Paranoia XP

Happiness is mandatory! Unhappiness is punishable by death. Are you happy, citizen?

Overall score:

Paranoia XP is the re-established, republished version of a game that’s ten years out of print, updated to take into account New Times. It’s a darkly satirical, laugh-out-loud game that can be played in a number of different ways. Plus it rules.

First, the premise. Actually, this is kind of hard to do, since the premise is that you don’t know anything. Well, that isn’t quite true. Although the rulebook is divided into about 30 pages of players' material, and 220 pages of GMs-only material, it’s actually expected the players will read the GM section. They’re just not allowed to show it during the game, since that will result in termination.

See, the game is set in Alpha Complex, a big underground complex ruled by “Friend Computer.” Friend Computer is insane, but you don’t want to say that, since it’s a rumour, and rumours are treason. The punishment for treason is death. Friend Computer is horribly afraid of Communist traitors, you see, and though well-intentioned, being crazy, it sees communism everywhere it isn’t. Thus, a lot of people die. Alpha Complex is divided up into a class-based system of colours. The lowest class, Infrareds, make up eighty percent of the population, and have precious few rights or trust. The highest, Ultraviolet High Programmers, are allowed to alter the very code of Friend Computer.

You are of Red Clearance, the second lowest. You are a troubleshooter, which means your job is to find trouble, and shoot it. You get tasked with ridiculous, ill-informed missions by Friend Computer. Furthermore, it is treasonous to belong to a secret society. You belong to a secret society. So does everybody else. It is also treasonous to be a mutant. You are a mutant. Expect, therefore, to die a lot. That said, don’t worry too much – you have six identical clones, and when one dies, the next in line immediately comes to replace you.

Thus is the setting of Paranoia. It’s a place, as emphasised in the book, of Fear and Ignorance. Yet, for all its Orwellian darkness, it’s also incredibly funny. The book itself is to be commended for this. Unlike something like D&D, where the rulebook reads like a car maintenance manual, Paranoia XP is a book that is enjoyable to read in its own right. (When I finished reading, my first thought wasn’t “Great, I’m ready to play!” but “Oh, now it’s over.”) See, the game is less a roleplaying game than a psychological experiment at times. Simply put, the only way to survive for any period of time is to kill your teammates before they kill you – and the rules are designed in such a way to encourage this sort of independence and backstabbing wherever possible. At the same time, the rules make it nearly impossible to get away with anything without clever planning and entertaining schemes.

The game comes complete with three separate styles. In Classic games, gameplay is balanced, and the troubleshooters deal with a bumbling bureaucracy that can’t achieve a whole lot. Players need very little proof to terminate each other for treason, and can create this proof after the fact. They die for the GM’s entertainment, and are filled with humourous names and pop culture references every now and then. Zap games are the extreme excessive end, and last maybe fifteen minutes – the players are lucky to make it to the briefing alive. They can shoot each other for even thinking they may be treasonous, pop culture references are everywhere, and the idea is to make as many jokes as possible. At the other end of the scale are Straight or Dark games. The bureaucracy is efficient, the tone is subtle. Proof is required for termination, but in this Orwellian nightmare, we’re all going to die. The players may try to play seriously through ridiculous circumstances, but this may possibly be the funniest style of all – if only as a defence mechanism.

The mechanics of Paranoia XP are incredibly simple. Though it uses a D20, D20 games aren’t fun, and this isn’t one of them. This is a fun game, it even states so many times in the book. Those Famous Game Designers aren’t half full of themselves, you see. Or lazy, for that matter. These are just rumours and rumours are treason. Anyway, the mechanics are basically rolling a D20. If you roll low, it’s good, if you roll high it’s bad. Compare it to your skill, the difference is the margin, and the greater the margin the greater the effects. There are some other rules for damage and treason accusations, but they’re simple and based around the same mechanics, and above your clearance level anyway. In fact, if you are the GM, the only mechanic you really need to consider is “Roll the dice. Consult some tables, ignore them, and make up what you want to happen.” Quite. Clearly, if a dice displays a number you do not like, it is plainly WRONG, and the book explicitly points this out.

In comparison to older versions, Paranoia XP has been updated to be more relevant to a modern audience. Firstly, the Alpha Complex has become almost a capitalist society! The Service Groups have outsourced to Private Service Firms, which the players now work for as their day job. Secondly, the Troubleshooters no longer always visit R&D to test out highly dangerous and improbable equipment. Instead, they perform a “Service Service” for one particular service group. It may be R&D, or it may be doing some dangerous and improbable task for, say, internal security. Thirdly, modern issues such as copyright, data licenses, identity theft, spam, and E-bay have been introduced. But these are just some of the many great improvements in the update.

Paranoia isn’t perfect. Although you can play a straight campaign, it’s not an easy thing to play for long periods of time. If you play for even a few months with fortnightly sessions, you’ll have needed to create new characters a dozen times. It can be fun, and it can be done, but Paranoia is really for one shots and short campaigns, which it does very well. For some people, it just might not be their thing. Besides that, I can only fault the game for three things. First, the index is terrible, but this is being fixed in the next reprint, and being made freely available as a pdf file. Also, there is no easy way to design stats for NPCs, but if you're thinking about stats you're probably thinking too hard - the game actively encourages you to make that sort of thing up on the fly. Finally, the Treason Accusation rules are of debatable quality. They are the same as combat rules, only based on a different score, but having to succeed a roll for the accusation to stick at all, no matter the evidence, doesn't sit well with me. Of course, this is easily changed, but it is still somewhat annoying.

Overall, though, it’s very hard to fault Paranoia XP. It’s an amazingly fun game, a very well written book, it has a highly supportive net community behind it, and is fun. I would recommend buying Paranoia XP, even if you only want to play it once, since the book is that funny. To do otherwise is treason. Are you a commie mutant traitor, citizen?

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Written by JamPaladin on November 09th, 2004