Digital Spinach: Paranoia Red

Between our second Eberron campaign and Blood Lords, we had a brief foray into Paranoia. It was an interesting TTRPG that sounded up our alley, but ended up being a bad fit for the group.

Overview

Paranoia is way different from DnD. Instead of doing an intricate character creation process, you all start out as clones produced by Friend Computer. You live, work, and die in Friend Computer's utopian civilization, the Alpha Complex. This was originally from a company in Britian, so it's full of their particular brand of humour: a bureaucratic red-tape nightmare hellscape.

There aren't classes or background or anything like that. You pick a few character traits, a name, and then allocate some stats points. After you do your bit, somebody else inverts one of your traits and fucks around with your stats.

I was originally going to play a handsome, upbeat office worker who focused well on his work named Steve-R-BGH-1. But I ended up with a handsome, downtrodden and defeated office worker who focused well on her work. Think Marvin the Paranoid Android, but as an HR benefits coordinator.

The character name encodes some other information: Steve-R-BGH-1 is Steve, who possesses red-level security clearance, was born in sector BGH, and is on their first clone. When you die¹, the number goes up. If you get enough credits to upgrade your clerance, the R changes.

Knowing the correct name for a character is very important. If I recall the rules correctly, initiative ties are resolved by the first person to shout the other person's accurate character name. I kept an up-to-date list of them visible on my screen at all times.

The "sabotage your friends" mechanics should have tipped us off, but it wasn't until the debriefing for our second mission where it finally clicked for us: we're "working together" in air quotes, but we really should be trying to screw the other guys over and get all the credit. And get everybody else shot for treason.

On Roll20

Playing this on Roll20 was terrible. When Friend Computer assigns you a mission, the team is issued equipment in the form of a hand of cards. The cards give you abilities and bonuses. Each one has a number on it that players use for your "initiative roll".

And while Roll20 supports cards, the UI for it was terrible. Here's how you look at your full hand. This is unreadable. I can't even see all my cards at once, which would be useful for figuring out what to play for initiative:

Playing a card involved dragging it out of this UI and onto the playing field. At which point:

1. The card becomes MASSIVE
2. It does not track who owns a card, so we drop four face-down cards and then immediately forget who it belongs to

We learned to scribble some "$player CARD AREA" boxes around the edge of the map to help manage that. But I was impressed by how bad the UI for this was.

The other problem with the card UI is that you're on a timer. The roll and, IIRC, your turn are both timed. So you need to be able to read your cards if you've got any hope of beating the timer and not losing your entire first turn.

The GM had to relax this rule quite a lot -- it's one thing to lose your turn because you're being indecisive. That's funny!

But losing it because Roll20 spawned your card 400 feet away from the map because Fuck You and now you've lost it entirely and nobody can find it? Frustrating.

Adventure

Our adventure was pretty typical Alpha Complex stuff: we needed to help some of the robots with their chores while Friend Computer prepared for its birthday party.

Our first mission involved us escorting some robots around and making sure they did some work. In the course of our duties, we accidentally killed a dangerous terrorist. Hoorah!

We saw exotic and dagerous locales: a power substation had been flooded with Red Dessert Topping, and we had to get in there to unclog its drain, with the "assistance" of some higher-clearance-level NPCs. They went through a dormitory that we weren't allowed to access with our red clearance, leaving us to navigate the ocean of raspberry jam.

We convinced some "pirates" to let us aboard their "ship" (deranged office workers & a conference table) to sail through the facility. We found the drain and fought a boss robot that had no concept of the facility being in crisis. Boris died heroically pulling the plug, but was then killed in the draining vortex of red dessert topping.

He lost some valuable equipment in that drain, so despite his heroism, his next clone was shot for treason. Don't lose Friend Computer's equipment.

Friendly Daeve, who had been inverted from being friendly to being a psychotic murder-leprechaun during character creation, may have been getting involved in some sort of ... rebel group. We were dispatched to a ruined sector of Alpha Complex, where Friend Computer's wifi does not reach, and we found all sorts of disturbed malcontents living outside the bounds of polite society.

Friendly Daeve interfaced with a vending machine and caught a rather serious virus. It caused his sixth clone to commit suicide; he had an overwhelming need to inload data and started plugging everything he could find into himself. Which would have been fine for a robot, but was less-fine for a fleshy person.

Conclusions

It was a fun time full of chaotic and inexplicable events². , but we moved on from Alpha Complex not long after Friendly Daeve's loss. There wasn't much of an epic end; we all died in a depressingly mundane manner.

I was excited to go back to something where the character felt like mine. Paranoia would be fun at a party if you want something more than Fluxx, but I don't think it was a good long-term campaign. Everything you achieved was built on a foundation of rapidly-eroding sand.