Books I Read In ’23: Part 4—RPGs
Paranoia (2023)
Everyone knows (at least) one of those people that are not themselves funny, but love something funny a little too much, which they can–and do—quote at length. In my age cohort, this was always Monty Python, or The Princess Bride, or Ghostbusters. People who’ve replaced having an actual sense of humor with memorizing the Dead Parrot Sketch or something, and as you listen to them shouting “Spam, Spam, Eggs, and Spam” for the umpteenth time, you think to yourself, wait, was this ever funny? Because they don’t really know what made it funny, and so they can’t themselves replicate it, and drained of the performance, there’s nothing really there.
The new edition of Paranoia is like that. The authors love Paranoia—LOVE IT—but can’t seem to actually convey whats so great about it. It’s page after page of the authors directly saying “this is the funniest thing ever wowee” without actually getting to anything, you know, funny?
Making this worse, they seem vaguely aware that “satire” is a thing, but don’t know what that means or how to do it. Mostly this is because they don’t have a take, they aren’t satirizing anything specific, just sort of vaguely gesturing that dystopias are bad? The back cover blurb ends with: “And here it is, a brand-new edition for the modern world. Surely there is nothing happening these days worthy of satire, right?” But… there’s nothing in here that does that? There’s plenty of targets from the current era, but the game sticks to enervated versions of the stuff that was there back in the early 80s. Even the core joke, that Friend Computer was so determined to fend off Communism that it built a perfect communist society, seems to have blown past them.
The result is a zombie, Paranoia-shaped game that just leans into the slapstick, “it’s funny when the players kill each other” parts. And yes it is, but that’s not the whole game, guys.
Of course, the memory cheats, so I dug out my copy of the original first edition Paranoia, and yep, that still slaps. That’s written by people with a Take, a solidly anti-Reagan/Thatcher satire with things to say. Friend Computer says to keep playing the original, citizen. Maybe it’s okay for some art to stay in its time, and not get a “brand-new edition”.
Kitty Noir
My kids aged out of Magical Kitties Save the Day basically the exact moment it was released, which was a bummer, because it’s a really neat younger-kids focused RPG. I happily backed the kickstarter for Kitty Noir, their film noir/golden age science fiction setting, hoping it would give me a way to age up the material a little. Spoiler: not so much.
Like all Magical Kitties books, it has the format of a kid’s picture book, with gorgeous art and great layout and design. The contents are a fun pastiche of film noir tropes while keeping them safe for an under-ten crowd. My one complaint is that its a little thin content-wise, there isn’t much here that you couldn’t freestyle after binging Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep, just to pick two random movies I can see from where I’m sitting.
Still, it’s a fun expansion to a fun game.
If I Were A Litch, Man by Lucian Kahn
It’s a box with three Jewish-themed RPGs. In the first—“If I Were A Litch, Man—you play a group of litches arguing about best way to defend the community from rampaging paladins. The second—“Same Bat Time, Same Bat Mitzva“—takes place at a Bat Mitzva party where one of the guests is turning into a vampire. The third—“Grandma’s Drinking Song”—is a singing game about a family of bootleggers during prohibition. They’re all amazing.
That said, there’s this new generation of extremely rules-light narrative/improv-heavy games that I really, really like, but do not know how to play. I don’t mean that in some kind of facetious “needs moar maths!” way, I mean I read the book and go “wow, that’s the coolest damn thing, but I genuinely don’t know what to do here.” Not a bad thing, to be clear! I’m glad the drama kids found our hobby and rescued us from the applied maths dorks, I just have a lot to unlearn. Back when I was in junior high, the cutting edge of RPG design was THAC0. I’m riven with jealousy that the kids today instead get things like this.
I Have The High Ground by Jess Levine
Few things have made me feel more old than the fact that this game is called “I have the high ground”, and not “I am not left-handed.”
It describes itself as “a collaborative two-player dueling game of banter, posturing, and capes” and so it is. But it’s not a fencing game—this covers the banter and drama before things get physical. Each match ends with weapons being drawn and the “real fight” starting. While the title obviously invokes Episode III, the Star War it most closely matches is the duel at the end of Return of the Jedi; if you’re playing this game right, every session ends with two lightsabers igniting and slamming into each other while the Emperor cackles.
The mechanics are, well, they’re rock-paper-scissors, but they’re used to shape the insults, baits, goads, and reparte as the two players score, basically, “making the other player mad” points. It’s only barely a “game” from a classic TTRPG sense, but it’s an absolutely amazing improv drama set of prompts. You probably couldn’t convince the other kids in the jr high Magic: the Gathering club to play this, but you probably could get the drama club to play this every week. Really fun.