PARANOIA

This blog's July 21 post spawned a comment thread that meandered far from the topic. Actually, most of the posts had absolutely nothing to do with the topic. Rather than resort to probation or censure of these discursive citizens, let us experimentally start an open thread. If you have anything PARANOIA-related to inquire or expatiate about, feel free to post in the comments. (You might also join the 1,000+ loyal citizens on the Paranoia-Live.net forums.)

See it now, citizens: the all-new, all-friendlier, all-perfect-er than ever FriendComputer.net! Famous Game Designer Bill O'Dea of the Traitor Recycling Studio writes, "I've made some big changes to FriendComputer.net that I wanted to bring to your attention. Firstly, I ditched GeoCities for a real host. No more bandwidth problems! Secondly, I redesigned the site to reflect service groups a lot more. It has all the old pages but a lot more.

"To help ensure this project doesn't eat into my Traitor Recycling Studio design time, I'm trying to find writers who want to add content. I'll do the actual coding (I can add paragraph tags easily), but they can write the creative stuff and I'll post it."

Interested? Contact Bill O'Dea: biggles (at) friendcomputer (dot) net.

Via loyal citizen saulres on Paranoia-Live.net, I belatedly learn that long-running gamer-cult comic Knights of the Dinner Table apparently covered PARANOIA last month.

In KODT issue #103 (cover image), the "Summon Web Scryer" column by Ken Newquist evidently mentions most of the good PARANOIA Web sites out there, including this blog. True? If so, is anyone here a new arrival specifically because of Ken's column? Feel free to introduce yourself in the comments.

StoppaRed UV MK-3 canister pretty much speaks for itself. (Thanks to Greg Ingber of the Traitor Recycling Studio for the link.)

Oxford mathematics student James Wyatt (newly registered citizen Sew-R-RAT on Paranoia-Live.net) has posted a delightful short PARANOIA mission, "Better Living Through Excessive Violence," on his home page. It should bring back memories for anyone who ever played the old text adventure games Zork or its honored progenitor, Adventure.

From James's summary:

• The Troubleshooters have to get through a large, dark area where the only light sources are the ones they carry with them.
  
• If they stay too long in the darkness, they will be eaten by a Grue.
  
• If they use their issued light sources properly, this is no problem. However...
  
• ...most of their secret society missions involve doing things in the dark.

I especially liked this passage advising how to play the bot brain that runs a malfunctioning power plant:

Playing Don/E: Imagine the weird guy at the office is having a birthday. He's spent all month planning the party and buying the cake, and invited the whole office. You, and five others, out of the fifty people he invited, felt sufficient pity that they decided to go along. Now you're scarfing down the cake as quick as you can so that you can go home and not have to stare at everyone else's embarassed faces.

Don/E is that weird guy.

Check out "Better Living Through Excessive Violence". It's free! Thanks, James!

Via BoingBoing, this University of Sheffield neurological study suggests why hallucinated voices are usually male. (That, in itself, was news to me.)

"The female voice [has] a more complex range of sound frequencies than in a male voice.[...]

"People who hear hallucinatory voices usually hear male voices. Psychiatrists believe that these auditory hallucinations are caused when the brain spontaneously activates, creating a false perception of a voice. The reason these voices are usually male could be explained by the fact that the female voice is so much more complex that the brain would find it much harder to create a false female voice accurately than a false male voice.

(NeuroImage abstract.)

Historically the PARANOIA line hasn't done much with hallucinations, other than strewing the setting with weird drugs and letting the Gamemaster have at it. We may have missed a big bet there; I could imagine a devious GM covertly recruiting as accomplices all but one player in his group, then staging a very Philip-K.-Dick exercise in reality shifting. I leave the details as an exercise to the GM. Other ideas for using fake voices (male or female)? Who knows, we may work them into next year's PARANOIA support line.

Posted a week ago on the Mongoose Publishing Web site, but I only noticed it now so sue me: details of the bot miniatures boxed set for PARANOIA, hitting store shelves this week. I can't (or don't want to) imagine what you might do with a miniature
combot, docbot, jackobot, petbot, scrubot, or warbot. But somebody must know, or they wouldn't keep releasing these sets, right? If you have ideas, fill me in!

A new company, Hybrid System Games, is trying an interesting idea: selling a tabletop roleplaying game as a Web service. You pay $20 to join, then $7/month for access to a Wiki with all the material for their science-fiction roleplaying game, Equat10n. As the site FAQ explains, it's all under a Creative Commons license with no digital-rights management, so presumably you immediately download everything available to your hard drive. But then (the Hybrid designers must hope) you stay a subscriber to get supplemental material, which is dynamically integrated into the existing material on an ongoing basis.

On the face of it this looks (a) impressively well-executed and (b) doomed. But I wish them luck. The financials of publishing an RPG grow ever more difficult, leading to fiascos like White Wolf's disastrously received attempt to license players of its Mind's Eye Theater LARPs. Whether or not Hybrid System Games in particular makes a go of this new approach, would you ever consider buying new PARANOIA material -- or any paper roleplaying game -- on this web-service basis?

(I ask out of curiosity as a private individual, not speaking for Mongoose Publishing or PARANOIA's owners.)

Little boxes on the hillside,

Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,

Little boxes, little boxes,

Little boxes, all the same.

There's a green one and a pink one

And a blue one and a yellow one

And they're all made out of ticky-tacky

And they all look just the same.

-- Malvina Reynolds, "Little Boxes" (1962)

A remarkable 80-page Straight mission collection for PARANOIA, WMD, appears this month. August brings the huge new 128-page rules supplement Extreme PARANOIA, with rules for playing characters of all security clearances from ORANGE up to VIOLET.

After that, this October brings Service, Service!, a 128-page sourcebook that covers the eight sprawling service groups of Alpha Complex. New service firms for each group, new "service service" duties, new NPC personnel to torment your Troubleshooters, and no less than eight full missions, all written by the Traitor Recycling Studio. Plus, we finally publish the rules for mandates, introduced on this blog in March 2004.

I'm just starting the layout for Service, Service! Throughout the book I'd like to use "callout" quotations appropriate to each service group. For instance, the Malvina Reynolds lyrics above would be appropriate for HPD & Mind Control. Any quotations you'd like to suggest?

If you're not into roleplaying game theory, this post may make your eyes glaze over.

D. Vincent Baker designed Dogs in the Vineyard, the 2004 indie RPG a distressing number of gamers said "just edged out PARANOIA" as their favorite game of the year. Baker has a blog, titled anyway. In his long July 5, 2005 entry, he discusses the perils of simulating one's favorite books, movies, or TV shows in an RPG.

"Our fetishization of source material is creatively unhealthy," he says. "Every moment of attention you spend trying to replicate 'Middle-earth' is a moment of attention you don't spend saying what you mean. The only person in the entire history of humanity for whom this was not true was J.R.R. Tolkien."

Baker argues that published RPGs can interfere with the creative act of roleplaying by presenting a fixed, doctrinaire setting. "What is it that we actually need, how much of what, in order to have a playable setting? [...] most RPGs' setting material (along with all primary source fiction, like Firefly or The Lord of the Rings) is the end product of a creative process. What do we roleplayers need? We need the starting point of the creative process instead. Because what we're doing? It's creative."

PARANOIA basically dodges that criticism. We give you setting material that is capriciously, gleefully inconsistent. If you, as a player, take any of it as fixed, you're not only wrong, you're treasonous. If you, as a Gamemaster, take the published material as gospel, you'll soon find much of it makes no sense, and you just have to wing it, taking the supplements as inspiration.

Way down toward the end of that long post, Baker recounts waxing nostalgic with his friend "Ninja J" about J's game setting:

Particularly, we talked about how rich and alive [his] setting was, how detailed. His players ate it up, he said, they'd go on and on about how compelling, complete, fully realized the setting was.

Then he told me how he'd done it. He'd taken three principles -- [...] "nobody thinks that they themselves are evil," "the Grand Galactic Empire is procedurally conservative," and "nobody really enjoys their job" -- three principles something like those, and whenever any of his players asked him about anything in the setting, he'd simply apply those principles to create the answer.

"I duck into a broom closet." "Okay. There are a bunch of reg-77f portbrushes in there, but someone hasn't bothered to replace them yet, they're all slimy and they smell." All the details you'd need to bring the setting home, give it weight and momentum, and yet J didn't precreate the contents of a single broom closet.

It struck me that those same principles (swapping out "the Empire" for "the bureaucracy") could generate most of PARANOIA's Alpha Complex setting. To get the rest, you could just add "The Computer is insane."

Am I arguing you shouldn't buy PARANOIA supplements? Nononono! Inspiration is important! I urge you, in the most urgently urging terms, to buy this month's inspiring 80-page Straight mission collection, WMD, and next month's hugely inspirational 128-page rules supplement, Extreme PARANOIA! (Check out the great Jim Holloway Extreme PARANOIA cover; click on the thumbnail for an enlargement.)

Roleplaying meets podcasting at RPGmp3.com: "This site is dedicated to bringing a unique(ish) experience to roleplayers, gamers and web surfers everywhere. A combination of gaming and sound! The Audio Reviews let you listen to roleplaying games unscripted. You can even download them to your iPod or MP3 player."

It's been around since March, but I only just found the "Sleepy PARANOIA" session. "Fin has kindly provided a recording of his rather sleep-deprived PARANOIA game that was run after a 24-hour session of roleplaying. It is extremely funny and he is totally brilliant at running this kind of game. There is a certain amount of background noise, but I have done my best to tune it out."

We may yet see the return of radio drama as a popular art form....

Mongoose Publishing, having rescued PARANOIA from a decade of obscurity and allowed its fans to carry it to still greater heights, now plans to rescue another of gaming's tragically neglected masterpieces: RuneQuest. Over on RPG.net, Mongoose doyen Matthew Sprange asks RuneQuest fans for advice on how best to bring back the great game.

RQ shares PARANOIA's sad story: Once great, it was consigned by a negligent publisher (in RQ's case, Avalon Hill) to stunningly untalented editorial misguidance. PARANOIA's brilliant first line editor, Ken Rolston, later led RuneQuest to a brief second Golden Age, but the game -- one of the finest RPGs ever designed -- eventually lapsed into obscurity. Here's hoping Mongoose can once again preside over a glorious rebirth.

(By the way, I don't work at Mongoose and know nothing about its plans for the new game. I just learned about this along with everyone else. Go to the RPG.net topic to ask questions.)

I'm behind-hand in mentioning this, but Mongoose Publishing has posted the fine Jim Holloway cover for this month's PARANOIA book, the collection of Straight missions enigmatically known as WMD. (Click on the cover thumbnail to see the full image in a pop-up window.)

Written by the Traitor Recycling Studio, WMD features four darkly humorous missions with the emphasis on "dark." They present tense suspense of a kind you've never seen before in PARANOIA, and in certain respects never before in any (non-fun) roleplaying game. Traitors Dan Curtis Johnson, Jeff Groves, and Bill O'Dea turned in their finest work to date; I tried to hold up my end of things as well (with help from my wife, Beth Fischi), and so far everyone has at least maintained a respectful silence. So I have high hopes WMD will mark a breakthrough for PARANOIA, an opening of new possibilities for players who might still think of the game only as a lighthearted one-evening change-of-pace.

The territory of paranoid suspense is largely unexplored in RPGs, but PARANOIA is about to make an imperial land-grab.