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Official development blog for the PARANOIA roleplaying game. No description is available at your security clearance. The Computer is your friend.

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Actual Play: "PARANOIA is EXHAUSTING" 

On the Mongoose Publishing forum, Gamemaster Eric Phillips posted a valuable Actual Play account of his recent PARANOIA game:
Compared to other games, PARANOIA is EXHAUSTING to run. I was on my feet, yelling mission alerts, having NPCs mess with players, dealing with their own attempts to get their secret society and service duties done. It was supposed to be Classic [play style], but the players made it kinda Zap, ending up everyone died at least once (one guy three times).

After three hours I needed to collapse. It was like I ran a marathon or something. Or more like I channeled Robin Williams on speed, jumping from this to that to character to event, making combat go fast and improvising to many many weird things the players say or do. I intended to keep the pacing faster than other games I run.

In the end it was a load of fun. Everyone seemed to enjoy stepping out from normal roleplay, where team killing is looked down on and team bickering slows play. They were able to indulge in the anti-normal roleplay and they dug it.
I have felt similar exhaustion running TOON, The Cartoon Roleplaying Game, but I've traditionally found PARANOIA a much more relaxing game to GM; the players are strongly motivated to provide the entertainment themselves, inasmuch as the usual ground rule is "Entertain or die." Thoughts?

Labels:

Posted by: Allen Varney / 2:49 PM

Comments:
I've had Paranoia groups where if I relied on the players to "entertain or die", they all would have burned through all their clones in 3 minutes :(
# posted by Anonymous Saul : April 02, 2009 10:15 AM
 
Cute one.
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : April 02, 2009 9:17 PM
 
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