Evil Mastermind posted:

The problem with Paranoia

FRIEND COMPUTER posted:

Yawgmoth posted:

Eventually they'll do Return to Lorwyn and you'll get your wish.

FRIEND COMPUTER posted:

Evil Mastermind posted:

The problem with Paranoia is that it let itself get overtaken by its own meme jokes.

paradoxGentleman posted:

I feel like a Paranoia game could be fun in a bleak humor kind of way, especially if the players buy into the idea that they're there to screw each other over in pursuit of their hidden agendas, while trying to mantain an appearance of fealty to Alpha Complex and Friend Computer. But I have a weakness for hidden agendas.

Falstaff posted:

Paranoia can also be a lot of fun played completely straight, a la THX 1138. Takes the right group, though.

Haystack posted:

try not to be insufferable.

Evil Mastermind posted:

XP/Mongoose Edition did a lot of work in making the "Straight" playstyle possible, with support for playing Paranoia as a dark black comedy game. There was also a book of dark adventures called "WMD" that all generally revolve around the PCs being involved in the slow unfunny death of Alpha Complex.

Falstaff posted:

Paranoia can also be a lot of fun played completely straight, a la THX 1138. Takes the right group, though.

xiw posted:

The Hunger from WMD was utterly amazing in play - it's a Straight adventure that's all about rapidly promoting the PCs behind their competence and hosing them through success rather than failure.

Evil Mastermind posted:

That's my favorite adventure in the book for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that it's based on something that happened in real life with a very similar outcome.

LeSquide posted:

Can you fill us in on both the adventure and its inspiration?

a sidebar, bolding mine posted:

The Great Leap Forward took place in 1958. The Great Leap Forward was Mao [Zedong]’s attempt to modernize China’s economy so that by 1988, China would have an economy that rivaled America. [...]

The Great Leap Forward planned to develop agriculture and industry. Mao believed that both had to grow to allow the other to grow. Industry could only prosper if the workforce was well fed, while the agricultural workers needed industry to produce the modern tools needed for modernization. To allow for this, China was reformed into a series of communes.

The geographical size of a commune varied, but most contained about 5,000 families. People in a commune gave up their ownership of tools, animals, etc. so that everything was owned by the commune. [...] Schools and nurseries were provided by the communes so that all adults could work. Health care was provided and the elderly were moved into ‘houses of happiness’ [...] Party
members oversaw the work of a commune to ensure that decisions followed the correct party line.

By the end of 1958, 700 million people had been placed into 26,578 communes. The speed with which this was achieved was astounding. [...] The Great Leap Forward also encouraged communes to set up ‘backyard’ production plants. The most famous were 600,000 backyard furnaces which produced steel for the ommunes. When all of these furnaces were working, they added a
considerable amount of steel to China’s annual total—11 million tonnes.
The figures for steel, coal, chemicals, timber, cement, etc. all showed huge rises, though the figures started at in 1958 were low. Grain and cotton production also showed major increases in production.

Mao had introduced the Great Leap Forward with the phrase ‘it is possible to accomplish any task whatsoever.’ By the end of 1958, it seemed as if his claim was true.
—Chris Trueman, http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/great_leap_forward.htm

quote:

However, in 1959, things started to go wrong. Political decisions/beliefs took precedence over common sense, and communes faced the task of doing things which they were incapable of achieving. Party offi cials would order the impossible, and commune leaders, who knew what their commune was capable of doing or not, could be charged with being a ‘bourgeois reactionary’ if [they] complained. Such a charge would lead to prison.

Quickly produced farm machinery produced in factories fell to pieces when used. Many thousands of workers were injured after working long hours and falling asleep at their jobs. Steel produced by the backyard furnaces was frequently too weak [...] Buildings constructed [with] this substandard steel did not last long. Also, the backyard production method had taken many workers away from their fields—so desperately needed food was not being harvested. Ironically, one of the key factors in food production in China was the weather, and 1958 had particularly good weather for growing food. Party leaders claimed that the harvest for 1958 was a record 260 million tons—which was not true.

The excellent growing weather of 1958 was followed by a very poor growing year in 1959. Some parts of China were hit by floods. In other growing areas, drought was a major problem. The harvest for 1959 was 170 million tons of grain—well below what China needed at the most basic level. In parts of China, starvation occurred. 1960 had even worse weather than 1959. The harvest of 1960 was 144 million tons. Nine million people are thought to have starved to death in 1960 alone; many millions were left desperately ill as a result of a lack of food. The government had to introduce rationing. This put people on the most minimal of food, and between 1959 and 1962, it is thought that 20 million people died of
starvation or diseases related to starvation.
—Chris Trueman, http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/great_leap_forward.htm

Evil Mastermind posted:

It was basically what happens when a) the person in charge tries to change basic processes work without understanding how they work, b) the people in charge not accounting for potential failures, c) the man in charge can't accept that he's wrong, and d) the middle management types just tell the people in charge what they want to hear because they know that if they suggest that the man in charge is wrong, they'll be executed as traitors.

Thankfully, that doesn't happen anymore. Corporations don't execute people as traitors.

Covok posted:

So, how do y'all deal with gamers who can find a problem with any trpg system and aren't afraid to complain about them in front of the entire group? I don't think there is anything wrong with not liking something or wanting to mention it, but I find bitching about it in front of everyone can lower people's fun in the title and makes my job harder when I'm the one who likes the game.

Covok posted:

So, how do y'all deal with gamers who can find a problem with any trpg system and aren't afraid to complain about them in front of the entire group? I don't think there is anything wrong with not liking something or wanting to mention it, but I find bitching about it in front of everyone can lower people's fun in the title and makes my job harder when I'm the one who likes the game.

Splicer posted:

Why are they complaining? Please choose one or more:
1) They only want to play <favourite game> so they poo poo on everything else you bring up so you'll go back to running (let's face it it's D&D or something White Wolf based).
2) "any trpg system" actually just means a number of D&D flavours or White the Wolfenings, and they are completely justified in making GBS threads on your terrible taste in RPGs.
3) They only want to play <particular genre> and their complaints about other games are how they don't handle <particular genre which is very much not what that system is for> well.
3.5) "Verisimilitude"
4) They have stared too deep into the abyss of critique and can only see the flaws in systems.
5) They have stared too deep into the abyss of dissaffected youth and think enjoying anything at all is for dumbies and lameos.

Covok posted:

7) They have been hacking 3.5 for years and are now obsessed with finding flaws and broken builds and trying to break a system

quote:

Also, he hates how it is so strict in what genres it does that, if you're players don't have buyin, it breaks down so therefore it and a lot PbtA games are deeply flawed but is also interested in them but also wishes roleplaying games would stop simplifying and feels a return to crunch is inevitable.

LatwPIAT posted:

9) Telling people about weird flaws and silliness in systems is a communal bonding activity that everyone participates in, sharing anecdotes about Exalted 2e's recession-blocking swords, peasant railguns, and football-throwing babies.

Evil Mastermind posted:

I think we may have found the problem.

Wait, what? He thinks "players need to buy into a game's concept" is a flaw?

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

"No game is perfect," is a poor excuse for not trying, you should criticize the gently caress out of games, and while the cooperative and human-adjudicated nature of RPGs means you can't be quite as 100% "go ahead, try and break the game if you can, if you manage it then the game sucks" as you could with a video game, developers, and to a lesser extent GMs, still have a responsibility to shape the player experience and design systems that don't fall apart under pressures that they themselves incentivized.