Paranoia-Live :: View topic

The Bad Kind of Puppy · Posted: Thu Apr 15, 2010 9:08 pm Post subject:

I'm new on this forum, so I figured I'd jump into the deep end of the food vat and provide my own take on how High Programmers differs from previous Paranoia offerings. Hopefully, this will help other players and GM's decide whether they want to try out High Programmers, or stick with the familiar territory of Troubleshooters, which is still in my opinion one of the best RPGs on the market to GM.

I'm just going to assume that everyone reading this has played, or is familiar with, the rules for Paranoia. I'm making this assumption for two reasons:
1) Why else would you be here?
and
2) As I will later explain, I don't think High Programmers is designed to be played by anyone who hasn't already played Troubleshooters/XP.

So, where to start? How about the basic rules... in Troubleshooters (which I'm just going to call XP at this point, because change is scary) the "rules" portion of the core book was classified Ultraviolet, "preventing" the players from reading it due to their security clearance.

In High Programmers, however, everybody is clearance Ultraviolet. This leads to what I feel is the key problem with this rulebook: the "this section is Ultraviolet Clearance, this section is Red Clearance" delineation that I'm so used to from previous products has been abandoned, lending a "you may read this entire book, but the GM is always right" atmosphere to the text. There will be sidebars addressing the GM on the same page as a passage giving advice for novice players.

Frankly this is confusing, to the point where someone casually reading the book from cover to cover will suddenly find themselves in the middle of the campaign module, with no clear warning that they shouldn't be reading an obviously GM-only section. Normally, the players reading the core rulebook's sample mission wouldn't be a big deal, but it isn't as if there is a vast catalog of High Programmer missions that the GM can pick from.

This could have been fixed by making the GM sections "clearance GAMMA", which honestly could have completely solved this problem. However, as the rulebook points out on multiple occasions, Clearance GAMMA DOES. NOT. EXIST.

The upshot of everybody being clearance ultraviolet is that the game can be run without a GM. Optional rules in the back provide a variant of the game in which each player devises crises for their opponents to deal with, and then must confound the efforts of their fellow players while simultaneously dealing with the crises provided by their peers. I suspect that the GM-less rules variant plays rather differently in terms of atmosphere, as the game becomes much more of a resource management game without a GM to make the lives of the players a living hell. Still, it's a welcome and logical inclusion.

On the subject of resource management, the authors want to make it absolutely clear that the game shouldn't FEEL like a resource management game, and that it is largely up to the GM to prevent the players from feeling too comfortable with the Access system. Despite the fact that almost everything in the game can be reduced to its resource (Access) cost, the ability of the GM to arbitrarily increase or decrease the amount of access available to each player (utilizing, of course, a handy Access decrease/increase excuse table) returns the game to its role-playing roots.

I quote: "the core of High Programmer isn't solving problems, or arguing with the other High Programmers, or even screwing other players over. No, the core of the game is letting the players take revenge for all the past indignities and screw-jobs inflicted on them in past Paranoia games." Consequently, everything in this game feels BIGGER, and everything the players can do feels like a more powerful version of what they could do as Troubleshooters:

-You don't go on missions with your team of Reds, you SEND teams of Reds on missions.
-You don't belong to a secret society; you play the secret societies against each other, and to a certain extent, aim the secret societies at problems you'd like to solve like well placed, highly unreliable carpet bombs.
-You have as many clones as you want, and death becomes a drain on resources and stats rather than a permanent imposition.
-Your mutant powers are EPIC. As long as you have power, you can solve any tactical problem like Batman, create duplicate bodies like Multiple Man, regenerate from injuries like Wolverine, or turn into a giant monster like the Hulk. Of course, since most of the game takes place in a locked subterranean control room in clear sight of the other players, the way you exercise your power becomes more nuanced.
-You can PROGRAM the Computer. To do ANYTHING. (This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that every player can program the Computer to do anything, and turnabout is fair play.)

So far, everything I've mentioned has fallen into the general statement that, compared to XP, High Programmers is more fun for the players, but more difficult for the GM. Upon first glance, I thought, "okay, if the players are the rulers of society, what can I throw against them that is even remotely challenging?"

Enter the "What UVs Worry About" section. If you have any doubts at all about High Programmers, I encourage you to look at this section first, as any problems I had with the book vanished upon reading it. There is so much you can do to utterly terrify your players with High Programmers that you just can't pull off in XP. In simple terms, if your players are constantly in fear of getting terminated for failing to file a report to change a lightbulb in triplicate, they are less inclined to worry about the possibility of the Caucasus Complex. If your players have to answer to their own secret society, they will be less inclined to worry about the existence of the Illuminati, which operates independently of High Programmer influence, if they even exist.

In summary, the whole game of High Programmers can be summarized by the phrase "the more power you have, the more worried you have to be about losing your power." Ultimately, High Programmers is a completely different game from XP, owing mostly to its difference in theme and focus, rather than its difference in rules. I look forward to trying it out with a group of players just as much as I look forward to my next game of traditional Paranoia.