Seven Players With Computers

We finished that Paranoia game on Sunday night. We picked up right where that post leaves off, since by the time the rest of the group came back everyone else had to go home.

In between sessions, we added two players, this being a mostly social "hang out with some friends we haven't seen in a while, and maybe do some gaming" kind of affair. So we had seven players, one GM, and everyone in possession of a laptop or other chat device.

I had fun. Make no mistake. I got to bother people with a sock puppet and reprogram a bunch of scrub bots to attack my fellow troubleshooters. But I can't say I recommend the size of the group or the level of technology in use. For some, maybe, and in our group it worked out okay, but there were some problems.

Most important was that the set up slightly overwhelmed the GM. Seven people texting to you trying to pull secret bullshit is kind of hard to deal with. This is a problem in any group of that size -- I've had issues running groups that large myself -- but the technology factor amplified it. If we'd been passing notes, the volume would have likely been a bit more manageable.

It would have also made it more obvious which other players were sneaking around doing their own thing. Everyone was fiddling with their devices, but some of us were passing notes and others were just recording suspicious events. (Or goofing off, but I'll get to that in a minute.) On the one hand, it was nice for me, being one of the people getting up to a lot of the antics. (Not all -- our Happiness Officer turned the air ducts we were using into trap-filled pits of doom. Good times.) But the guy playing our Loyalty Officer pointed out that this greatly reduced our options to spend Perversity Points to thwart the other players actions.

But the major problem was just how distracting being hooked up to the internet can be. It might have been okay with a smaller group, and a large group might have been okay without the gadgets, but together? The people who weren't in the spotlight had a terrible temptation to decouple from the game entirely.

Not that it didn't go well. I had fun, and everyone else seemed to have a decent time. We've got an experienced group that works well together, and we had a good GM. But the combination of a large group and laptops has some definite pitfalls.

The Year in Gaming

This was sort of the year of the one shot, for me. I didn't as much gaming done as I would have liked, but what I did do was pretty fun. Pretty much all new systems, too; besides three sessions of a tragically doomed D&D 3.5 game, I don't think I played any of my old standbys. Here's the break down:

The Aforementioned Tragically Doomed D&D 3.5 Game: Four brand new players, one of whom never showed up after the first session and another who I'd kind of dragged into it and spent most of his time playing mah jong. Theoretically wilderness exploration, except for some reason I'd dumbed most of the hex map I worked up in September and replaced it with a really terrible random encounter chart. The play environment wasn't great either; we used a college provided study room, and the white board was handy, but the big glass window, terrible fluorescent lighting, and total lack of snacks just didn't set the right tone. Despite some really great play from the two players who wanted to be there, I just couldn't muster any enthusiasm for the thing, and stopped scheduling the games after a couple of weeks.

Feng Shui: In a trend that will continue, I got very excited about this on the train home from New York, played a single session that had a satisfyingly level of Nazi punching and general ludicrosity, and promptly forgot about the whole thing. Despite the fun we had with it, I haven't had the urge to play it again since.

4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons: Obsessed over it for, oh, a good eight months before it came out, ran a mostly successful short campaign using Keep on the Shadowfell over the summer, and decided it wasn't for me. Fun, yes, but a little too slick, and a little too streamlined.

Traveller: Mongoose Traveller gave me an excuse to get the book and see what all the fuss was about. Very impressed, spent a month or two rolling up a subsector. Never got around to playing it, though a couple members of my home group have expressed interest in it, and it's still top contender for games next semester and over the summer.

Swords & Wizardry: Finally started paying attention when the PDF version came out (especially since it's available for free at the official website) and proceeded to get very excited and spend a month and a half working on a crazy sandbox setting, which I still haven't run, and might not ever. I had fun putting it together, but it's still an irritating pattern.

Paranoia: A game my home group has been talking about for years, we picked it up on a whim and went home to play a crazy late night session. We managed to get in another game, and have some vague plans for a session next year, so this one may end up being a regular part of our college diaspora gaming landscape. It's been fun, and nice to be a player for once.

Vampire: the Requiem: Developed a bizarre fixation on the line, then got the book and became thoroughly confused. That's one to sort out in the New Year.

So I kind of got distracted every five freaking minutes, but I had fun doing it all so I'm not too unhappy with it. Hopefully I'll be able to run an actual campaign next year, but I'll tackle that when I blatantly rip off Amityville Mike's Gaming New Year's Resolutions.

A Second Stab at Paranoia and a Possible New Year One Shot

Coming to you live, mid-session in a Paranoia game! A couple of the other players have left to take Maggie home, so the other half of the group is hanging out, fiddling with computers and things, and talking about Stargate.

I have a new appreciation of pre-rolled characters for one-shots. I'd been over at my Paranoia GM's house for about three hours before we finished our characters and actually started the game. It always takes my group ages to make characters, and yet somehow we always end up making them, even for short games, and characters we're never going to use again.

This is mostly because none of the other GMs in my group tend to bother rolling up characters ahead of time. Neither do I, honestly, but that's usually because the one-shot games I run tend to be out of the blue, "oh, hey, we're hanging out, we should game" kinds of affairs, or games where character creation is supposed to be short and easy. This is a lie. Character creation always takes between 30 minutes to an hour, even if it is entirely random or for a character that will be used once and then discarded.

I'm making an exception to this general habit, and rolling up characters ahead of time for the game that I might be running on New Year's Eve. I haven't decided whether I'm going to run it, and I haven't decided what system I'm going to use, but I'm rolling up characters anyway. (I was planning on using Swords & Wizardry, but apparently one of my players has a never before mentioned life long dream of playing Traveller, so I might end up running that instead.) Luckily, they're characters for Traveller, so the generation process is pretty fun in and of itself.

Anyway, I'll probably do a more thorough session analysis once the whole thing is over and done with, but so far the game is going pretty well. There haven't been a whole lot more treason accusations than last time, but we haven't gotten very far yet, and at least one other character is keeping track of possibly treasonous activity. I've also read a bit more of the (red section of the) rulebook, and discovered that there is, in fact, a reason for wanting to turn your team mates in for treasonous behavior. You have to do it to get promoted. So there's a mystery solved.

Paranoia Quotes

"We are the computers friends. And friends clean each others stuff." Hygiene Officer Peter-R-WQR-1

"Greetings, citizen! We have no plans to eat you, no matter how tasty you might look." Loyalty Officer Mel-R-BOK-1

"Ah! There's blood everyone, just like in Beta Complex. I'll clean it!" Peter-R-WQR-1

"On a scale of 1 to 10, how clean is the dead body?" Peter-R-WQR-1

"I ate a grenade!" Mel-R-BOK-1

(From the game of Paranoia I was in about a week and a half ago. I was waiting to see if the other players had any more quotes, because this list is woefully incomplete.)

I ate a grenade!

Friday night and way into early Saturday morning me and my high school friends played some Paranoia. (XP edition, Classic style.) We used pre-made characters, the DM ran an adventure that came in the book, and it ended up being a lot of fun. I ran a REGISTERED MUTANT with the "Matter Eater" mutation and a habit of randomly chewing on things. We'll probably play again when we get together over winter break.

And with any luck, when we do play again, we'll get a little more actual "paranoia" in. I almost shot the Team Leader after she reprogrammed a robot to do something weird and wouldn't let the Hygiene Officer look at her stuff (I was the Loyalty Officer, figured that was my job) but that was the only actual accusation of treason in the game. Even that ended up getting dropped, when we went off to finish--well, what we'd decided was the mission, since we were never properly briefed.

The rest of the time we functioned as a team. I wasn't too clear on how, exactly, accusations of treason worked--was it something I should yell about and then start shooting, or wait until the team debrief and then unload?--so I mostly stuck to keeping a record of all of my Team Leader's "treasonous" actions. And the rest of the team kept focusing on "completely the mission," rather than blaming the complete failure of the mission on the rest of the team.

The near complete lack of treachery ended up not being a problem. The mission was a complete fiasco, but the guy debriefing us was responsible for it being a fiasco and wanted to keep the whole thing quiet, and it was a one-shot anyway so none of us got into any trouble. And by the time the debrief came around, I was too tired to care about reporting the treason list I'd assembled. Debrief anyway ended up being really short, because everyone was tired.

Still, the name of the game is Paranoia, so a little more backstabbing wouldn't have hurt. The big issue was just that we didn't have a good idea of why backstabbing was so crucial. I suspect that the player section of the book has some information on how you actual go about reporting treason to the computer, and on exactly how badly you can get screwed over if management decides you're responsible for the mission failure.

That wasn't the only factor: The Team Leader's player was under the impression that "there were cameras everywhere," which I don't think was true, but it would have helped if we or the game master had been more familiar with the material. It also might have helped if our secret society missions had been in more direct opposition. But basically, since we didn't know why backstabbing our teammates was a such good idea, our natural instincts took over, and we're all pretty veteran roleplayers, especially with each other. Completing the mission and working with the rest of the party come pretty naturally.

Oh yeah, and I ate a grenade, saving everyone. It was a grenade that one of my team mates had thrown, but still.