone not necessarily being any of the players prior to debriefing) and you can't just spontaneously kill a clone; they have to in some way actively participate in their own demise, either by poor dice rolls, poor life choices, or both.
Therefore, the questions needed to sort out are:
1 - Who has seized the building and why?
- Obviously 'generic mutant commie traitors' - at least as far as the briefing goes
- Part of me thinks I should come up with a specific group for this adventure (or it's just a single clone who's gone futsie....maybe with his other clones as backup?). This avoids a situation of someone drawing the secret society in question (which whilst funny for me probably isn't for them - things will, in my experience, go wrong fast enough without active sabotage).
- With cerebral coretech being a new thing, DAIV is also a new thing, so might be worth mentioning. I guess it could be virus-related, but then the question is why it's contained (which then basically just turns it into the last mission in the starter set). A non-replicating DAIV that's somehow locked to a coretech serial number?
- As a basic start point, an administration building makes sense. Offices are an 'interesting' environment for a firefight with lots of enclosed rooms and large, open-plan bits. Both low ranking and high ranking clones share the space, Printing facilities mean powered machinery, and file storage areas offer rooms where ABSOLUTELY NO COLLATERAL DAMAGE IS ALLOWED (yeah, right....).
2 - Why are a troubleshooter team, rather than IntSec goons or Vulture Squad, being sent in?
- It's certain death. But the players should at least have some chance of pulling it off.
- The local IntSec personnel are tapped out, dealing with actual crises. Which leads to the possibility of it turning out to be much worse than the supervisor thinks?
- They have a 'cover' for a bunch of RED clearance clones to get in past some initial level of security so the supervisor decided to roll with it rather than risk having someone more important hurt
- The route in is really unpleasant (sewer tubes?) and the Vulture Squad said "no thanks, get some troubleshooter scrubbers to do it."
- There's a time element - a 'proper' strike was being prepared but the mission just got massively more urgent and they're the closest group who know which end of a laser not to point at themselves (probably).
- The team is subject to termination post-operation because of potential DAIV infection or witnessing something inconvenient
- The recruiting party are doing an off-the-books mission.
3 - What should happen?
- Hostages are always good. The higher ranking, the better - although they can't be too high ranking or they'd have their own security and not be relying on trouble-shooters.
- A bomb could work, or - if there's a (currently) hardware-locked DAIV, some sort of transmitter
- I read Altered Carbon many years ago, and loved the Netflix adaption - a lot of the plot elements - a high clearance individual is killed and the memofax jammed, forcing the Computer to switch to an hour/day/week old backup for the next clone, for example, work perfectly well in paranoia.
4 - What options are there for everything to go catastrophically wrong?
- My first thought, if the terrorists are under observation from a forward command post, is how to make the troubleshooters think the command post is the terrorist holdout and storm that, guns blazing.
- If a DAIV is involved, obviously anything they see, hear, feel or are told via coretech messages is subject to tampering once they enter it's area of effect.
Any thoughts or suggestions are greatly welcomed!