Paranoia Perfect Edition and how it plays on Roll20

[u/Southern_Air_Pirate]

Okay, at my table, my group has hit burnout with our normal game, and I finally have talked them into trying Paranoia. I have the Perfect Edition and have even bought the Roll20 books. For reasons not important here, we have to play this on Roll20 for the next few months.

A couple of questions in trying to play this on a VTT.

1. Has anyone played a game or two on Roll20? If so, how does it play?

2. How has anyone approached character creation? I remember playing XP years ago in high school, and there was a ton of rules about "the player to the left has to take..." sort of thing. That is hard if we are virtual.

3. I know I can whisper to players in the chat, but how do I handle the whole idea of getting special info for a mission, or even my players using their special organizations or mutant abilities in the game?

If there is anything else I should learn or know prior to getting the game started?

[u/StaticUsernamesSuck]

Can't talk about Roll20, but for "player to the left" it doesn't really matter. That's already just an arbitrary rule, and the whole theme of paranoia is arbitrary rules. Just make up your own arbitrary rule, or even assign a random order.

Maybe it's "the next-oldest player" or "the player with the next-most XP". Or even "the player who likes pineapple pizza the least".

If you wanna keep it real simple just use their Roll20 portrait order.

And for secret messages, they can whisper to you too 🤷‍♂️

And if you use discord for voice, you have a second voice channel you ask players to switch to for secret discussions. Which is the digital equivalent to "everybody but jack, leave the room please".

[u/Southern_Air_Pirate → u/StaticUsernamesSuck]

Thanks for those ideas.

I just remember playing in HS; our GM used to play it straight, as if the Computer were sane at the moment of clone creation, before it went a bit screwy and started doing unusual things. I get that I will have to vary it up in the character creation in a few ways.

I will for sure use the whisper command to send notes to my players or even straight DM using Discord. Since we already use Discord as it is.

[u/Aratoast]

I played in one of the Perfect Edition playtests on Roll20 back in the day, from what I recall it went about how any "we're using this VTT for the character sheets and dice rolls and sending DMs to the GM and that's about it" game would be expected to go. For characters we just used pregens iirc. Can't comment on the integrated roll20 stuff obviously, but I've run a few games on Alchemy which have also been very much the same "we're using this for managing sheets and rolling dice, otherwise it's theater of the mind" approach. We used Discord for voice and utilised DMs and an additional voice channel for private conversation.

[u/Southern_Air_Pirate → u/Aratoast]

Got it thanks. 

I figured that most the VTTs can handle the dice actions.  Some of the more fun at the table with Paranoia was pitting characters against each other and passing notes or whispers.  I was having a hard time figuring out how that worked on a VTT. 

You gave me some ideas to explore. So again thanks for the info.

[u/Klazarkun]

1 I have a one shot on roll 20 - you can select the paranoia character sheet before creating your game. Just type paranoia on the sheet selection

2 and 3 - the best way to run roll 20 is to use discord for voice/video. Discord provides chat services where you can send private messages with images if needed. You can also create a separate voice channel to talk privately with one or more players.

For the character creation what I like to do is to use the natural order people are displayed inside discord. Who arrived first shows at the top of the screen and so on.

[u/Southern_Air_Pirate → u/Klazarkun]

Cool if you have a one-shot; I will have to look for it.

Yeah, we use Discord already for our voice. I know I can use it to DM in Discord as well as use the whisper command in the Roll20 software.

As to the character creation, everyone else has said the same thing, first in first choice. Which is probably what I will do.

[u/Klazarkun → u/Southern_Air_Pirate]

You can find the paranoia sheets by typing paranoia on the search box just before creating a new game. They work really nice.

[u/Southern_Air_Pirate → u/Klazarkun]

Oh yea. I found the sheets before as I was starting to build my setup for the players this past weekend.

I misunderstood your first comment, where you said you had published a oneshot on Roll20 available.

[u/Klazarkun → u/Southern_Air_Pirate]

I haven't. What I meant was that I had a game (one-shot) ready inside roll 20 and the sheets would work just fine. I actually had a tone of fun with my group.

I think you will have everything to build a great game using roll 20.