Paranoia XP- A Review by Mike

A Review for Gamers Unfamiliar with Paranoia

For those gamers who’ve grown up in a hermetically sealed vat and somehow have never heard of Paranoia: Paranoia is a roleplaying game set in a darkly humorous future where the players are troubleshooters in an underground complex run by a paranoid and demented Computer. Unlike most games, players are not encouraged to work together, and in fact, player characters are the leading cause of player character death. Paranoia 2nd edition is the single most fun game ever created, and joy of joys, a new version, Paranoia XP, has recently been released. Many of you, though, I suspect have heard of Paranoia and know a bit about it, but maybe have never tried it out. Don’t worry: I forgive you.

If you’re new to Paranoia, then let me sum up my review by telling you to go buy Paranoia XP. Go. Paranoia really is the greatest game ever, and Paranoia XP is a classy retooling of the dynasty for a new generation of gamers. The book itself is slick and pretty. The look and feel of the interior are a close match for the original books that sold me on the game in the first place.

The mechanics are solid. We’re talking about a standard d20-roll-under-skill style that should be familiar to most roleplayers, which is incorporated into a universal “hostility” mechanic, so that the process for shooting your buddy is the same as the process for accusing him of treason or stealing his camera. This simple application is then given a twist with the largely player-controlled Perversity mechanic, in which players can pump in points to affect the outcome. Since players are typically at each others’ throats through most of Paranoia, perversity-pumping can turn into a bidding war, and the meta-mechanic adds to the backstabbing, cutthroat nature of play, while giving players a sense of being in control of their own destiny (even though they’re not). For beginning games though, I’d really suggest a heavy cap on perversity spending, just to keep players from getting too far out of character on a regular basis.

The point of the game is that players are troubleshooters in service to The Computer in the utopia that is Alpha Complex. It is their job to root out traitors and mutants. The fun part is that all of the players are secretly traitors and mutants themselves, not to mention members of legitimate Service Groups and illegal Secret Societies, all of which have their own agendas and are at odds with one another. Mistrust between players is par for the course, and violence between PC’s is common. Be prepared to be passing lots of notes during gameplay—I recommend having a couple of sticky pads on hand to pass around.

The real heart of this game is the dystopian world of Alpha Complex which is rendered with plenty of detail and nuance. While the game is largely comic, the world is very well realized and there are even rules and suggestions for playing “straight” games without the over-the-top comedy.

The only criticism I would level is that the book itself is a bit confusing. There is a Players sections, a GM section, a Sourcebook, and a sample mission, and while other sections may have some of the information you need, the meat of the rules (although not everything you need) is in the Sourcebook section, smack in the middle of the book. The current SP1 edition of the game has an updated index that helps, but unfortunately, the three column format really packs the information in, and the chapters, while clearly labeled in the headers, don’t actually have a chapter title, so it is sometimes hard to tell where relevant sections begin and end. Not to mention that the table of contents for each section is actually at the beginning of that section. If you’re a newbie, be prepared to have to hunt a little bit to find exactly what you need.

The cover price is nearly forty bucks for around 250 pages of high-density hardback gaming goodness. If you shop around, you can find it for less than thirty. It’s a great investment for a solid product.

A Review for Experienced Paranoia Players

Look, I don’t even know why I’m writing a review for you. This game’s been out for what?... eight or nine months? I’m sure you own it already, but just in case, let me give you the rundown.

First off, my credentials: I purchased the first edition of Paranoia back in 1985. Loved it! I bought the 2nd edition in college after my father sold all my gaming materials at a garage sale, and when West End Games went under, I picked up every Paranoia supplement not already in my collection as well as the horrific 5th Edition. Miscellaneous Paranoia articles, characters, adventures and other stuff are featured liberally around my website.

Maybe I’ve grown a little obsessed.

So it was with some measure of trepidation that I followed the development of Paranoia XP. Greg Costikyan (one of the original authors) made me pretty nervous with some of his more extreme talk about how to update the game. I saw some of his original proposals and ideas and was concerned that the beauty and simplicity of this wonderful game was going to be lost or obscured.

I needn’t have worried. Lucky me, Greg entrusted this precious property to Mongoose Publishing and author Allen Varney, and Varney has completely kicked ass all over this game. It has some flaws, to be sure, and there are plenty of areas where I say, “oh, I would have done this so differently…” And I’ll go into some detail on these in a minute, but truly, don’t let my petty whining detract from the fact that Paranoia XP is a great reworking of the original. You want to own it. It captures the irreverent counter-RPG spirit of Paranoia and expands on it in some wonderful ways.

As I mentioned above, the book maintains the look and feel of the first and second editions. It uses the same three column format, and the headers and footers look to be in the same style (BTW—the running footers through the whole book were an absolute hoot once I finally noticed them). Much of the text and art has been lifted from the earlier works, but it doesn’t in any way feel like a ripoff. Mr. Varney had some big shoes to fill, and with the original text available, there was no reason for him to rewrite stuff that was proven gold. However, there is also so much new text, not just flavor text, but new rules and setting information, that you get more than your money’s worth. And Varney’s writing is easily up to the level I expect from Paranoia.

And I can’t say often enough how glad I am that Andrew Holloway did all of the art in the book. Much of it I recognize, but it looks like a lot of it is new as well. Nothing says “Paranoia” like Holloway’s illustrations. It’s like coming home.

I don’t have much to say on mechanics. I play largely through email, so mechanics are very secondary to me, but I will say that the reworking for XP is pleasing a couple reasons. First, in the actual gameplay mechanics (as opposed to character creation and setup), a lot of superfluous stuff has been stripped away from the basic mechanics—for example only having 2 attributes, and not even revealing them to the players—this appeals to my minimalist sensibilities. Not to say that Paranoia XP is a rules-lite system in any way… it’s not. But the rules that are there specifically support the unique Paranoia world and style. The Perversity mechanic is the best example of this.

What will help a lot in my email games though is that action resolution opens by encouraging some pretty straightforward diceless stuff. Not that Paranoia is going diceless, but rather that it takes a very common sense approach to action resolution in that many things can be resolved just by comparing the relevant abilities and not resorting to dice for every tiny thing—especially when so many dice rolls can turn quickly into Perversity bidding wars. Overall, a very satisfying feel.

But as well as Varney did with stripping down and modifying the basic mechanics, he then added bells and whistles in a few unneeded places. First and foremost, the book details three distinct styles of Paranoia gameplay: Classic, Straight, and Zap. Then, throughout the book, it offers information on how to run the game or handle specific situations in all three styles. This was a waste of my time. I understand the desire to do this. Paranoia fans have developed these very entrenched styles over the last 20 years, and XP seems to want to keep everyone happy, but c’mon. The game is obviously biased towards the Classic style, which is as it should be. The whole book would have flowed much better had it just stuck to the Classic game, and then included a few pages of appendix on running Straight or Zap. As it is, it just provides clutter for the majority of Paranoia fans and confusion for newbies.

Similarly, it’s nifty to have a different Secret Society chart for each of the Service Groups, but was it really needed? I admit that it makes sense, but it means a whole page of charts instead of just one little one, and for only a modicum of added value.

But what about the world? This is the heart of Paranoia—the setting. Mr. Varney had the daunting task of updating the Paranoia world to accommodate new technology and culture and concepts. Overall, he did well. I’ll look at the elements one at a time.

Tics: This is my favorite addition to character creation. Players all start with at least one minor tic or flaw. Especially creative tics can earn you rewards. I don’t know how Paranoia survived without this. My own Paranoia players have always saddled themselves with various disabilities and psychoses, so having a mechanic that gives them credit for it is just icing on the cake.

Mutant powers: All the old favorites are here, and there are even a few new ones. Very good. Of course, there’s already a mutant supplement out there, so I’m left to wonder what I’m missing, but that’s the point of supplements after all.

Secret societies: If you’ve played Paranoia before, then you’ve seen these. They are nearly exactly the same as 2nd edition. I was a little disappointed by this. The original Paranoia was chock full of hip 80’s pop culture references, and this was reflected in the secret societies. In the build-up to XP, Costikyan made a huge deal about updating all of this for the new millennium, incorporating new technologies and paradigms and modern culture references, etc. His talk had me worried that XP would go way overboard, but in the end, it turned out that there wasn’t actually enough of this sort of thing for my taste. There was some good stuff with the new technology and economy and outsourcing and stuff (I’ll cover that in a minute), but I expected more from the secret societies. What about recognition of the X-Files/conspiracy theory mentality that’s gained mainstream attention lately? Or maybe some holistic new-age whack-job goodness? Or even just a little gothy angst? Heck, I would have been happy even to see some of the best from Acute Paranoia be carried forward, but it was not to be. To be fair, this is stuff that may well be addressed in the traitor supplement now out, but having virtually no alteration in the societies after 20 years was disappointing.

Service groups: Wow. Big changes here, and mostly good ones. One of the major nods to our own post-Cold War society is the updating of the Alpha Complex economy. The place has new capitalist initiatives, and most non-security functions of the old service groups are now outsourced to “private” service firms that compete for contracts, leaving the old service groups as massive bureaucratic oversight. So now, not only do troubleshooters belong to a service group, they are actually in employ to one of these contracted firms. The service firms are essentially their “day-job” and they get called up for troubleshooting like volunteer firefighters.

This is all really good stuff that adds flavor and new dimensions to games and characters. What threw me was the inordinate amount of space dedicated to service firms. There are more pages (26 all told) dedicated to service firms in this book than there are to mutant powers and secret societies combined. Wow. And clearly with hundreds, if not thousands, of possible firms, this only scratches the surface. I understand the added intrigue and character/plot hooks that come from service firms, but is the added value worth 26 pages? XP spends this much time and space on service firms, but powers and secret societies have to wait for supplemental material? Now, I like Mr. Varney, so immediately I went to the credits to find an editor I could blame this on for not keeping it reined in. Turns out he was his own editor. Blame shift sequence aborted. Damn.

MBDs: Mandatory Bonus Duty—you can’t go wrong with this. These are the team positions, like leader, hygiene officer, etc. These have always been used to a degree, but XP formalizes them and gives them some real space. After my whining about service firms, I had some momentum going and was going to complain about how much space is devoted to them, but my brother reminded me of how critical they are in gameplay for defining characters and character actions. Too true.

Technology: XP makes significant changes to tech, mostly to recognize changes in communication and information technology. In good Paranoia fashion, new technology increases functionality while also increasing danger and risk. Every advance goes hand in hand with a new threat to troubleshooter health and/or privacy. It provides an excellent balance.

And my last complaint is simply that I can’t find a damn thing in this book. I love the look and feel, but the three-column format is so densely packed with information that finding exactly what you need is a chore. The single-page index is adequate, but the tables of contents (all four of them) are scattered throughout the book, and there are no chapter titles to mark the start of a section. The only way I know I’ve reached the start of the chapter is by flipping back one page and seeing that the page header has a different chapter number on it. I hope that if and when we see XP Service Pack 2, it involves a little reorganizing and clarifying.

But, in spite of these things, let me quote a review by Mike Jones: "…truly, don’t let my petty whining detract from the fact that Paranoia XP is a great reworking of the original. You want to own it."

In closing, I should confess that I didn’t run out and get my own copy of XP right away. I was anxious about it, and I kept putting it off. As a result, Allen Varney visited my website on more than one occasion to chastise me for my oversight. My family could only suffer the shame for so long before my wife finally got me a copy for my birthday. So the lesson to all of you is to go out and buy your own copy of Paranoia XP right now. Not because it’s a great game (although it is), but because if you don’t, Allen Varney will personally haunt you until the day you die. He knows where you live. It’s eerie.

[Oh yeah… and happiness is mandatory.]

Click Here to purchase Paranoia XP from Mongoose Publishing.

Click Here to visit Allan Varney's homepage.