[Parody]

I have my Paranoia 6th* set now and I've read through the rules and cards. My reaction is mixed.

As a GM who runs Paranoia at game conventions, your typical four-hour RPG time slot gives you roughly three and a half hours of precious time for players to perform their Extremely Important Mission for The Computer.

While the player vs. player character creation process is very important to the authors (they continue to reference it in other parts of the rules as a main reason for players to make various decisions) it's something that'd take far too long to explain and do in a convention slot. In a less time-limited environment it'll probably work OK.

As actions the cards seem limiting; players will likely assume that they can only do actions on the cards, rather than use them as options or enhancers when they apply. Similarly, Equipment on cards means that all of your equipment has to be cards or players will forget it exists. There goes all of your R&D deathtraps...err...devices and anything else you feel like making for your players, unless you also make cards for it.

As initiative...well, initiative has never been a very important part of any Paranoia game I've run or played. I don't see players challenging the bluffs just out of spite; they'll only do it if they're pretty sure they're about to die. I don't see the point.

The reduction of skills looks fine. Coming from 2nd or XP/25th, there are a number of skills that either rarely come up in my adventures or are too similar and the differences won't stick in the time available. You could argue the degree of reduction, but as I was already ignoring some of the ones that were designed for campaigns I don't have a problem with it. (I will miss the group realizing that nobody's any good at, say, Nuclear Engineering, but whatever.)

The dice pool is fine as well, though I prefer a single number and roll to things that require players to do math and counting. :) Here I liked XP's/25th's changes; one downside to 2nd's skills is that it's too hard for characters to succeed.

I already had weird things happen on 1s and 20s, so the Computer die (== Ghost die) looks like it'll be a fine substitute.

Moxie points have three uses: pool modifiers, charges for Mutant Powers (Power from previous editions), and Sanity. I dropped Perversity Points early in XP/25th events because people forgot to use them, so that's probably out. The other two uses are probably fine.

A minor writing quibble: I obviously don't find "acronym that includes words repeated afterwards" jokes as funny as the authors do.


At this point I'm not sure what I'm going to do for the 2017-2018 convention season. I might experiment with using everything, try 6th but cut out the cards and character creation, or just stick with XP. Hopefully I'll get a chance to try it with folks I know in the next few months to get some actual data.


* Mongoose has not provided a designation for this version, but there's been 4 and a half other versions and I needed some way to separate it from the others.