There's a lot of cognitive load to running Paranoia I wasn't fully prepared for when I came up with the idea to run a one-shot. Making all the secret society missions, plus the regular mission and its complication, it's a lot to handle in a way I don't think I could run this game frequently.
Any tips/hints/suggestions for running Paranoia?
ok so a couple folks shared the post above to try and provide aid, sadly no one answered but in appreciation for their attempt I thought I'd do my best to talk about the two sessions of Paranoia I ran and the lessons I learned. This was the Red Clearance Starter Set from 2017, and it uses Action cards to facilitate combat if that jogs your memory. I was at a cottage and we totalled 14 folks, and there was enough interest to run a first group of 6 and a second group of 4 without any repeat players.
Mission Prepping
I made no conscious decisions on who got what Secret Society, Bonus Duty, or Mutant Power when handing out the cards or prepping.
The primary mission was to make a cake or dessert for Friend Computer's Programming Day (after exterminating the pests in the kitchen), with secondary objectives to make decorations and set off the fireworks. This was a really straightforward mission both for the primary mission and everyone's secret society missions, which are a lot and can add a lot of time to a session if they're far enough from the primary mission. that's why everyone's most important mission was to make sure the cake was a certain flavour, or ruined, or replaced with a 'superior dessert'. I prepped 7 missions for each of the 7 secret societies which was an unnecessary amount for a one-shot, so while the first group members all got the full 7, the second group members only got the real important 4 secret society missions. The three I cut were the same for all 7 secret societies, which were 'recruit someone, 'don't get caught', and 'whatever else you think they'd want you to do and is funny'. In hindsight, these weren't that interesting compared to the 4 custom to each of the prepped secret societies.
The second group's members were more successful in achieving their Secret Missions, so I'd say less missions are probably better since it allows players to focus on a few important ones, but they were also a smaller party of 4 rather than 6 so that might also have impacted things.
I didn't do Bonus Duty missions, but thankfully everyone got into their role without needing missions, so I feel pretty good about not prepping those. A lot of folks used them to argue for why they should do actions related to their Secret Society missions, so they were still useful additions. I made sure the group had a team leader, equipment officer, happiness officer, and a loyalty officer, and the group with two more players had a combat officer and science/hygiene officer. I think those first four are the most important to an interesting 'party dynamic'.
Combat
Figuring out the initiative order and how combat works took a little work even with the book, but it wasn't super important because I treated Action cards as something you could do whenever, even outside of combat. I'm fairly sure that's not as written, but I don't think the game would have been nearly as good without them changing non-combat situations.
I did have to slow down my countdown (at one point drinking some water) for folks to get their cards in the middle, but that was mainly because players were tired rather than taking too long to decide, and it was better to let everyone take a turn in the round rather than deprive them of that. The countdown is probably just best used as a tool for speeding up gameplay.
NPCs are supposed to go whenever the narrative calls for it, as the DM decides, but it never felt like that because the NPCs weren't doing anything nearly as interesting as the players were. That might have been a lack of prep problem, or maybe the action cards are simply too good?, so NPCs were pushovers in both missions. Personally, I don't mind, because the rest of the gameplay time more than made up for it in humour and player choice.
Gags / Jokes
I had the second group's mission occur two 'cycles' (days) after the others, so the results of the first mission affected what was available to the second's mission (The first group used the only vanilla flavour packet, so the second group had to contend with that), which was really funny since most of the first session's players were a room over playing a different board game, and it was nice to see them slowly realize I was in fact running the same mission twice, but they're choices and actions affected the second group. This led to: a radioactive crater, the judges of Great British Baking show appearing as radiated mutants, and a general lack of useful equipment. The second group took this in good stride.
For R&D equipment, the first group only took a single item: A Nuclear Hand Grenade (NHG). They were supposed to learn that R&D equipment works poorly / are mostly puns / or work horrificly well with the rest of the equipment before the NHG worked perfectly. Sadly this was not meant to be, so I played up the R&D importance to the second group, and they took five things which they used far more liberally. Notably, both trusted the R&D equipment to work for their 'Set Off Fireworks' mission, so both ended their missions in a classic Paranoia explosion.
Brief Aside: This group is mostly engineers who were part of a school club, and so I had a lot of workable material from their real lives to turn into terrible R&D equipment. For example, they had built a rover named Waldo that I turned into R&D equipment they could take, but as soon as everyone looked away from it, it would disappear without a trace.
Interpersonal Conflict
I really wanted to see some PvP in these sessions, or at least a little screwing each other over and got a tiny bit. I realized in the second session I was much more comfortable with players hurting each other with physical violence than manipulation because it felt like violence was straightforward and left the other player with more agency than if they were convinced to think a different way by a good Charm roll. I became a little uncomfortable as a result in the middle of the second session, but we we're able to talk it through so everyone had agency, though it did make me reassess if I truly wanted PvP after all. I had only imagined cartoon violence before this moment, and anyone killed would come back as a fresh clone. I hadn't considered the player behind the character enough.
Overall
I would run Paranoia with a reckless disregard for the Action card system's intention again, but maybe with a party with better-aligned secret society missions to prevent manipulative infighting. I would write fewer missions, and continue to make them tightly related to the core mission. I would have a hard time making more R&D equipment, and would likely hand out 1-2 items per party to make what I do come up with last more missions.