Character Creation: Paranoia Ultraviolet Edition

Happy Boxing Day, citizen. 

The Game: Paranoia Ultraviolet Edition
The Publisher: Mongoose Publishing
Degree of Familiarity: I've played and run an earlier edition, but not this one
Books Required: Just the one

Paranoia has gone through a few incarnations. I played the version from West End Games, and then Mongoose put out another edition that I never read or played, and now here we are. 

The game itself is very much like the version I'm familiar with; I know that a previous Mongoose edition broke game-play styles into Classic (as the game was originally intended) or Straight (taking everything a bit more seriously?) but this is pretty unabashedly Classic, which is what I'd prefer anyway. 

Ultraviolet Edition updates the tech, including allowing the Computer to download stuff into your brain and show retinal displays. The term "commie" is also replaced with "terrorist," which makes sense. Character creation is meant to be a group affair, with people taking positive skill values at the expense of making another player take negative ones, which is very much in-theme. As I have no group, however, I shall have to use the solo chargen rules (usually employed when one has run through all of one's clones and needs to make a new character). 

The game box includes dry-erase character sheets, which is just smart in a game that involves killing off characters frequently (and is why I did something similar with curse the darkness). 

ANYWAY. I need to read the GM book, but I don't need to do that to make a character, so here we go. (And in doing this I realized that I never got or never downloaded the PDFs, DAMMIT. Hope someone is still monitoring the Kickstarter account.)

OK, so. I start out by giving my Troubleshooter a name, a gender, and three adjectives to make up his personality. The name follows the traditional formula of [name]-[clearance]-[sector]-[clone number]. My Troubleshooter is name Hype-R-BOL-1. He's male, and his adjectives are curious, upbeat, and clean. 

Next, I assign Skills. I get to assign values of -5, -4, -3, -2, -1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Everything else gets a 0. 

OK, sure. So what do I want to suck at? OK, let's put the -5 in Intimidate (just far too cheery to be scary). -4 into Throw, because I like the idea of him not being able to hit the broad side of a barn. -3 into Psychology (how do people?), -2 into Demolitions (BOOM), and -1 into Science (boom?). 

On the plus side, I'll put the 5 into Bureaucracy (I do like filling out forms, and these were some doozies!), 4 into Alpha Complex, 3 into Charm, 2 into Engineer, and 1 into Athletics. Guns, Melee, Bluff, Stealth, Operate, and Program all get 0. 

Stats: We total up the number of positive scores in each skill category (1 in Violence, 2 in Brains, 2 in Chutzpah, and 1 in Mechanics), and then shift them one to the right. That gives me Violence 1, Brains 1, Chutzpah 2, Mechanics 2. 

Now I can spend Moxie to increase Skills, but eh. I kinda like the idea of being really well put together, at least initially. I'll stick with my full Moxie score.

Normally the GM would pick one of my adjectives and invert it, but as I have no GM I will risk treason and pick one randomly. Rolling a d3, I get to flip "upbeat" to "downbeat" (though I think "pessimistic" might be a better way to say it). 

And then the GM would give, potentially, a mutant power and/or secret society card. Again, no GM, so let's just do it myself! 

My mutant power is Electroshock - I can release a zap that stuns bots and hurts people. My secret society is Death Leopard! That's actually perfect; DLs are all about finding a good time and then breaking it, and you could do a pretty good lightshow with Electroshock. My character's generally pessimistic attitude means he might be more on the emo side of things, but that's fine. 

And that about does it, actually. I have a red jumpsuit and a red laser, but anything else would be at the Computer's discretion. I like to think that Hype keeps himself so clean because he's actually inclined to let his freak flag fly and his hair stand on end, and he's overcompensating.