Paranoid roleplay

Community Larp discussion
#1

When I started tabletop roleplay (in the late 80s) there was a strong culture of cooperative adventure scenarios. It was expected that players would form a fairly unified adventuring party and work together to overcome challenges in the style of a typical D&D scenario. This is still true for most tabletop roleplaying I think. Check out S. John Ross’s Big List of RPG Plots and note how they’re all about a party of PCs confronting challenges together.

This was so entrenched when I started roleplaying that anything that challenged it was either breaking a taboo (everyone has a story about that time one of the PCs turned on a fellow party member) or doing it for deliberately unconventional humour value.

The tabletop roleplaying game Paranoia was an example of deliberate convention breaking. It was a deliberate subversion of the cooperative roleplaying tradition. In Paranoia the PCs are ostensibly working together on a mission, but actually they’re all trying to kill each other. We loved it partly because it was a breath of fresh air, I think. Especially because it didn’t involve killing things, looting treasure, and then leveling up so you could kill bigger things, rinse and repeat. Instead what you did was mostly to kill each other and die repeatedly in funny ways, and enjoy it.

The results of Paranoia were hilarious slapstick… but I wonder if the humour would hold up as well these days in our larping community? Because nowadays it’s the norm for PCs to be at odds to some degree, and for inter-PC challenge is expected part of the game structure that provides a big part of the challenge and enjoyment of playing. Many larps are based entirely on this. Especially pregens, large larps with factions, and World of Darkness. Partly this is the medium - with so many people, larp is naturally suited to oppositional play. But we’ve also developed new social conventions that make it normal and deal with the OOC issues it can raise.

And now for the interactive part of this post. :wink:

  • What are the advantages of cooperative roleplay? I’ve noticed that in games like St Wolfgang’s where the PCs were mostly on the same side (in the events I played), there was a sense of comradeship among the players that I enjoyed.
  • Likewise, what’s cool about oppositional play? I’ve heard it said that other PCs will always make for more complex, diverse, and reactive opponents than a GM and crew can possibly field, and I think there’s some truth in that.
  • Who wants to play a Paranoia larp?
#2

Interesting. I started roleplaying in (I think) 1990, and there was a lot of interplayer competitiveness. It was still effectively the group against the GM’s scenario, but people would be jostling around for face or sometimes griefing each other or whatever. I can remember one friend telling me about this campaign he was in where he was secretly evil and working to derail the party, and another friend talking about a campaign he ran where the players were officially in it to get the most ‘glory’ and anytime the group split up in character, he’d switch them to another evening and then spread rumours between the two groups about what each were up to. Different gaming culture I guess?

"What are the advantages of cooperative roleplay?"
Well, the big one is less hurt feelings when you call timeout. Players can get awfully wily and mean, compared to crew/GMs who have (mostly) got some kind of motivation around playing fair.

#3

In many adventure larps (at least the ones I have played), the cooperative option is reinforced for a number of reasons. I can think of two strong ones:

In game challenges - frequently this is a big bad. Big bad sends forces against the players. Therefore it is natural to team up and improve the pool of resources. And if the game is a deadly one, this makes all the more sense. In the face of a greater threat, character disagreements become secondary to the “shite” going down.

Suspension of norms - to larp in many settings we have to, in essence “play pretend”. And of course you go… well durr dumbass, of course we do. The benefit of roleplaying cooperatively is that we can therefore “play pretend” all in the same line of disbelief as the “player group”. As a GM I have slapped my head when the players fudge a challenge up because they have, as a group, chosen to believe a scenario in a certain manner. The fact that the NPC was lying his pants off in character just didn’t penetrate the group perception. Now as a group of players, we can avoid all sorts of difficulty by just working off the same page. Playing a character which is in fact antagonistic to the player group disrupts this paradigm. Can we spot the lie within the lie within the lie? Is that so and so being weird or is it just in character?

I have seen a couple of good examples of antagonistic player actions and how basically they slipped through because we were already suspending disbelief and missed clues we might have otherwise noticed. In Wolfgangs - we had a number of betrayals by members of the Order who didn’t agree with the group. It was made easier by the fact we weren’t looking internally (well I wasn’t) for the enemy. And in Teonn, well I have seen a bit more player opposition… and I still find it very hard to pick because we do play in the assumption that we’re roughly on the same team.

#4

One of the big appeals of larping for me, (actually for any roleplaying) is the building up interactions/friendships/relationships with other characters. This tends to be done more with other players because you can have a bit of certainty that they will be there again, and hang around for quite a while (compared to crew, who may be dragged off to prepare for the next scene at any moment).

Having said that, it could be good to play a paranoia larp, given it was a shorter timescale than a weekend. Let the inner ruthless hard-arse have some air time.

Depending how you organised it of course, but like any elimination games, it would be a bugger to taken out early on and then be bored for the rest of the time, watching others still having fun.

#5

Unlikely. A key part of the PARANOIA! setting is that you have clones. Get “accidentally” killed by your treasonous commie mutant team-mates? New clone! Have first aid performed by an overenthusiastic Docbot? New clone! With six clones, it should take you a while to go through them all.

#6

I am willing to serve The Computer!

#7

With regards to a Paranoia Larp, Chris Hoggins (assisted by myself) ran a one-off Paranoia larp at America’s Cup in 2005.

We used clones - some people managed to get through all five during the game - and hilariously when someone finally got through the endgame scenario they hadn’t gone through sufficient clones to get the full password and keyed in the wrong code giving the victory to a different secret society. Yes, somebody did push the Big Red Button along the way.

We could have done a lot better with game balance and mechanics but it was a bit of a rush job - I would probably take a different approach if I wrote something similar again. I would be very interested to see someone else’s take on Paranoia as a larp. Pro tip - Smarties make excellent Happy Pills :slight_smile:

With regards to cooperative play in general, I really enjoy this aspect of larping. A cooperative game allows you to get to know other players and make new friends, whereas oppositional games tend to encourage cliquishness. This extends to WoD games, which are NOT necessarily oppositional games for PCs. The recently concluded Werewolf - Tides of Change game was an excellent example of a cooperative WoD game and I really enjoyed it :slight_smile:

#8

Bound to be, and also in my experience during the 90s the whole culture shifted somewhat, due in part to games like Paranoia I think. Also, I reckon your example of a person who was secretly working against the party is a decent illustration of what I’m talking about, and one I’ve seen done also (in a superhero larp, Marvel I think). That wouldn’t be notable if cooperation wasn’t the norm.

[quote=“Stephanie”]"What are the advantages of cooperative roleplay?"
Well, the big one is less hurt feelings when you call timeout. Players can get awfully wily and mean, compared to crew/GMs who have (mostly) got some kind of motivation around playing fair.[/quote]

Yes. And curiously that wily meanness is also the advantage of antagonistic play for some people. Maybe it depends whether players are looking for the feel-good managed challenge that a GM and crew can provide, or the unpredictable and perhaps more brutal and realistic unmanaged challenge that other PCs can provide. Different strokes for different folks. Although of course, other PCs can provide a managed challenge too if they don’t play “to win”.

My thinking is to capture a little slice of life in a part Alpha Complex, rather than purely a traditional troubleshooter mission. But it’s on a long list of things I don’t have time to do right now. I also wonder whether the appeal to roleplaying children of the 90s will extend to others who’ve never played or even heard of the tabletop game. I’d want to interpret it in a way that makes it accessible and contemporary, and my adaptation might not please purists I suspect. For example, I think the “Commies” would become “Terrorists”. For me, a big part of the fun of Paranoia was how it subverted the western propaganda of its time.

#9

That suggests a tone-change from slapstick to dark.

#10

Paranoia was always “the roleplaying game of a darkly humorous future”. Black, ironic and subversive slapstick comedy is its mainstay.

In the 80s when it made, the smell of fear of nuclear death by commie was still pungent, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Glasnost, and the end of the Cold War. That propaganda-induced fear is what Paranoia was poking fun at. It’s much the same fear that western governments (and their imitators) have built up in relation to terrorists today and used as an excuse to limit public freedoms, increase monitoring, etc. The parallel is pretty uncanny, actually. And the extreme version of those policies is the kind of regime The Computer has.

In the Paranoia books the “commies” were really terrorists who wanted to destroy Alpha Complex, there is no mention of socialism that I recall. But the power that the word “commie” had in the 80s has been lost, and terrorists are the new “global enemy” that has taken its place in western propaganda.

Inevitably there would be some change in tone, just because we all have our own interpretations of these things. Your camp 80s TV Batman is my gritty 90s Dark Knight Returns, etc. But personally, I always had the impression the game was intended to be both dark and silly at the same time, and that’s part of what makes it such a classic.

#11

I agree with Ryan and that parallel is actually still very relevant.

The 2nd edition box set (which was of course perfect in every way, praise the Computer) had the odd throw in, mostly in the GM-only background section (which I, being of lowly Red Clearance, have obviously never read) which hinted at the darker side of the setting, but generally speaking the game was played for LARFS.

The next edition (6th edition, even more perfect than ever, the Computer be praised) actually had two different playstyles written into the rules; one was light and fluffy (and the way most people have played Paranoia and perceive it even now). The other, however, really was very grim and very dark and was played very much seriously. I’ve never actually met anyone who did play this way (myself included) but the options were there to turn it into a quite dark, conspiracy-laden near future RPG.

#12

I should have said, I’m only referring to the 1st edition. I think it’s the best edition by a wide margin. Nothing competes with its writing and illustrations, they were genuinely funny and original in tone. It’s Greg Costikyan’s masterwork.

Your’e right that the 2nd edition was definitely lighter, and crapper for it in my opinion. I don’t know that and the latter editions as well, but I wasn’t impressed with the changes.

#13

The problem with that is that “terrorist” isn’t an enemy. It’s a vague term which doesn’t refer to anyone in particular, and is effectively equivalent to calling them “the bad guys”.

#14

…yes, exactly.

#15

The problem with that is that “terrorist” isn’t an enemy. It’s a vague term which doesn’t refer to anyone in particular, and is effectively equivalent to calling them “the bad guys”.[/quote]

The Computer says Terrorists are a threat to Alpha Complex.
Do you doubt the Computer, Friend Citizen?
Doubt is Treason. If you doubt the Computer, you must be a Terrorist.
Please report to the nearest Termination Booth.