Paranoia High Programmers

[locarno24]

...My local group of players, who've been exposed to Paranoia on a few occasions, have now started actively asking to play High Programmers, largely due to watching the trailer for The Death Of Stalin.
It looks hilarious, and I'm wondering how to do something similar - a not-so-big-as-the-big-crash-but-still-fairly-big-crash-crash (with Friend Computer playing the part of Stalin) or else a permadeath of a major UV high programmer in their area of operation springs to mind.

 

[GoldenWyvern]

Compnodes!

I don't have my copy of the 2017 manuals at hand so a lot of this comes from 2e and XP, but I seem to remember compnodes being brought up in the new version. Long story short, Friend Computer is not a single entity, it's a series of interconnected compnodes which (theoretically) connect to the same databases. In theory, this means that there's redundancy; in practice, this means that when your team goes from POW sector to PRW sector next door, the Computer may have a completely different personality, have no memory of the mission it gave them, and might actually be "a member" of a secret society.

To make matters worse (read: "more fun") that's literally what a High Programmer does. They "make sure that the computer is running smoothly at all times" and nobody who clawed their way up to Ultraviolet would possibly have their own agendas.

So, yeah: Figure out which sectors your high programmers handle, work out which subsectors are attached, and which compnodes are running in those areas. Then have those areas blocked off from the main Alpha Complex for "return to normal" purposes (hey, isn't there an entire section in the 2017 manuals about one thing which will completely panic Friend Computer to the point where It would cut off all access to a huge chunk of the complex?) and you've got a crashable game area.