Paranoia: Please Give Feedback on my Session Plan

[Isocahedron]

Hi all,

I'm an experienced GM, but new to Paranoia, and I'll be running a Paranoia game in a couple days with players who also have experience with other TTRPGs but are new to Paranoia. I'd like some feedback on my plans, and any other advice you may have. I'm running Paranoia XP, but I think most of this is system-agnostic. Also, many elements have been shamelessly stolen from various forums, but the overall amalgamation is my own.

Mission Assignment: The Troubleshooters are contacted via PDC: "Friend Computer cordially requests your presence in room SLW-922-21A. Failure to arrive punctually is treason, punishable by termination. Have a relaxing trip. The Computer is your friend." There is no SLW-922-21A. There is a -21, though, which contains an ORANGE pencil-pusher who has been on duty for the last four daycycles. He knows that the Troubleshooters actually need to go to SLW-V15-556. Before he gives the Troubleshooters this information, he will try to get food or a mattress out of them.

The mission: Deliver a RED box to a particular location. No, you may not look in the box. (It's pizza delivery for an INDIGO researcher who's working late, and whose caterer got Troubleshooters to do the delivery since the usual delivery guy was terminated for treason.)

The secret societies don't know what's in the box either, but they can guess. PURGE thinks it's advanced tech, and wants it replaced with a bomb. Psion thinks it's some sort of mutant-detection device, and wants it sabotaged. FCCC-P doesn't know what's in it, but wants the box blessed in a ceremony that will take ten minutes. Pro Tech wants to steal it. Et cetera. Players will get their orders via passed note; I think sidebars will slow the game down too much.

After being told to deliver the box, the Troubleshooters (and the players!) are handed MBD Selection Forms. I'll watch them fill them out with great interest, and then after they hand them in, I will put them on the floor unread and hand out MBD cards at random.

R&D would like the Troubleshooters to test this Plasma Generator. It is for mining purposes only. It has five charge packs (the paperwork says they have six, so they'll have to account for the missing pack.) It has three settings: Boring (bores a hole), Standard (describes how far the ambient air is from standard temperature, pressure, and humidity) and Danger (Loudly announces that all personnel should clear the area for imminent excavation). With Management skills, the Troubleshooters can get a user's manual, but it says

Boring: boring mode

Standard: standard mode

Danger: danger mode

To deliver the box, the Troubleshooters will have to take transtube, cross sector NOP, and get into the lab itself. Each of these will pose its own... challenges.

Transtube: Two seats. They might be able to all fit inside if they really squish, or they could use the convenient externally-mounted handles. Good news: it's an express capsule. Bad news: it'll be taking very tight corners. If anyone dies on the way, their capsule will be rerouted for another capsule, carrying the player's clone. This will cause a large delay.

Sector NOP: Licorice-flavored Bouncy Bubble Beverage has been advertised here for three yearcycles straight. It's finally arrived. There were only two dozen cans. A full-scale riot is now in process. Vulture Squad goons have been assigned to guard assorted empty corridors and ignore the riot in front of them.

The Lab: It's GREEN. The whole lab is GREEN. The office they need to deliver to is on the third floor.

I'm not sure what to do for the debriefing, besides that I might bring up the MBD forms if anyone had particularly creative responses. Any tips / ideas for debriefing?

[Anonymouswizard]

Surely the ORANGE clerk can just demand that they give him food or a mattress. He is a higher security clearance after all. After securing them the clerk is also under no obligation to know which room they have to get to.

Once they reach the room it's entirely possible that Friend-Computer has laid a cunning trap to root out traitors. You see, while the door to the room is INFRARED clearance the handle is YELLOW clearance. Travel time and bypassing such a fiendish scheme should hopefully ensure they arrive at the meeting room 29 minutes late...

Plus there's always the classic of providing four lasers for a team of five people. Then at the debriefing call for an equipment inspection.

[Isocahedron]

Surely the ORANGE clerk can just demand that they give him food or a mattress. He is a higher security clearance after all. After securing them the clerk is also under no obligation to know which room they have to get to.

As an newbie Paranoia GM, I'm a little bit concerned about simply throwing up a brick wall without giving the players a way around it. And the authority of ORANGE, according to the XP book, is "you can coerce the occasional INFRARED." Of course, it might be easier to just make him RED.

Still, though, I might be thinking more like a DM for a non-fun game. As a Paranoia GM, suppose you sent your players to a nonexistent room with no leads (at least none they picked up on), and they end up stuck, milling around and trying nonsensical things. How would you get them to the briefing?


Once they reach the room it's entirely possible that Friend-Computer has laid a cunning trap to root out traitors. You see, while the door to the room is INFRARED clearance the handle is YELLOW clearance. Travel time and bypassing such a fiendish scheme should hopefully ensure they arrive at the meeting room 29 minutes late...

That's a good idea. I'll decide whether to use it or not based on how many Troubleshooters survived to the briefing, and how paranoid the players are.


Plus there's always the classic of providing four lasers for a team of five people. Then at the debriefing call for an equipment inspection.

Delicious. Although I'd like to make sure they can still shoot each other. Decisions, decisions...

[Telok]

I have a little spreadsheet here https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kK1r8MOliMqCkp49v9t5RzIN0cdzL_Pr/view?usp=drivesdk

For Paranoia. It has some drug & color lists, and basically automates a few things from random tables I worked up for my games. It doesn't look great in the online docs but you should be able to grab it and open locally if you want. It generates a random subsector, level, sublevel, corridor, clearance color, and room number. Plus a simple node map with transport links.

I probably played some bits a little more straight. The computer & people never screwed up official use rooms existing or not. But someone may have moved a sign or repainted. Nothing terrible the briefing is where the fun should be starting, they should all get there (although the guy who mailed himself to the briefing room through the very rapid pneumatic parcel post had broken legs until his next clone).

I used a pretty simple d20 table system to generate locations. 10 subsectors, 19 'open' floors & a 20 was a reroll divided by four for a service & maintenance level that went by letters of the alphabet, corridor same system as the floor but numbered, rooms 2 to 40 because room 1 was the transport area. That gave me stuff like "subsector 7, level G, corridor 3 (red), room 18".

Picking up gear & getting through R&D were always good bits. Give them a timeline where they have to do something risky or split the party in order to get through both on time. That way they're getting Then they're loose on the sector until they report back, do enough damage they're recalled, or time (game, real, or my willingness to deal) runs out.

[Amidus Drexel]

Delicious. Although I'd like to make sure they can still shoot each other. Decisions, decisions...

Make sure the person without the gun has some explosives or a mutant power that can do some damage. Grenades are the GM's friend (not usually the players' friends, though).

[Anonymouswizard]

Make sure the person without the gun has some explosives or a mutant power that can do some damage. Grenades are the GM's friend (not usually the players' friends, though).

Have all the characters be forced into a target practice session, the one who scores the worst is given a crate of experimental grenades to help them hit.

Or if you have one really devious player give them a notebook and a suicide pill. With any luck when the debriefing comes round their last clone can out the others as traitors while remaining completely innocent by the laws of Alpha Complex.


It's possibly also worth stealing elements of the latest edition's character creation. Particularly the skills round, one player begins by picking a skill to get +1 in, and the player next to them gets -1 in that skill. Then they get to pick any skill they don't have a rating in, set it to +1, and the player next to them gets it at -1, repeat until everybody has a +1 and -1, at which point the starting player moves by one seat along the circle and you start on the +/-2s...

By the end everybody has five +s, five -5s, and everybody hates the player before them in the queue. This is a great time to declare that they get to arrange that person's stats...

[Misereor]

If its your first outing with Paranoia, I can recommend adding a random encounter of bureaucratic nonsense that somehow screws with their plans. Do this to let them get a feeling for the setting, and don't be afraid to kill a clone or two if they unthinkingly treat it like a D&D problem. Also, it has to be funny. The goal is to help them into the Paranoia mindset, not to discourage them.

(Should you scew up and make them mad, subtly remind them that it is not your fault, but probably due to the nefarious influence of traitor mutant commies who are everyhere.)

[Lo'Tek]

Hi all, ... I'll be running a Paranoia game in a couple days
Hope i am not too late and sorry for the wall of text, got a bit carried away


Friend Computer cordially requests your presence in room SLW-922-21A. [...] There is no SLW-922-21A. There is a -21, though [...] the Troubleshooters actually need to go to SLW-V15-556.
"badly labeled rooms" are not the kind of problem i would place the very start of a fresh time critical delivery mission. This happens when you get the room number from old documents, or hearsay. Implying Friend Computer makes such mistakes is treason.

However: remove the word "in room" from the message and require their presence "at 21A" (which is in room 21, on its left side to be precise) and there is no mistake. There is an unused desk on the right side of room 21, with mountains of dusty files and a small note pinned to it reading "21B". If asked the only person in the room denies any responsibility and or knowledge about it.

Another idea, which requires more interaction by the players than trying the obvious door, would be to send them to room 21, but between 19 and 23 is 21A. The person inside has no knowledge about their mission, or about room 21. They are young, new and easily scared, but know nothing. They can only say no one else working there told them anything. (a hint there are others they can talk to) Closer inspection of the rooms labels shows that the A was recently added. The official infrared floor plan says 21 is between 19 and 23 where 21A is. The timestamp of that plan is quite old.
The rooms are all labeled correctly, but SLW-922-21 is at an unexpected location between SLW-922-54 and 58. The person there had to move, was unhappy about it, complained and tried to argue about orange level mail and that ended with them keeping "their room (number)".

The troubleshooters can learn where room 21 is

by bribing/sweet-talking/intimidating people close by. Obvious choices like a porter, receptionist or information desk will squirm under pressure and say they were reminded to only hand out the current official infrared floor plan and not talk about planned plans and office rumors. Others prefer to send the troubleshooters to these people or have them talk to an information kiosk or something else, but not to bother them. Success means they squelch/sweeten hard enough and someone talks. (Note the last paragraph of my wall of text for the tone. Moving the room is not considered a "ridiculous compromise" but a "brilliant solution") Failure is walking back and forth being indecisive and getting nowhere. Critical fail is using violence and getting a clone killed by a security response.
by getting access to the recently updated floor plan which is not yet signed by management to be published as infrared (signatory is on extended leave due to being investigated) or to the highly classified mail routing information. Success is hacking a kiosk, work station, mail tube, delivery drone or whatever and getting the intel. Failure is raising an alarm by getting caught accessing data above ones own clearance, but standing down and making excuses. Critical failure is getting caught and starting a fight, getting a clone killed by a security response.
by very slowly by methodically searching SLW-922 for the room. To enable this, i wouldn't place the briefing in a different sector. They will run around a lot anyway, from briefing to R&D to collecting the box to delivery. Don't stretch it further. Again a critical failure condition might exist to searching the area, like a green hallway they have no reason to be in at all and exploring it before exhausting all other options leads to a fight with security.
by sending mail to SLW-922-21 from within the same subsector and following it. This is a quick and easy way. Keep a close eye on those who use it, they know too much.




Failure to arrive punctually is treason
Given that the mission is fresh and time critical, you may want to emphasize this more: add a concrete time and ask questions like "when do they leave (from wherever they start) how do they get to the sector/subsector, when do they think they will arrive there. This may also set up transportation options (un)available later when traveling to pick up the box and then to the lab.

Be aware that starting with a group split in time and space can easily go wrong. Getting the players in one place at the same time for a meet-and-greet to form a group should not be a problem. Paranoia is more competitive than other RPGs, but you don't want to run multiple solo adventures about getting to the briefing room.

If you do use a "search for the briefing room" intro, avoid miss-aligning the space-time vectors of the troubleshooters and have them run into each other at chokepoints before the maze. So if someone wants to arrive very early, acknowledge that, but get them stuck at a security gate, allow them one question as a reward for being early, answer the obvious question with handing out the outdated official infrared floor plan. Switch to the others and then clear them when the others show up, so they enter the maze together.


they end up stuck ... How would you get them to the briefing?
Easy: collect them. If they at least manage to get to the right subsector, the person giving the briefing will leave the hard to find room shortly after noticing they are late and look for them in the obvious place where people tend to get stuck (or if they managed to get lost, or in trouble, at the place where security says they are now). The pencil pusher doing their briefing is orange and involved in having some troubleshooters do work that needs to be done, rescuing them is well within their interest and ability.

The hard part is wording a veiled threat of reporting their failure to arrive punctually at the right place into an extortion for resources without sounding treasonous. .. or worse having them annoyed at the GM for setting them up and then extorting them.


Before he gives the Troubleshooters this information, he will try to get food or a mattress out of them.
I think the pencil pusher is somewhat involved in the delivery and has a self-interest in not being blamed for sabotage and treason. So the basic briefing is free. However the basic briefing could include strong hints that specific access codes / gear / knowledge / etc may be useful and could be theirs at a price. As the mission is possible without them, this is only mild corruption.

If they are late, combine the extortion and corruption into one thing, don't do it twice.


the box.
Add a can of Licorice-flavored Bouncy Bubble Beverage, which, if stolen from the box, might come in handy or be actually valuable, but never ever give them any hint if the sender/recipient/computer knows and or cares. They do not. The can was added in transit and is poisoned. Give the troubleshooters a chance to discover the box was manipulated before they got it, like an error on the electronic seal, and have some excuses ready in case they do their due diligence on pickup. ("yeah damn thing keeps glitching, we RMA'ed it but they say its fine so what can ye do. No one checks these anyway, just ignore it"). Have the people at pickup try to get them on the road quick, play into the whole timely delivery thing, but give them a chance to check, get some evidence of prior manipulation on tape, or force a reseal (not that they want that, but they could do it)

Have a way or two ready they can use to discover the poison, should they search for it: ("Warning, liquid in Licorice-flavored Bouncy Bubble Beverage(TM) can does not adhere to to food safety standard SSFD-2321.78 for bubbled and non-bubbled beverages") but don't give it away for free, they have to activly put it in front of the devices sensor. They will likely guess it anyway. Especially if you add adverts for the stuff like "Licorice-flavored Bouncy Bubble Beverage(TM) - Everyone should have a taste!" and "Share a Licorice-flavored Bouncy Bubble Beverage(TM) with your friends today!" to Sector NOP.

Note that the mission as stated forbids them to open the box, and that friend computer is manipulated by different powerful forces to want the researches both dead and alive. So those who remove the poison from the box are rewarded, unless someone reports they opened the box, which is treason. Delivering the box as is without adequate proof of their own innocence, makes a scapegoat. Do not punish the whole team, have them push the blame around.

And remember: as long as they don't look into it, you can Schroedinger it.


Transtube: Two seats. They might be able to all fit inside if they really squish
The box is so big, they need to squish if two want to to ride with it, instead of leaving someone alone with the box. Lean back and enjoy the discussion who rides with the box.

If you give them missions that more or less require them to be alone with the box, you should provide situations where that is possible and avoid saying things like "you can all fit inside but it will be very unpleasant" unless you are pressured by one of them to do so. The transtube splits up the party for a short time and avoids a lot of the downsides of splitting the party by combining them at destination. Do not give them reason to think this could be avoided.


Any tips / ideas for debriefing?
You will likely not get there in the first session, it would surprise me if they even make it to the lab. There is almost a whole session until they have the box, and they need opportunities for their secret missions between pickup and delivery.

If they do reach debriefing, note that those doing the debriefing have no idea what the actual intended outcome was, and that due to the way friend computer was manipulated, any outcome is kind of fine and kind of bad. Debriefing should mostly be them trying to accuse the others of treason and praise their own actions as good ideas in tough situations. Both should be rewarded with additional clones. However being found guilty of treason means loosing clones. Be generous and have this kind of act as a score. Make it competitive.


The Lab: It's GREEN. The whole lab is GREEN. The office they need to deliver to is on the third floor.
Sometimes having a problem without prepared solutions is a good thing, and getting into higher clearance areas is a typical problem so it is well within reason to expect the troubleshooters to come up with a plan and you to just wing it. Be sure to not shut them down, when they do, so it does not become impossible. Expect trivial solutions like "ring the bell and tell whoever answers about a delivery"


Secret missions - PURGE thinks it's advanced tech, and wants it replaced with a bomb.
They are not about the box, they want the scientists dead. Shooting them is also acceptable, as are explosions, falling out of windows, not evacuating the danger area of a boring device despite clear announcement to do so... But the secret mission does NOT have the info that the box is already primed to complete it by doing nothing, so be sure to give this mission to someone who assumes they must to do something, preferably someone who prefers direct action, guns and explosions.

An obvious choice is for a mission is one that directly opposes another mission: "According to our sources someone is planning to assassinate the recipients of the box. Their survival is in our interest. Do the necessary to guarantee it. Do not disclose this mission." (do not give this to a team leader, it looks too much as if it aligns with the one the team has)

May i suggest to add some missions that are not about the box at all? For example: "We have good intel that one of the other troubleshooters is a member of Pro Tech. If you can arrange it, befriend them and infiltrate the society, then report back. Do not incriminate yourself."


any other advice you may have
Create a culture where "coming up with clever solutions to problems under hard conditions" is highly praised and seen as a great virtue. This is necessary to make troubleshooting in a dysfunctional dystopian bureaucracy fun. Otherwise any clever solution is a violation of some regulation. So ensure there is plenty of praise for short-sighted highly problematic and downright dumb ideas that solve the current problem at hand. Not only for the players but as cultural aspect of society. To give an example: "if an optical guided missile can't hit a target with low contrast, but there is an important demonstration that decides if they are mass produced, paint the target bright yellow." This type of solutions should be highly encouraged and the person who comes up with such things is congratulated for their ingenuity. Look at this picture: https://cdn.acidcow.com/pics/20120220/there_i_fixed_it_32.jpg do not think "this is stupid they will get someone killed" but instead think "this is genius they found a way to make the car work".

[Kurald Galain]

As an newbie Paranoia GM, I'm a little bit concerned about simply throwing up a brick wall without giving the players a way around it.
Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. Clones can always try to blow up the brick wall, or play the Blame Game (tm) about who put it there, or just go in a random direction. Or, of course, all of the above.


May i suggest to add some missions that are not about the box at all? For example: "We have good intel that one of the other troubleshooters is a member of Pro Tech. If you can arrange it, befriend them and infiltrate the society, then report back. Do not incriminate yourself."
Yes, that. And/or, one of the clones you'll meet on this mission is your secret contact. Identify yourself by waving both arms wildly and saying the secret passphrase "scaralamantandalartator", and this clone will give you your secret instructions. (this is actually false, but the clone can have fun waving and saying the nonsensical passphrase to everyone they meet, and see how their teammates react to that)

[Lacco]

Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. Clones can always try to blow up the brick wall, or play the Blame Game (tm) about who put it there, or just go in a random direction. Or, of course, all of the above.


Yes, that. And/or, one of the clones you'll meet on this mission is your secret contact. Identify yourself by waving both arms wildly and saying the secret passphrase "scaralamantandalartator", and this clone will give you your secret instructions. (this is actually false, but the clone can have fun waving and saying the nonsensical passphrase to everyone they meet, and see how their teammates react to that)

Don't forget: your contact identifies themselves by a secret code word, inserted inconspicuously into conversation, to avoid any suspicion. Just watch for the codeword and you're golden.

The code word is "hello'.



Also, GitP R&D sends their regards: LINK (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?405709-Useless-Inappropriate-and-Amusing-Equipment)