NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4826425" data-attributes="member: 40961">Maybe I should elaborate now that there's a whole thread. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> One of the ways that some old school games worked was a player vs DM game where the DM gleefully killed off character after identical character as the party attempted to get through some death trap of a dungeon using every underhanded trick in the book along the way.  Not only did players go through character after cloned character (Matthias II, Matthias III, etc) until they reached high enough level to no longer serially croak, they also cajoled, coerced, or bribed dozens of faceless henchmen into wandering to their doom in the party's stead. I think Paranoia was designed to recreate that feeling, but with a complete focus on it instead of just leaving it as an incidental way you could play if you chose.  As a result, I think Paranoia has certain advantages in that style of play. 1. It provides character motivation.  Why are you going into these incredibly dangerous situations?  The computer told you to, and it has guns. 2. Where are all your serial PCs coming from after they die?  Instead of being the twin/son/brother/nephew of the original PC, they're actual clones. 3. Why is combat to be avoided?  Its intentionally designed to be erratic.  That's not an emergent feature, it was coded directly into the game.  Your laser just isn't a reliable weapon, and beyond that your only weapons are probably things like experimental NewCLEE-R boomerangs. 4. Why do the PCs backstab?  Its not just for money, its for survival. I could probably go on.  Paranoia also went beyond this and came up with a bunch of original ideas that facilitated the game, like the debriefing- a genius bit of roleplaying that casts the PCs as henchmen having returned from utterly failing at their mission, and blaming one another. So that's where I'd go if I were creating a Paranoia style D&D game.  I'd make the characters henchmen.  Probably kobolds.  And then I'd give them impossible missions, with contradictory orders from multiple masters.  And then they'd go out and fail (or surprise me and succeed!), and be brought back to bow before their Dark Overlord and explain what went wrong. <a href="http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/18723" target="_blank">See this for reference.</a></blockquote>

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