Nearly 40 years on from its original release, dystopian RPG Paranoia is back with the Perfect Edition. Rob Wieland risks life and limb to look at why this atypical game has endured and why, disturbingly, it remains more relevant than ever.
Okay, now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about Paranoia. Paranoia hits people hard. They love this game so much that many fans will immediately jump into the doublespeak used in the game without stopping to explain it. Imagine mentioning you enjoyed the last season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and suddenly everyone starts yelling at you in Klingon. It’s authentic, weird and just a little terrifying. So for those who aren’t familiar, let’s start with the basics.
Paranoia is a satirical science-fiction role-playing game set in a place called Alpha Complex. Alpha Complex is, in theory, a utopia run by a machine known as Friend Computer. Alpha Complex is, in fact, so perfect that Friend Computer needs crack troops, so-called Troubleshooters, to root out its many enemies - Communists, mutants and members of strange secret societies - who wish to end its enlightened rule.
The twist? Everyone in Alpha Complex, especially those Troubleshooters, are both mutants and members of a secret society, including the aforementioned Communists, who aren’t so much socialist revolutionaries as cargo cultists, worshipping the pop culture detritus of the Soviet Union like ushanka hats whilst adopting thick Russian accents.
This was a gonzo premise in 1984 when the first edition of Paranoia, designed by Greg Costikyan, Dan Gelber, and Eric Goldberg, was released and most role-playing games were still taking their first wobbly steps out of fantasy dungeons. By the mid eighties though West End Games were challenging the notions of what an RPG could be with the likes of Ghostbusters, Star Wars, and indeed Paranoia, putting the focus more on story-telling and genre simulation.
Paranoia’s creators certainly had ideas far beyond the gritty, subterranean crawls of Dungeons & Dragons and reading that first edition it’s not hard to picture Costikyan, Gelber and Goldberg cracking jokes in the back of Professor Gygax’s class as he lectured everyone on the serious business of playing elves.
Paranoia flies in the face of so many of the rules, written and unwritten, of RPGs. I still remember when I first cracked open the rulebook as a young nerd. Here, players were told to betray each other at every opportunity and to advance their own agendas above all. GMs were expected to be petty and arbitrary, hiding behind in-game bureaucracy and an out of game desire to mess with their friends. Whilst missions were built to put characters into deathtrap after deathtrap often with a no-win ending waiting for them after all that trouble. Characters died so often they were given half a dozen clones and would often run through all six within the confines of a single session.
My mind was blown. Could a game like this actually be fun? Like many others I soon found out the answer to that was both a resounding yes and so much more.
‘My first experience with Paranoia was running the 2nd Edition box set as a freshman in High School,’ said Chris O'Neill, creator of Mazes and Kobolds Ate My Baby. ‘I can clearly remember gleefully killing Chef-Boy-RED over and over as the player kept saying innocuous, but obviously treasonous, things to the automated kiosk.’
‘It’s 1998, or maybe 1997? I’m 14, or maybe 13?’ said Chant Evans, freelance RPG writer and co-founder of Ex Stasis Games, ‘Our RPG group is just back from the schools AD&D tournament at GenCon UK because we're the extreme type of nerds. Our regular DM’s older brother offers, with a glint in his eye, to run “something different” for a change of pace. Three hours later we’re all about four clones deep and every crack in our social network has been driven wide open and some of them have been cathartically purged. Some. This, I realize with my mind exploding like experimental classified equipment, is not D&D.’
‘Back before I had played any game other than AD&D,’ said Kevin Kulp, lead designer of TimeWatch and Swords of the Serpentine, ‘a very distinctive full page advertisement appeared in Dragon magazine. It was for Paranoia second edition and showed the cover art by Jim Holloway. “Sure it’s a one joke game…” the ad declared. “But it’s a REALLY funny joke.” I was sold. I bought a copy before I ever played at a con. I returned my copy three times for missing pages, duplicate pages, falling-out pages. They had some printing issues, I didn’t care. It was the funniest game I’d ever read, it was in on its own joke, and it made me desperate to play. D&D felt like running someone else’s game; Paranoia felt like running MY game.’
‘I remember buying the original Acute Paranoia back in high school, in the mid to late 1980s, and ran Me and My Shadow, Mark IV,’ said WJ MacGuffin, lead designer of the new Paranoia: Perfect Edition. ‘I fell in love with Paranoia on the spot! I can count on one hand the number of times I played instead of running a game, but it has always held a special place in my heart. That means I'm both excited and intimidated to help run the show these days.’
Humour is one of the big reasons for Paranoia’s longevity. It reads funny, it plays funny. It connects to some of the awful paradoxes in modern society that you can’t help but laugh at because the only other option would be to endlessly scream. That humour runs the gamut as well, with different editions leaning into different styles, from biting satire that makes everyone chuckle with a grim note in their laugh to the kind of cartoon slapstick violence that would make Bugs and Daffy applaud in admiration.
Similarly, how the game has actually played has varied wildly too, both inter- and infra- editions. Some missions suggest a through-line. Others were written as if the authors never expected anyone to survive the initial briefing. There was even one, The Yellow Black Box Clearance Blues, written by legendary science fiction author John M. Ford, that suggested tables could somehow manage a small Paranoia campaign.
Current license holder Mongoose’s 2004 edition Paranoia XP, named as a joke about Microsoft Windows before they received a polite request to stop or else, was the first attempt to catergorise these facets into three distinct styles of play. On one end there was ‘Straight’, here the focus was on dark satire and it tried to reign in the excess death that the game had become known for. On the other extreme there was ‘Zap’ which turned both the cartoon violence and pop culture puns up to 10. Finally in the middle sat ‘Classic’, a style of play which still tried to tell a coherent story but wasn’t afraid to let Troubleshooters lose a few clones before things really got going.
‘Classic’ felt most like the tone of the first two editions, ‘Straight’ was something of an experiment to see if Paranoia could actually be played as a campaign and ‘Zap’ emerged from the game’s least popular, Fifth, edition, whose rushed core book was published in 1995, just as West End Games were circling the drain of bankruptcy.
In my experience the best adventures for Paranoia tend to mix all three play styles in a single story. The aforementioned Me And My Shadow, Mark IV works well as an example. Here the Troubleshooters are assigned to guard a giant warbot and each scene sees the game’s various factions try to put the squeeze on them. On the ‘Zap’ side, the players get their hands on some walking mines straight out of a Wile E. Coyote ACME order. On the ‘Straight’ side there’s a scene where a higher clearance character orders the players to move the warbot because it's blocking his favorite jogging route. Of course any attempts to order the warbot to move cause it to open fire wiping everyone except itself out. Finally in the ‘Classic’ sense, there’s a scene that combines a simple premise with a devastating outcome. Something falls off the warbot, which subsequently stops working, providing all the players a chance to settle old scores and advance their secret society missions.
Game masters live for these moments and the kind of faces players make when they are told the murderous warbot has broken down. It makes all the other challenges of the role worth it just to see such clear feelings of ‘We Are Screwed’ dawn upon them. Thankfully Paranoia is nothing if not full of such moments, especially with its unique combat system.
‘Paranoia’s Dramatic Tactical Combat System was a revelation and endlessly funny,’ said Kulp. ‘You weren’t more likely to succeed by being a tactical genius, you were more likely to succeed by being funny and dying as stylishly as possible. Throwing a grenade was a lot more likely to fail than slipping a grenade down the back of someone’s jumpsuit. The revelation that you only “lose” if you’re boring drives endlessly funny, and poorly-thought-out, player choices. “We landed? I roll down the window and breathe in the sweet, sweet air of the Moon!” and that makes the game a joy.’
The other way Paranoia stands out is how it handles player character death, and again the game’s humour is key to this. In many role-playing games, death is, more often than not, a downer moment. All the time spent creating a character’s narrative and, in many cases, the work that goes into building them mechanically, down the tubes thanks to some bad luck. For that reason many games include mechanics that can keep a character alive just a little bit longer. Whether you’re talking about death as a narrative choice or death saves, there are a lot of second chances in role-playing games. Paranoia, with its vat grown clones waiting in the wings, offers every player at least six.
‘There’s no part of Paranoia that’s not funny but the funniest is unquestionably how sudden and unceremonious death becomes,’ said Evans. ‘Pure clownery. A game that gets you to laugh at death is pretty damn clever.’
This isn’t to say that death is meaningless in Paranoia, rather every demise represents a time a player took a big, possibly foolish, risk to advance the story or at least do something entertaining. The investment of time, effort and emotion put into other RPG characters often means players act with an abundance of caution. This was especially the case back when Dungeon Masters were encouraged to play against rather than with players. That culture instilled many with a paranoid fear that death was waiting behind every door, that any NPC could turn on them at any time and birthed the idea of the perfect RPG character with no backstory, friends or family the Dungeon Master could use against them.
Paranoia neatly subverts the RPG genre and encourages players to abandon caution and engage in acts of foolhardy bravado. Of course you’re going to die, it says, so don’t you want that death to be memorable? Go out in a blaze of traitorous glory and you’ll be back in a few minutes to do it all over again. Various editions have delved into how this actually works in the narrative but at the table it always comes down to ‘Look, do you want to be in the next scene or not?’
‘There's something liberating about Paranoia that encourages folks to get creative and darkly humorous,’ said McGuffin. ‘Sure, we try to pad our word counts with meh-level jokes, but the real fun comes from watching players, in real time, exercise their creativity to get out of Catch-22s, Kobayashi Marus, and other old references we barely understand.’
‘Paranoia is still one of the funniest games that I have ever played, and it manages to do that while also remaining fun to play, which I don't think was ever intended,’ said O’Neill. ‘For me the core problem, that you are Troubleshooters rooting out mutants and communists - who are also secret mutants and communists - is the best part. Also, that everyone forgets that you are a mutant or a commie when you die - so that you get to do that all over again. The game play idea that you had 6 lives was so "freeing" from a game perspective that it led to the funniest of moments.’
Comedy is one of the most difficult things to get right in an RPG. Paranoia’s tone might shift depending upon the author and the edition but beyond the slapstick deaths a universal theme is how it taps into absurd truths revealed from our real world. I’ve found myself using catchphrases from the game, like ‘The Computer is your friend’, around people who knew nothing about RPGs and they’ve nodded along, innately understanding exactly how technology can be dehumanizing or an excuse for cruel and petty behavior.
It’s also a lot of fun to watch players act like utter bastards to one another, and more so to see them get away with it. That’s the power fantasy in the game. Instead of untold riches or super powers, it’s the chance to be the one to wield the power of bureaucracy for your own selfish good for once. Or, for the cost of a measly clone’s life, stuff a grenade down a bureaucrat’s throat and laugh heartily as it explodes. When people ask me to suggest a movie that gets Paranoia’s tone right, the one I most often suggest is not a sci-fi classic but Office Space.
‘Players are highly incentivized for ratting out, framing, and setting up their fellow troubleshooters in the funniest ways possible,’ said Kulp. ‘And they do this despite the certain knowledge that it is going to backfire and end terribly for them. No one cares. Trying to slip one in under the all-seeing eye of Friend Computer at the same time you’re attempting to frame everyone else for doing the same drives a fantastic environment of “do but don’t get caught.” That message of “recognize backstabbing!”, along with having to scramble madly while being questioned in a Termination Booth, is a pretty good training ground for far too much corporate culture.’
It might seem ridiculous to talk about the realities of Paranoia in our world, but that’s another key reason the game has survived as long as it has. Those issues existed when the game was first released and they still exist today. The authors knew that papering over inequalities, greed, power dynamics and other human frailties with technology would never solve but only exacerbate those problems.
In Paranoia mutants represent the hidden threat that’s always ready to strike. Commies are the outsiders waiting to rush in and tear down society. Whilst traitors are the collaborators, those who will happily sell out their friends for power in any new regime. All of them get used by merchants of fear to distract from their own sins using propaganda and lies.
Like all great science-fiction, Paranoia uses its fictional world to examine our own and suggest that just perhaps we’re the ones in the funhouse, not the citizens of Alpha Complex. There may be games with darker settings but there’s a relatability to Paranoia that’s hard to beat. When I hear Friend Computer say ‘You are in error. No one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation,’ I feel a chilling resonance with the official, and ongoing, response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
‘Paranoia still resonates today because its surveillance state turned out to be real,’ said Kulp. ‘There really are cameras all around you, some with facial and gait recognition software on them. Class warfare between the haves and have-nots is even more pronounced. People are often set upon each other infighting so that the real movers and shakers are ignored. The only real difference is that the real world is nowhere near as funny as Alpha Complex.’
‘Good dystopias always feel current,’ said Evans. ‘We’re always scared of losing identity and agency. The feeling that we’re all disposable clones is, you know, pretty relatable when you’re taking the fall for your boss’s latest mistake or getting fired and rehired on worse terms, or when your government’s telling you a whole category of human beings is now persona non grata. But Paranoia presents a shockingly impersonal world and that plays on fears and stressors that are even more relevant now than when the game was first published.’
‘That's part of what makes Paranoia so great. It uses sarcasm and satire for any number of topics.’ said McGuffin. ‘From little jokes about being volunteered for mandatory bonus duty to big jokes about the nature of obedience and even lines about how the masses can be easily fooled by shiny objects. In other words, the most subversive part of the game is its willingness to mock life's bullshit across political and cultural spectrums. If we can make fun of it and make folks laugh, then it works.
‘Paranoia's setting is a dystopia that mandates its people call it a utopia. There's a ton of government control over what you do, what you enjoy, who you spend time with, and so on. Sadly, the modern era is seeing a rise in authoritarianism and government control over life, and that's what makes Paranoia so relevant to modern audiences. People see censorship, nepotism, and extremism on the rise, so they enjoy playing a game where we make fun of such topics. By laughing at them, we see these issues in a new light and can better understand how to respond.’
‘I think that Paranoia potentially resonates even more today,’ said O’Neill. ‘With the rise of authoritarian and ultra right wing ideologies - we find ourselves in a time that needs this particular commentary.’
Beyond its humour, Paranoia broke the mold and subverted RPG tropes in many other ways. Notably it was one of the first RPGs that leaned into the idea of fiction first gaming. There’s a theatricality to it few other games possess, like everyone playing is in on a big gaming secret. Despite the antagonistic setup, the players and the Game Master are all in on the same gag. They are working together to tell a story first rather than see how far a person can move in six seconds or how many weapons they can carry. It taught tables that with clear stakes and everyone understanding the premise of a game, everyone can still have fun even when betrayal, immolation or evisceration lurk around every corner.
‘Paranoia informed my designs by reminding me that failure was fun if you frame it right,’ said Kulp. ‘The goal doesn’t have to be success, because for many games a goal of “be stylish and exuberant and have fun whether you’re successful or not” turns out to be a lot more enjoyable for everyone at the table. Games like Bully Pulpit’s Fiasco picked this idea up and ran with it beautifully, flawed characters with strong needs and poor impulse control… but I first learned that lesson in Paranoia.’
Games like Fiasco carry within them Paranoia’s DNA of players primed to both fail and have fun while they do it. More recent RPGs like Triangle Agency and The Company have likewise adapted the hellish hallways of Alpha Complex for the comparatively hellish cubicles of corporate life. It also inspired designers to explore more niche ideas outside of the usual fantasy epics and beat up old space freighter tales.
‘Paranoia had a direct influence on my most famous design, Kobolds Ate My Baby!’ said O’Neill. ‘There are so many similarities - an uncaring overlord that sends you to your death, mechanics that force you to march gleefully to your death, multiple characters to allow for character death. Paranoia and KAMB are games where people WANT TO DIE while playing. The stories that people tell you about those games are never that they won, just how they lose. Paranoia was the first game, and is still one of the few, that finds its fun in the action of the game - not the completion of it.’
‘Paranoia also taught me the difference between simulation and emulation,’ said Kulp, ‘and that games don’t need complex systems to accomplish their goals. The stats in Paranoia’s first edition were more finicky than they needed to be. That was even more true in 2e Paranoia. But simplify those and boil them down to the basics, only keep the rules you NEED while keeping the tone strong and consistent, and the game gets even better.’
Whilst Paranoia has encouraged little fidelity to its rules, it has notably gone through several different versions in its near 40 year history. The last, 2017’s Red Clearance Edition, moved the game to a boxed set approach making heavy use of equipment cards and dice. Paranoia has always been a prop heavy game, second perhaps only to Call of Cthulhu in the quality of the handouts for adventures. Is there any other game that could get away with giving players forms to fill out before they can terminate a particularly pesky clerk?
Red Clearance Edition moved those props directly into play and included innovations such as initiative cards that were inspired by the classic bluffing game Coup. A player could claim any initiative on the card to go first but any other player could call them out and make them reveal their card. If they were lying they went last, if the player was telling the truth the person who called them out went last. And whoever ended up going last might as well just bump off their current clone and wait for the next one to arrive. Whilst Red Clearance Edition was full of clever ideas like this I found that in play I rarely got to explore them. Players are too busy drawing lasers, pushing people off ledges and trying to achieve their secret society missions to also play head games outside of the story. Mongoose seemed to agree which brings us to the game’s newly released Perfect Edition.
‘There were two broad design goals,’ said McGuffin. ‘One. Revise the previous edition so it feels more like Paranoia and two, use this new edition to celebrate the beloved game. The previous Red Clearance Edition edition is still a great game! But it lost some of that Paranoia new car smell, so my team was tasked in capturing that spirit once again. We also brought back rules and setting info from older editions as optional additions.’
Paranoia Perfect Edition then goes back to the basics with a simple dice system and quick character creation and is a perfect chance for those new to RPGs to see what the fuss is all about while letting older players rediscover many of the things that made them fall in love with Paranoia many years ago. It certainly helps that even more so than a game like Dungeons & Dragons, Paranoia makes it incredibly easy to use older material with classic adventures like Send In The Clones rarely depended on specific mechanics or balanced white room combat in the first place and the new edition offer suggestions on how to bring back all the ideas from older editions and build an Alpha Complex that’s unique for every table.
It also seems like taking out the cards and strategy from the system makes the game a better candidate for the 800 ton gorilla bot in the room; livestreaming. Whilst there have been a few one shots scattered out there on the web the game is primed for a table of professionals to make a room full of viewers laugh at their hapless antics. So the new edition looks poised to give many more people a chance to visit Alpha Complex, even if only as visitors safely behind a glass screen.
Despite being almost 40 years old, Paranoia remains both topical and fresh. Even as it makes adjustments for modern stories, like an always-on device carried by Troubleshooters to provide assistance and monitor everything, it lets us look at the strange ways we’ve adapted to survive. It also keeps a laugh close to the surface. Sometimes it’s a grim chuckle. Other times it's a rueful guffaw. But often, it’s the only thing keeping us from breaking down like Friend Computer.
Paranoia Perfect Edition is out now published by Mongoose Publishing
This feature originally appeared in Wyrd Science Vol.1, Issue 5 (Dec '23)