PARANOIA

You start your PARANOIA career as a Troubleshooter with 1000 credits in savings (at Red clearance, about a monthcycle of ordinary expenses). You need these credits for many expenses, including new clones.

In the original PARANOIA, the designers compensated for the game's extraordinary fatality rate through an audacious, aggressively cheesy device: You played a family of six identical clones, all born from the tanks at the same time. While your first clone went on exciting and dangerous Troubleshooter adventures, the others held down routine desk jobs. When the first You inevitably bit the dust, The Computer called up the second You to trot right into his place.

For the new PARANOIA edition, advances in forced-growth cloning technology permit the tanks to squirt out only one You at a time. Most citizens who meet an untimely demise must wait months for Tech Services to get around to downloading their recorded memories into a new replacement body. Because Troubleshooters have a twenty-seven-thousand-percent higher fatality rate than average, The Computer has ordered Tech Services to prepare a number of ready backup Yous. Unfortunately, this costs money -- and it comes out of your salary.

When you start a new Troubleshooter, Tech Services grants you six clones for a regulated minimal cost per clone. You begin as Clone #1 in your line, which costs nothing. The cost to activate each subsequent clone equals 100 credits times the clone's number: Your second clone costs 200 credits, the third 300, and so on.

If you have exhausted your six allotted clones, all is not lost, but things get unpleasant. There are two main reasons: cost and genetic defects.

First, cost. To discourage frivolous dying, The Computer has decreed that each additional clone from the seventh to the twelfth costs 1,000 credits times the clone number. So clone #7 costs a whopping 7,000 credits, and the price goes up for each subsequent iteration. The progression after the twelfth clone is not pretty: The credit multiplier for clones 13-18 is 5,000 times the clone number, for 19-24 it's 10,000, and for clones 25+ the multiplier is a cool 25,000. That's right, clone #25 will cost you 625,000 credits. To pay this, you may need to take an odd job on the side. Maybe two odd jobs. Maybe two hundred.

If you don't have the credits to pay for a new clone, your credit balance goes negative. If your negative credit balance dips too low, your clone bank forecloses and wipes your template. Start a new character. The threshold for this catastrophe is 10 times the monthly living expenses associated with your clearance.

The bright spot here is that if someone else kills you without having adequate evidence of your treason -- and "adequate" will be numerically defined in game terms -- then the impetuous murderer is liable for the cost of your new clone.

A more serious problem is genetic drift. Tiny imperfections in the cloning process enter your clone template and accumulate with each clone after the sixth. The seventh might have a minor speech impediment or be missing a finger. The eighth has the same problem and could also be nearsighted, partially deaf, or color-blind (a grave hazard in Alpha Complex). The ninth has both of these problems and might also have a pronounced limp, twitch, or hump. By the tenth or eleventh clone, think Quasimodo.

At Clearance BLUE and higher you can spend 10,000 credits to get Tech Services to clean up and correct your clone template, so that your next six clones are as perfect as the original. The only means of template cleanup at lower cost or clearance is an illicit deal made through a secret society. Generally the society requires you to do them a favor at some unspecified time in the future. Perhaps the society will never call in that favor, perhaps they will never need you....

Courtesy of Aaron Allston, this bit of overly useful equipment, which we hope to make standard in the upcoming edition of PARANOIA:

Every citizen is required to carry a Mercantile Enterprise card -- universally known as the ME Card. Though it looks and works much like Old Reckoning credit cards, the ME Card is far more. Loaded with the character's biometric data, credit history, property inventory, and authentication codes, the ME Card is, in a sense, that character's identity.

Sadly, the card's built-in sensors don't test whether the individual carrying the card is the rightful owner. The Computer, in its analysis of economic systems, has determined it doesn't matter who is spending the money so long as someone is. So if a character loses his ME Card, the thief can become that character until the owner recovers, destroys, or cancels the Card.

Because cancelling a ME Card is a slow, all-day ordeal at Central Processing (though nothing compared to the three-day hell of getting a replacement), it's far more practical to try tracking down your stolen Card -- and in the meantime even to "borrow" someone else's Card and become him for a while.

Identity theft in Alpha Complex has thus become not just a concern but an everyday event. Wise characters go to extremes to protect their cards.

But take heart! Theft of one's Card doesn't always mean immediate financial ruin. The ME Card's resources are highly unreliable, varying in their buying power and perquisites by sector, time of day, and database availability.

Upgrade to Paranoia XP

It's mandatory!

We passed Alpha.

We're out of Beta.

Welcome to Gold Complex.

Utopia has been perfected.

(By the way, don't assume that it will be called Gold Complex in the game... Probably won't, but we can still use the joke...)

Failure to upgrade to

Paranoia XP

is a fatal protection error.

For you.

Filesharing is treason.

Listen only to Trusted Music ®.

A public safety announcement from The Computer.

All your rights are belong to us.

You may make up to six clones as personal backups.

All other rights are retained by The Computer.

Copyright violation will be punished by summary execution.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Digital rights management is not necessary.

You have no rights.

The Computer is Your Friend.

Trusted Computing.

It's the mandatory thing.

Trust the Computer.

The Computer is Your Friend.

Pre-emptive defense is mandatory.

The Commies must die.

The Computer does not lie.

Imagine no possesions,

I wonder if you can,

No need for greed or hunger,

A brotherhood of silicon and man,

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer,

but I'm not the only one.

After re-education and re-installation of your meatware OS, you will join us

And the whole world will live as one.

Paranoia XP

Happiness is mandatory.

Some netizens, including people who have only heard about the original 1980s PARANOIA but never got to play, have suggested/remonstrated that we should replace the old version's all-purpose enemy, the Communists, with some au courant foe. Everyone suggests terrorists.

Terrorists, of course, have been part of the PARANOIA Alpha Complex setting since the beginning; many of the secret societies use terrorist methods, as do The Computer's loyal forces. We will retain all this in the new edition.

That said, we're planning to keep the Commies. The Computer is still paranoid about Communist infiltration. "But that's crazy," you say. Well, yes.

It was crazy back in 1984, too. Nobody at that late date was still caught up in Cold War McCarthyist hysteria. In American pop-culture terms, "Commies" were already a joke. They were no threat at all, except in the mind of The Computer. That was the joke -- that in the name of fighting Communism, The Computer had turned Alpha Complex into a totalitarian socialist state. (Not that the ideological details of Communism entered into the game, of course; another part of the joke was that PARANOIA's Commies were cartoonish, mustachioed Rrrrooshians in bearskin hats -- Yosemite Sam with an accent.)

The Computer's mindset still requires a huge, shadowy, presumably omnipotent enemy. "Terrorist" implies a weaker, desperate enemy. Call the putative enemy "Islamic terrorist subversives" and you divert the player's attention to a variety of current hot-button issues. Call the enemy "Commies" and the player laughs -- and then starts seeing the real point: why the government finds it useful to establish a putative enemy. ("We have always been at war with Oceania.")

The people who want us to update Commies to terrorists are just expressing their concern that the game's satiric edge shouldn't be blunted. Rest easy. Nearly every person commenting on this subject has clearly detected the parallels between Cold War anti-Communist McCarthyism and today's anti-terrorist alarmism. If we do our job right, any newbie player starting a PARANOIA XP game will perceive the same similarities within the first five minutes of play.

In a display of pretzel logic worthy of Internal Security's Department of Unspecified Threat Assessment, some readers are taking the following exchange from the PARANOIA XP press release --

Player: Are you using the d20 rules system?

The Computer: No. PARANOIA is fun. D20 games are not fun. The Computer says so.

--and, from it, somehow managing to presume that PARANOIA XP will after all (despite the words on the page) be using the d20 system. This is untrue. PARANOIA XP doesn't use the d20 system. (If you're not a game geek, this is the popular system based on Dungeons & Dragons.) PARANOIA XP uses a modified and simplified version of PARANOIA's second edition rules. These rules do use a 20-sided die, but the rules themselves bear no relation to the d20 system or anything like it.

I think this weird confusion derives from the early 1990s decline of the original PARANOIA line. Products at that time depicted The Computer as wilfully and maliciously tricking its Troubleshooters into deathtraps. PARANOIA XP restores the correct attitude seen in the game's first and second editions: The Computer means well. It tries not to lie, though it rations information jealously. The Computer genuinely wants loyal Troubleshooters to survive and thrive. The problems are that The Computer is paranoid and imagines treason everywhere; and, too, that mere survival in Alpha Complex at any level above Infrared clearance basically requires you to commit treason constantly.

To repeat: PARANOIA XP doesn't use the d20 system. Pass it on.

Some comments have suggested that we open a forum for discussion. My ISP provides free software for this, which I could install and figure out. However, there are a couple of issues:

1. There's no clean way to link from a post here to a particular topic in the forum. That is, I'm sure it's technically feasible, but the software isn't set up for it, my time is limited, and I don't really want to muck about with the code, since I suspect it would take me at least a week to get that working. Thus, blog comments and the forum would remain pretty much separate entities.

2. While a forum organizes posts more effectively by topic, and allows you to find material more easily later, I (at least) am likely to browse it only occasionally, while I'm likely to look at the blog comments at least once a day. IMO, a forum is better for organizational purposes, but blog comments are better for a quick read and response.

So I'm interested in your thoughts. Yes or no on a forum?

Spam. Viruses. Identify theft. Digital rights management. "Trusted computing." Weapons of mass destruction.

Paranoia: Now more than ever.

Paranoia XP, should that be what we call it, is not an attempt to bring back an old RPG for the nostalgic, or not only that. Today, distrust and fear of government is as high as it has ever been. The fear and uncertainty around digital technology is as great as it has ever been, although it has shifted; it is not, as it was in the mid-80s, so much fear of being displayed by this new thing, the desktop computer; more, it is fear that scumbags will hijack your computer for their own ends and steal your financial information and destroy your reputation; that the Powers that Be will monitor your online behavior, to sue you into submission, or to indict you as a terrorist, or a child molester. That companies like Microsoft and the record labels will limit and restrict your freedom in ways no one could previously have contemplated.

The basic themes of Paranoia--totalitarianism, fear of technology, mistrust, and loathing--are, if anything, more relevant than they were in 1984, or whenever the fuck it was we published this thing first.

We have an opportunity not to "bring back" an old title, but to make Paranoia relevant to the 21st century.

this is a start.

Networking. Spammers. Scammers. Blackhat hackers. Weapons of mass destruction. Totally dysfunctional government. Paranoia XP is not an excercise in nostalgia. Paranoia XP is today. Paranoia XP is what we're living through--writ large, and excessively, and humorously.

That's what we have to achieve.

Paranoia XP has a ready-made market, in those who remember the old game--but potentially, we can reach a much larger audience than that, if we provide commentary relevant to those who care about freedom, technology, and the intersection between the two.

The post I linked to above was featured on boingboing, today. Boingboing is one of the top ten sites in the blogosphere, with hundreds of thousands of daily users. By letting out dribs and drabs, by guerilla marketing to the digerati, we can potentially sell Paranoia not merely to nostalgic aging gamers, not merely to a new generation of gamers--but to a wider audience, who are not dismayed by "games" but embrace them, at least in their digital form--and will find what we have to say about modern trends in society and technology disturbing, funny, and cutting.

We need to encompass everything that has happened with computing technology over the last twenty years: the universality of digital media, the Internet, the cultural struggle over intellectual property. Information wants to be free. But nothing is free in Alpha Complex.

Not Alpha Complex. We're beyond Alpha. We're out of Beta.

Welcome to Gold Complex.

Utopia has been perfected.

Or will be, when we are done.

I've suggested some themes we need to pursue: the issues that roil the Internet, the issues that roil the nation (and not ours alone), fear, loathing, the viciousness of power, and the ineluctable, programmatic stupidity of computing devices--timeless themes. Or as timeless as any can be, in an era of technological ferment.

But because we're addressing these themes, we face a marketing challenge, and opportunity, as well. I'm going to use some names now, and please take them as illustrative, rather than literal:

Almost no matter what we do with Paranoia, even if we simply reprint the second edition, Peter Adkison will pick it up. But if we do it (and market it) right, so will Eric Raymond, John Perry Barlow, Joe Trippi, Brenda Laurel, and Michael Stracynzski.

That's what we should be trying to achieve.

I look forward to dililgent service to The Computer, or to its appointed representatives in MNG Sector.
-- Allen Varney
www.allenvarney.com

I'll go into the history of Paranoia a bit later, but this is what's important for now:

This blog is for the use of the people working on Paranoia XP, the next version of the Paranoia tabletop roleplaying game. The people you'll see posting here are Greg Costikyan and Eric Goldberg (two of the original designers); Allen Varney and Aaron Allston (who are primarily responsible for writing the new version); and Alex Fennel and Matthew Sprange, who run Mongoose Publishing, which will publish the game. Greg is maintaining the site. We'll also invite Daniel Gelber (the third of the original designers) and Ken Rolston (who worked on the second edition) to chime in.

In other words, all of these folks will have IDs and passwords allowing them to post; however, everyone and anyone is invited to comment.

We'll be talking about what we're doing and what we're thinking here; in essence, the hope is that this will become our main means of communication as we work on the project, with each other and with the public. We're working without a net, in other words.

We may post bits of the material we're working on for comment, at times--but at present, we don't expect to make large chunks of what actually gets published available here. That's because we're evil capitalist scum, and we want you to purchase the print edition and make us all rich beyond our wildest aspirations. Otherwise, you might be inclined just to print crap out and carry it around. Because you're like that, and we're greedy.

But we do want your comments, rants, and so on. If we start going off the deep end, we want you to correct us. If you have clever riffs on some of the material we're working on, we want to hear it. This isn't exactly an open source project, but we take Eric Raymond's insight seriously; when a thousand eyes look at code, bugs are trivial. Since this isn't a software project, we're not worried about bugs--but we do think a thousand heads are better than, um, six or eight. We want to produce a version of Paranoia that is insanely good, not just a modest improvement on the second edition (let's not even talk about the so-called fifth), but something that speaks to the fears and concerns of this era as the second edition did to those of the 1980s. And we welcome your help in doing so.

With two caveats, by the way: First, we're aware of the dangers of grognard capture. There are times when we're going to do things in order to make the game friendlier to newbies, at the potential risk of alienating old fans.

And second--we are all believers in the importance of 'the commons,' and the importance and value of making material freely available (and in future posts, you'll see some of our discussion on that issue). Indeed, the attempt by owners of IP to control it indefinitely at the expense of the public is going to be one of the main themes (or ongoing jokes) of Paranoia XP. But this is a commercial enterprise. The end product is a series of print products we hope you'll want to buy. That's why we'll be posting snippets of what we're working on, not the whole thing--and also the reason for our 'terms of use,' which you'll find at the bottom of the page. We want your ideas--so we can steal them. We're not making any bones about that, we're being completely upfront about it. We want the best possible Paranoia XP, and if you want to contribute to that, fan-fucking-tastic. But anything you post here, we feel absolutely justified in using in the final game, if we like it. And we'll credit you, if we can, and if we remember to--but we won't pay you a dime.

What did you expect from a Paranoia blog, anyway? The Computer is Your Friend. All your rights are belong to us. Thank you for your cooperation.

It's pretty simple, by the way--if you don't want us to use something, don't post it. Use it to launch your own lucrative career in the high-paying hobby games industry. Cough. Or something.

In the meantime, we hope you'll enjoy reading stuff here, and will feel motivated to comment with flights of hilarious brilliance so sublime that we absolutely itch to cut and paste it into the final product with no compensation for you whatsoever, chortling to the bank all the way.

Test.