I know, I was supposed to post yesterday and I missed it. But it was for a good reason(s), I promise.
Review: Paranoia: [Your Security Clearance is Not High Enough For the Title of This Adventure]
A few years ago, I kickstarted a new version of the slapstick dystopian dark humor RPG, Paranoia. Paranoia takes place in a future setting called Alpha Complex, which was built to save humanity from [REDACTED]. Now everyone lives here. It is run by an entity known as The Computer. Things run smoothly and efficiently all throughout the complex, and everyone has happy lives. Except that they don't.Players take the roles of Troubleshooters, people who work for the Computer to root out trouble in Alpha Complex and shoot at it (or fix it through other means.) Given the Computer seeing threats behind every corner, somewhat malfunctioning, and all the things that go wrong, Troubleshooters tend to live very challenging, frustrating, and short lives.
The new version of Paranoia has been perpetually pushed back over the last few years, as kickstarter projects tend to be, but moreso than my usual experience. Shortly before GenCon, we got PDF files of the books. Yay. Sometime after that, we got "final" PDF versions. The most recent update on the physical version is "Early 2017". We'll see what happens.
So, last night, I got a group together and I ran the first adventure of the Mission book.
I really like Character Creation, in general as well as in Paranoia. The Paranoia system is designed to create tensions between the party to begin with by having them go in cycles where one person chooses a skill to have a positive rating in and then chooses someone to have that skill in an equal negative rating. I decided to run through Character Creation, rather than using the pregens provided in the Mission book.
It took a little longer than I'd expected, but I think this was in part because the players wanted to try to help each other/coordinate more than the game wants them to and partly because players like to think through their decisions more than the game wants them to.
Once done with that, we headed into the first adventure. This adventure is definitely designed for new players/GMs to Paranoia, and maybe to RPGs in general. It's very good at introducing things, and it does so in a very straightforward manner. It gives long selections of text for the GM to read to guide them in how to set scenes and run a Paranoia mission. Helpful. It goes pretty systematically through different setting and mechanics things for the players to get used to them. Also helpful.
However, it's also fairly restraining in it's helpfulness. The mission is rather linear, to the point of literally giving the players a yellow arrow on their iBall display to follow to each point in the mission. There are a few things that "MUST" happen in particular ways that seem to take control away from the players in manners that seem a bit forced.
So, it's very good for new people, but some more flexibility would be nice for those with some knowledge of the game and/or experience.
And it's very odd/in stark difference with the next couple missions, which I haven't yet run, but which I've read and feel are oddly lacking in direction. The second one gives a fair number of options of things to have the players do, but it gives a lack of guidance in how to lay out or handle presenting the main conflict. It has a general suggestion in regards to setup, but doesn't give specific ideas for how GMs can execute that. The third adventure is much more of a sandbox, with different things in different locations which the players can interact with. There's still a lot of improve/decision making on the GM's side, but I feel like there aren't obvious holes like with the second adventure.
I'll be running the second adventure in a couple weeks, but I'll be doing a fair bit of prep work to make sure it goes well-the actual product may be quite different than what's in the mission book.
I look forward to running the third adventure after that.
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