Thoughts on the Current Paranoia line from an old-school GM

[Gryndyl]

I had a rather serious and regular Paranoia group back in the late 80's. We drifted away once the "Crash Course" stuff started coming out and the published materials either seemed to alternate between silly parodies or overwrought campaign settings.

I'm delighted to see the resurgence of Paranoia and am starting to round up some players again.

I noticed in the "State of the Mongoose" letter the following comment regarding Paranoia:

The main rulebook is one of our best selling titles of all time, but the supplements, while cheerful enough at the sales end, are disproportionately low compared to the rulebook. Clearly, this is something we need to take a look at.

I thought I'd offer my 2 bits to let you know, from my perspective at least, why the line might have lower than expected sales.

The sales of the rulebook should definitely let you know that there is a market for Paranoia out there. Looking at the current line-up, however, I'm not really seeing anything that I want to jump on apart from the main rulebook.

What I want, quite simply, is missions. Missions where the players go trotting out as Troubleshooters, barely survive the briefing, have harrowing experiences at Supply, get saddled with nightmarish R&D gear and then charge into a chaos of backstabbing and destruction that is occasionally actually directed towards a mission goal. I don't have a lot of time to create these myself; certainly nothing up to the twisted and inspired levels of the published materials.

The original Paranoia line was chock full of fantastic supplements that offered exactly that: Send in the Clones, Vapors Don't Shoot Back, The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues, etc. The current line-up, however, offers pretty much nothing like this. What I see instead are sourcebooks, and reprints.

Sourcebooks are certainly fun to read but I'm not prone to buy them simply because they add a lot to the game that I'm never likely to actually use. I'll read them and get a lot of laughs and then maybe be able to squeeze about 10% of the new stuff into an actual game.

The following are my thoughts on what's out there. These are the impressions of each supplement that I've formed based on how it's advertised here. If I'm totally off on the contents and purpose of any of these then you might want to glance at how it's being described. Currently for offer I see:

"Big Book of Bots":A Sourcebook so that Troubleshooters can own their own robots? After their experiences with robots in the past none of my players are willingly going to allow a bot within 20' of them. They could have bots assigned to them, naturally, but this already happens pretty frequently through R&D. A bot Sourcebook seems of limited use-how many of them can I reasonably expect to use? Assign a new one each mission? Unless they are actually useful the players are going to make killing it a matter of early priority in each mission. If they actually ARE of use then they're in the wrong game I'm guessing I'd get about three missions worth of bots out of this and then the joke will have worn thin.

"Stuff" and "Stuff 2": I'd likely never let my players see either of these as they'd read through them and see all of the jokes in advance. I would buy these if I were creating my own adventures a lot so that I would have good stuff to unload on them in R&D or HPD&MC. I'm not sold yet on the whole "Infrared Black Market" concept as, in my games at least, visits to the market would have to be either done individually which would take absolutely forever or the entire thing would have to be made mostly treason free. Otherwise no one will risk going anywhere near it with the other players around. I'll introduce it in a future game and see how well it flies-if it goes over well then I might be more inclined to pick one of these up.

"The Underplex": Looks like a great Sourcebook if I were making my own missions. Otherwise, not so much. I'd run an adventure from it if it contained one but other than that it would see little use.

"Criminal Backgrounds": Another Sourcebook. Looks like it might be nice in fleshing out Paranoia campaigns that have characters actually carry over from adventure to adventure. If I were running a "straight" style game I might be interested in this. Typically we play "Classic" and use pregen characters, however, and my players typically have to look at their character sheet if you ask them something as simple as their character name. Forming long lasting bonds and developing their troubleshooters is a tough concept to suddenly try and add in.

"Service, Service": At first glance this appeared to be a sourcebook and I almost skipped right past it. Do I really want a detailed 8 page background on Production, Logistics & Commissary? Then I saw that it contains a mission for each one and it became much more interesting. It might be good to make that content more obvious. That being said, I'm hoping that the eight missions are connected in some way, creating a big, treacherous inter service network conflict with the hapless troubleshooters being moved around like pawns by all 8 groups. I suspect, however, that these are one-shots. and are in addition to a bunch of source material making for some pretty short and sketchy missions.

"Extreme Paranoia": We really, really like playing Troubleshooters. TV Stars and Executives? Not so much.

So that's the non-adventure stuff, now let's look at the missions that ARE on offer.

"Flashbacks" and "Flashbacks 2": Fantastic! Great to see these back in print. Not so good for my group, as we played these back when they were first out but I hope that these are some of your best sellers. What I want are more adventures and missions like these classics!

"Alpha Complex Nights" and "Nights 2": Five missions between them. One of these has the players as children and one has them as commies. We LIKE playing Troubleshooters. Really! While highly skeptical of those two adventures the other three look interesting. Since two of them are in one of the books and only one in the other I'm far more likely to pick up the first book and not the second.

"Sector Zero": These missions look like they could be good.

"WMD": Looks interesting and I'm curious to see how well the Straight style can be worked in with players used to Classic.

"The Thin Green Line": We LIKE playing troubleshooters, REALLY! Army men? Hmmmmm.

What it all boils down to is that Paranoia was/is a success as it stands in the basic books. Players as hapless Troubleshooters in a nightmarishly twisted setting. The fondly remembered classic missions that were deemed worthy of reprinting pretty much all feature this exact same setting. We don't necessarily want rules on how to play Scrubots and cafeteria workers or how many creds we can pick up mono-floss for. Tight, clever adventures like "Send in the Clones", however? Sign me up.

So far I've ordered "Crash Priority" from DriveThrouRPG and am eyeballing "Sector Zero". But I'm thinking that if the Mongoose line-up offered my foreground and less background that it might see better sales.

So that's my 2 bits

 

[Allen Varney]

Based on what you're looking for, I think Crash Priority will serve you pretty well, especially with its"six-shooter" packs of pre-generated characters. You're correct that the missions in Service, Service! are unconnected one-shots.

In fact, there are no extended missions in the new support line to match the length of West End's early YELLOW Clearance Black Box Blues or Send in the Clones. When I was packaging the PARANOIA support line, I moved strongly away from such lengthy missions, because I believe -- speaking as co-author of Send in the Clones here -- the game doesn't work as well at longer lengths and can become exhausting.

That said, Dan Curtis Johnson's "Hunger" in WMD is quite long in play, longer that you might expect from its page length. Your players might like that experience of playing Troubleshooters of much higher clearance. Sector Zero should also work well for you.

It sounds like the book(let) you'd enjoy most is the "mission blender" insert booklet in the out-of-print Gamemaster Screen. This is a 24-page set of tables that lets you generate PARANOIA missions with the roll of a single bucketful of dice. Though the GM Screen is out of print, you can still find copies at retail stores.

Beyond that, it's hard to advise you on what you might or might not like. I think it would be worth your time to page through some of the books, particularly Extreme PARANOIA, and see whether the experience affects your opinion.

 

[Allen Varney]

I'm not sold yet on the whole "Infrared Black Market" concept as, in my games at least, visits to the market would have to be either done individually which would take absolutely forever or the entire thing would have to be made mostly treason free. Otherwise no one will risk going anywhere near it with the other players around.

Sorry, I only noticed this point after I posted my previous response. The IR Market is easier to work in if you have established a routine level of corruption in Internal Security -- which should be straightforward, inasmuch as this concept goes back to the earliest days of PARANOIA. Have the Troubleshooters' own briefing officer whispers the market's location to them, and have their GREEN goon guards oh-so-casually happen to "accidentally" take the PCs by that location, and have the PCs see lots of high-clearance types strolling in and out of the market under wrecked and ruined security cameras.

And then -- this is the important bit -- and then, if they buy something, let them get away with it. Really. You want to establish the IR Market as acceptably safe, for the most part, because it's a handy narrative device and makes for great gags. Plus, over time, you can use it to hose players more deeply and lastingly than they could ever get hosed at PLC and R&D.

 

[Mongoose Gar]

"Alpha Complex Nights" and "Nights 2": Five missions between them. One of these has the players as children and one has them as commies. We LIKE playing Troubleshooters. Really! While highly skeptical of those two adventures the other three look interesting. Since two of them are in one of the books and only one in the other I'm far more likely to pick up the first book and not the second.

None of the missions in either Nights book has the players playing Commies per se. There's an episode in Sweep of Unhistory where they get mistaken for Commies, and they're trapped behind revolutionary lines in Viva, but you're playing standard Troubleshooters in all of them. My First Treason is the only one with non-standard player characters.

Oh, and thanks for the comments. Food for thought as I work on War on INSERT NOUN HERE.

 

[Gryndyl]

Thanks for the replies!

As I mentioned, I did pick up the digital version of Crash Priority and have had time to read the first mission-Stealth Train. I have to say that I loved it Very much in the spirit of the old Mark IV adventure and possibly, dare I say it, even better. I'll see how my group responds to it.

I may have had some initial bias as far as the IR market goes. I tend to feel that players should become familiar with the "classic" mission format before I want to start playing with that format and was disappointed that the Mr. Bubbles adventure eschewed the HPD&MC visit and the R&D stop in favor of the IR Market. I'll certainly give the market a shot but probably won't bring it in until the 2nd or 3rd adventure.

I do agree that those longer missions can be exhausting. I remember players being a bit glazed towards the end of them. Splitting them over multiple sessions was an option but it seemed difficult sometimes to bring the Paranoia levels of the players back to where they needed to be in the 2nd session when they're suddenly back mid-adventure. So yeah, I can understand steering towards the shorter missions. Still would like the emphasis to be more on missions than sourcebooks, however
I think that the element that is "lost" with the shorter missions is the running gag. Things like the second or third visit to R&D introducing experiments that are 'improvements' on designs that the troubleshooters received on their first visit. I also seem to recall one of the old adventures having a running gag in the briefing room. Each new mission briefing was conducted by clone replacements of the officers from earlier briefings due to internal backstabbing and terminations brought about by the treasonous agenda they were coercing the players into.

I think my ideal would be a series of connected missions, each of which is pretty self contained to allow for reasonable play sessions.

In any case, lest that original post have been overbearing in criticism, I do want to emphasize that I absolutely love the new edition of the game. The rules system is much cleaner and faster, the best of the old supplement concepts have been incorporated and the game is funnier than ever. Kudos!