Paranoia Perfected?

In looking over Stu Horvath’s Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground – and its supplementary zine, Experience Points – I got to thinking about Paranoia again – for a new edition came out last year, and I’ve been slack about getting hold of it. But to properly talk about that, I need to talk about the game’s history. I covered that a while back in fairly epic Kickstopper article concerning the release of the previous edition, but a quick recap for anyone who doesn’t want to trawl through that article is probably sensible. The story so far…

• 1984: The 1st Edition of the game is released by West End Games. The core book is alright, but it’s really in the supplement line that the distinctive Paranoia style comes into its own.
• 1987: A tightened-up 2nd Edition of the game is put out by West End, a grand improvement over 1st Edition’s core book on all fronts. The early 2nd Edition line continues the game’s golden age, but eventually things go a bit awry when a series of misguided metaplot events see the game straying from its original concept (and the style of play it handles best), and the writers who best “get it” drift away from writing for West End.
• 1995: West End, circling the drain somewhat by this point, put out the “Fifth” Edition. The bit about it being the 5th version of the game when it was, in fact, the 3rd is the funniest joke involved by quite some margin – and given how stunningly un-funny it is, that should give you an idea of how poorly it is regarded.
• 2004: Having retrieved the rights from the wreckage of West End, the game’s original creators give Mongoose the licence and they put out the edition initially known as Paranoia XP until Microsoft suffer a lack of sense of humour about it. It’s an excellent return to form, most particularly because it recognises three distinct playstyles popular among Paranoia players – from slapstick “Zap” games to gag-light, satire-heavy “Straight” play, with the “Classic” style somewhere in the middle – and provides both clear guidance on how to cater to each of these.
• 2009: A 25th Anniversary repackaging essentially provides a slimmed-down edit of the 2004 core rulebook – now called Paranoia: Troubleshooters – and two other core books, Paranoia: Internal Security and Paranoia: High Programmers, bids at fleshing out styles of play alluded to in past supplements like HIL Sector Blues and Extreme Paranoia but which, it’s probably fair to say, don’t seem to have the same legs as the decades-old tried-and-true Troubleshooter-focused version of the game.
• 2014: Mongoose began the fractious, much-delayed, ill-tempered Kickstarter process which led to the release of the “Red Clearance Edition” (RCE) of the game in 2017 – a major system revision spearheaded by James Wallis of Alas Vegas infamy and Grant Howitt, whose preceding Goblin Quest was a fun fantasy take on Paranoia and whose subsequent Spire shows some influence from design ideas he worked into Red Clearance Edition.

As I outlined in my previous article, the Red Clearance Edition had a difficult beginning. It was subjected to extensive delays which caused no small amount of ill will; the Kickstarter backers were badly annoyed by the delays, and became outright furious when one backer was given a preview PDF to use at a convention but the same courtesy wasn’t extended to the backers in general, creating an impression of undue favouritism. In the process of mollifying the backers, Matt Sprange – founder and head honcho at Mongoose – laid the blame for the delays squarely and unambiguously at James Wallis’s feet. (Not, let’s be very clear, Grant Howitt – I say that not because I take any joy from slamming James Wallis, I’ve done that enough in the Alas Vegas articles, but because it’s not fair to include Grant Howitt in the blast radius here; at no stage did I see Matt Sprange express any dissatisfaction with how Grant had been handling his end of things.) In the annotated versions of the core materials that Kickstarter backers at some tiers received, Grant and James expressed dissatisfaction with Mongoose’s editing, proofreading, and quality control processes. Everyone was left just a bit sore-headed and grumpy by the whole thing.

That included me, especially once I got the final product, which ended up looking cheap and with a similarly uninspiring tactile feel to it; between the lacklustre hard copies and the somewhat shaky artwork (particularly on the cards and in the internal art), it felt like a tatty and half-hearted sort of product. The shift to incorporating special dice and a set of bespoke cards as key game components – not a Wallis & Howitt decision, the cards were apparently a Mongoose mandate – might have made a degree of sense if Paranoia were being repackaged as a pick-up-and-play game, something which could sit attractively and eye-catchingly on a boardgame shelf and be pulled out for a quick game when the mood strikes, but the apparent desire in the text for somewhat more sustained play, combined with the less than appealing quality of the final product, kind of combined to sabotage that. (Those proofreading and editing complaints Wallis and Howitt had don’t exactly add to the sense of a well-honed product either.)

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In retrospect, I strongly suspect that the long delays meant that the former estimates Mongoose had been provided with by their printers were no longer valid, and the only way they could get the products out there without breaking the bank was to cheap out on the artwork, layout, and proofreading and accept significant compromises in the production values. As for the execution of the books themselves, I was unimpressed.

For one thing, Greg Costikyan and the other original creators had apparently mandated that the book dial back on introductory material to the setting, and had declared that instead of “Communists” being public enemy number one in Alpha Complex, the Computer should be exhorting citizens to keep an eye out for nefarious terrorists. The terrorist thing rubbed me the wrong way for two reasons: the first is that having the Computer demand citizens hunt a comically anachronistic threat is funnier, the second is that “terrorist” is a term which is increasingly racially charged in present-day discourse (and it’s not really the bogeyman du jour anyway, and wasn’t in the mid-2010s; if you want that it’s “immigrant”, and I don’t think Costikyan and company wanted to go there).

The other reason I think it was a poor idea is that an RPG who only gets a core book released once every 5-10 years or so is a poor medium for bang-up-to-date cutting-edge satire: RPGs are better off going for “timeless” than “timely”. Witness the way that QAnon types – and more mainstream right-wing politicians trying to dogwhistle to them – have simply started to directly accuse Communists of being behind all sorts of nastiness of late; with QAnon and similar conspiracy theorising beginning to pick up when Red Clearance Edition released, Paranoia ended up abandoning Commies as the enemy du jour just as it was about to become timely again, making the game’s creators look like absolute chumps for demanding its removal.

For that matter, I think Greg Costikyan was wrong-headed to take the attitude that there’s no point folding substantial setting introduction material into a basic Paranoia product because the set of people who will buy such a thing who don’t already know the setting is essentially zero. Of course that’s going to be the case if you take that attitude – but if you don’t make sure to provide good onramps for people entirely new to your concept, you are basically saying that the product line must embrace a spiral into irrelevance, obscurity, and death, and just because your physical body is hurtling towards the grave at a rate of one second per second doesn’t mean you should blithely accept the same fate for your legacy.

The new system didn’t particularly wow me either, not least because I didn’t like the inclusion of cards. I don’t like RPGs where I might suddenly become unable to play them if a pack of cards gets lost or badly damaged; moreover, such things are an absolute chore to set up and use in online play (unless game companies provide means to do so – but I dislike that dependency), and COVID taught us all a harsh lesson in how enabling online play is extremely important these days. More generally, I tend to feel that if you go from a game which you can play with just pen, paper, standard RPG dice, and the core rulebook to a game which requires the use of additional proprietary components, to my mind that’s unambiguously a downgrade which offers little benefit to the person who elects to upgrade. I’m a big theatre of the mind guy – I accept the need for randomisers to attend to random systems, books to record rules, and pen and paper to take notes and record character details, but I resent any additional component busting in on my immersion.

Perhaps the worst thing about the cards, however, was that James and Grant didn’t want them – it was a mandate that was imposed on them. And whilst professional game designers will bravely take such mandates and put the best spin they can on them, my feeling is that you get the best work out of a game designer when you don’t impose that sort of mechanical mandate on them independently of whether or not cards are really the best thing for the sort of design they are going for. There was a faint whiff of unenthusiasm, a taste of obligation about how the cards were implemented, at least in my perception.

(Oh, and the cards had some of the worst art in the set. We’re not talking Fifth Edition bad – some of the interior art in Fifth Edition looks like the sort of stuff where, if it wasn’t jotted down on the back of a napkin in under a minute, the artist in question should be embarrassed. But it certainly made the lackadaisical Red Clearance Edition cover art look like, say, the sort of Jim Holloway masterpiece that graced the cover of 2nd Edition.)

Maybe I’m a grump and a grognard and my complaints were silly and based too much on my personal tastes and Red Clearance Edition was a smashing success, with most people loving all the stuff I disliked. I kind of doubt it, though – for in 2023, Mongoose published Paranoia Perfect Edition, a thorough revision of the game helmed by Keith Garrett and the blatantly pseudonymous WJ MacGuffin. (Mongoose seem to have belatedly decided to start referring to it as the All New Shiny Edition on their website, but the text of the currently physically extant books is very much based on the Perfect branding.) And what do you know – Perfect Edition seems to have corrected more or less everything I was grumpy about in Red Clearance Edition, whilst still providing a tightened-up iteration of the same general system concept Red Clearance Edition used with some improvements here and there.

The core book is, naturally, The Core Book. This is a nicely presented hardcover book, with decent manufacturing quality, a brief but still more or less useful index (Red Clearance Edition didn’t believe in such fripperies), a few typos here and there but in general prose that flowed much better and was far more readable and better-proofread than Red Clearance edition, and… art! Really gorgeous art! There’s an entirely new slate of illustrators this time around and they’ve shifted away from the doofy, somewhat cartoonish, occasionally alarmingly sketch-like approach of Red Clearance Edition into a style which draws on the contributions Jim Holloway made with his excellent illustrations for earlier editions whilst still looking nice and refreshed.

There’s even a Holloway tribute running through the book! There’s a sequence of full-page illustrations which tell a little story much like the “faction A spying on faction B spying on faction C spying on faction A….” illustrations that graced the covers of the booklet in the original 1st Edition boxed set.

• Chapter 1 shows us a team of Troubleshooters in frenzied argument with each other, two of them already coming to blows and others clearly about to start shooting, as a Communist supporter they’ve arrested looks on smugly.
• Chapter 2 shows an IntSec team, clearly about to ambush the Troubleshooters.
• Chapter 3 shows a group of traitors using a hacked system to spy on the IntSec team.
• Chapter 4 shows a High Programmer and their bickering Violet-clearance underlings observing all of the above.
• At the Appendix we get an illustration of the Computer observing all of the above.
• The very last interior illustration in the book shows us a bird’s-eye-view of a post-debriefing scene, where someone is mopping up the mess left behind by messily executed Troubleshooters and IntSec officers. I’m pretty sure she’s the Communist from the Chapter 1 illustration. And so the loop is closed!

It’s both a great nod to that fun gimmick Holloway pulled off back in 1st Edition, and perhaps more importantly, the sort of thing which immediately communicates to newcomers a heck of a lot about the tone and style of the game.

Speaking of accessibility to newcomers, the book also actually makes sure to introduce the setting, both in the preamble and the full-fat setting chapter (the title page of which has a little easter egg at the top referring to “What RCE lacked”, so clearly someone in the pecking order realised Greg Costikyan had made a terrible mistake by requiring the setting material be pulled from that). “Communists” are back in fashion, and the blunder of Project Infinite Hole from the Red Clearance Edition line has been used to explain why and to cover for a bunch of adjustments and corrections. There’s also a welcome return of some text from old editions – clearly spruced-up, but equally clearly still drawn on – which is a change from the scorched earth let’s-rewrite-everything approach of RCE.

In terms of the system, the basic principles are essentially the same as Red Clearance Edition. The extent to which the cards were a somewhat needless elaboration is illustrated by how smoothly and effectively they have been removed, though the Appendix provides guidance on using all the cards and other gimmicks and doodads from Red Clearance Edition in Perfect Edition if you want, and I don’t mind that at all. Like I said, if you take a game which didn’t used to require anything other than standard RPG dice, pen and paper, and the book and then add more clutter to it as a form of cardboard DLC, I regard that as a downgrade, but if you do the reverse process, but make it viable for people who liked and enjoyed those extra components like the cards to continue to make use of them, then that’s clearly an upgrade – everyone wins!

Beyond this, the system has been tightened up, better-explained, and generally improved. The weird little blunder where it was possible for a player to have no secret society – a massive error because it takes away a motivation for them to do treason stuff and a potential resource for them to play with – has been patched out, and thank goodness for that. There’s still a need to include a Computer Dice in your D6 dice pool (yes, it’s “Computer Dice” despite there being only one – presumably because “Computer Die” sounds too much like a treasonous slogan), but there’s no pretense of needing a funky one with a computer logo on it – just use a standard D6 and you are fine. In fact, having a logo on the Computer Dice is actively unhelpful for two reasons: in Red Clearance Edition, the Computer Dice was a D6 with a computer logo where the 6 should be, and if you roll a Computer logo it doesn’t count as a success, you lose a point of Moxie, and the Computer takes an interest in what you are doing.

In Perfect Edition, however, this is streamlined: there’s no Moxie loss (attention from the Computer is penalty enough), and if you roll a 6 it still counts as a 6 (and therefore a success). Moreover, as you accumulate Treason Stars the range of numbers on the Computer Dice which correspond to the Computer paying attention to you broadens (because once the Computer is suspicious of you, it’s going to keep more of an eye on you). As a result of that mechanic, it’s actually more useful for your Computer Dice to simply be an ordinary D6 which is clearly visually distinct from the other dice you’re rolling, a bit of design work which perhaps doesn’t help Mongoose sell tat, but also absolves Mongoose of the need to manufacture tat in the first place.

I also like how this aspect means that the Computer’s attention falling on the party doesn’t mean an immediately automatic screwup (a la the Ghost Die coming up with a ghost in West End’s Ghostbusters system, the obvious ancestor of this) – which I think is an outcome referees might have been tempted to default to under RCE. Here, you can have the Computer showing up create a moment of peril which a really skilled player might be able to twist to their advantage – or might derail them totally. Less predictable, more chaos, great!

There’s also some really cunning tightening-up of the system. In Red Clearance Edition you had three adjectives describing your character’s personality, but didn’t get involved in much. Here instead, you have two Buttons – your Treason Button and your Violence Button. See, the folk of Alpha Complex are under a tremendous amount of stress due to, well, living in Alpha Complex; they’re often on the brink of doing something treasonous just to spit in the face of the society that’s destroying them, or unleashing some whup-ass on fellow citizens because it’s all got a bit too much for them. Your Treason Button is the thing which, when you run into it, kicks your imp of the perverse into high gear and makes you want to commit treason; your Violence Button is the thing which makes you see red and want to lash out.

Essentially, these work like Aspects in Freeform Universal Donated Gaming Engine Adventures In Tabletop Entertainment – if your character encounters this stimulus the GM can nudge you into acting out on them, or if you spot a chance to do so proactively and take it, you get 2 Moxie. This is great because it’s a mechanism which prevents turtling – the one way a player can make a Paranoia game more boring is if they try to play incredibly defensively, take no risks, and never stick their neck out, and the Buttons not only give the referee the means to stop this if a player insists on doing it, but it also creates an incentive for a player to take risks anyway – and the more players chase those useful, useful Moxie points, the less the referee will need to mash those buttons to begin with.

Another thing I really appreciate about the system, which I wasn’t sold on in Red Clearance but looking at this book has really made click with me, is the fact that the GM doesn’t roll dice in this version of Paranoia – as in RCE, only the players do. That was a Grant Howitt innovation he eventually used in Spire, and I think it’s actually quite a clever addition to Paranoia. For one thing, the referee already has ultimate power in Paranoia and is encouraged to strike a pose of dictatorial authority – so why submit to the dice? For another, if all the other players are rolling dice and passing notes, and if much of what happens in the game seems to be following on from that, that’s going to make it seem like other players are screwing you over (through sabotage or incompetence) more than the referee is – which is as it should be if you’re refereeing in a savvy fashion.

What of the setting adjustments? Well, the idea of Treason Stars, XP Points as a currency/social credit system (leaning more towards the latter than the former now), and the Cerebral Coretech system providing a Computer-implemented augmented reality nightmare for all citizens have all carried over from Red Clearance Edition, as well they should have. In addition, there’s a touch more emphasis on celebrity culture this time around – as well as Teela-O, the Complex’s sweetheart from editions past, a swathe of new celebrities for citizens to develop unhealthy parasocial relationships with have been rolled out. Team positions now include a Media Officer, responsible for creating awesome #content to show off how cool the Troubleshooters are and what a grand job they are doing keeping the Complex safe for citizens.

This works nicely, in part because it’s a good example of trying to be timeless instead of timely: celebrity culture was a thing when Paranoia was first released, was a thing long before that, and isn’t likely to go away in our lifetimes, and whilst social media platforms may rise and fall the idea that it’s going to all vanish abruptly seems profoundly unlikely – and if it did enterprising tech startups will just bring it all back anyway. As such, these setting elements are arguably either dialling up ideas which have always been fairly natural inclusions in the setting, or developing the setting in a direction which is both funny currently and can remain funny in future iterations. On the whole, the system here exonerates a lot of the work Wallis and Howitt did on Red Clearance Edition, whilst at the same time ensuring their vision of the system has more longevity by extricating it from some of the muddle which surrounded that version of the game.

The Core Book feels like better value, all told, than the Red Clearance Edition boxed set – it’s only 144 pages, but the full-size presentation as opposed to the digest-sized rulebooks and better layout means there’s probably around as much material in here, and whilst it’s substantially shorter than the Paranoia XP core book, that was always a bit of an outlier and included perhaps a bit too much in the way of very niche setting fluff to begin with. In terms of page count and form factor, it compares very nicely to the old Games Workshop hardcovers I have of 1st and 2nd Edition, which I find both pleasing on a nostalgic level and the right direction the game ought to be taking right now. It’s got the form factor of a tabletop RPG, not a boardgame, so people know what they are getting into, but it’s reassuringly slim and the finely-tuned adjustments means that it’s able to give newcomers everything they need to run a game in the new edition plus some neat setting fluff and a rather clever sample mission all in one neat package.

If you want more, though, Mongoose offer more in the form of a companion book. No, it’s not called The Paranoia Companion – “companion” sounds way, way too friendly for Alpha Complex! Suspiciously friendly. Treasonously friendly. No, it’s The Accomplice Book, and it’s a very handy little text indeed. With a similar hardback form factor and essentially the same personnel involved, it’s a grab-bag of bits and pieces which didn’t make the cut for the core book – the sort of thing we’ve seen in plenty of Kickstarter campaigns fuelled by stretch goals, in fact – but the team have done a fine job of presenting all this in a logical fashion and make sure it remains extremely useful.

First up there’s the Past Perfection chapter, which is an instant guide to using material from old editions in Perfect Edition. (My heart was warmed to see that the illustration for that chapter is, very obviously, a scene from Me and My Shadow, Mark IV – far and away the best Paranoia adventure ever written under West End Games’ curation of the game.) There’s setting features like registered mutants, and commendation points, as well as guidelines on running robot Troubleshooters or elderly ones, there’s writeups of a swathe of old mutant powers and secret societies which didn’t make the cut for the core book (or, where a decision has been made not to include them, a clear and extremely sensible explanation as to why they’re better off left out of the game). And to top all that off, after the core book gave conversion rules for Red Clearance Edition material, this gives you a guide to how to convert stuff from 1st Edition, 2nd Edition, and XP/25th Anniversary.

(No Fifth Edition conversion rules, mind and that’s how it should be – the “unhistory” joke is still funny when it comes to that particular turkey, and furthermore nobody would get any use out of it; only two books were put out for Fifth Edition, the core rules and the cringeworthy World of Darkness parody Creatures of the Nightcycle, and there’s sweet fuck all in either of those anyone would ever want to convert. Those are not places of honour; no great deeds are commemorated there.)

After this there’s a chunk of alternate rules – crunchier combat for those who insist on such, and tweaks for rolling dice as the referee if you insist on doing that, or for taking the competitive/sabotage element out of character creation – which is particularly useful if someone wants to join a game late after the initial character generation round has happened, or if you want to just let players cook up characters by themselves so you can begin running immediately on game night. More extensive is a big pile of additional material, including the return of the Mission Blender from Paranoia XP, additional NPCs and celebrities, and other cool material to get ideas from. Matters are rounded off with a set of little infoboxes which give an instant idea of what the lifestyle, accommodations, and general situations of citizens at different security clearances is, a consolidated equipment list, and an index.

At some 112 pages, the Accomplice Book feels like good value and, added to the Core Book, ends up offering about as much material in terms of page count as Paranoia XP, and it’s perhaps even better organised and more immediately digestible and deployable than that. You heard me – Perfect Edition might in fact be exactly what it claims to be. Even the referee screen is pretty decent – sure, the panels are in portrait orientation (wrong!) rather than landscape (the objectively correct way to do referee screens), but it’s got a lovely spoof of Leonardo’s The Creation of Adam on the player-facing side, extremely useful stuff on the referee side, and is generally vastly nicer than the desperately ugly Red Clearance Edition screen, which was set up to enable a gameplay gimmick which simply didn’t work if you were actually trying to use the screen as a screen.

I’m serious about this: it is nigh-uncanny how Perfect Edition has targeted each and every one of the complaints I had about Red Clearance Edition and comprehensively answered them, either by fixing things which weren’t quite working or outright changing stuff where the basic idea just wasn’t sound. If I had written out a wishlist, MacGuffin and Matt Sprange have ticked off each and every request I had on it. In fact… that might even be what happened. Both of them showed up on a web forum I used to frequent to take part in a Paranoia thread which turned into spitballing what we wanted out of a new edition, and I basically got every wish I expressed there plus more besides. I’m not saying Mongoose write this edition of Paranoia solely to get a good review out of me, but I am saying that Perfect Edition is about as close to a “perfect edition” as I could hope for.