Paranoia: Red Clearance Edition features a great new card mechanic that allows actions, reactions, gear, and mutant powers to determine initiative order and serve as a useful rules reference. But these cards aren’t mandatory, or at least the initiative and action/reaction system isn’t. It’s a piece of cake to remove this layer and rely on the standard dice pool rules to solve everything, leaving the cards as useful reference tools (mutant powers, secret society affiliations, gear, etc.) or as an added layer only triggered at certain times.

Here’s a bunch of different ideas on how to use, abuse, or ignore the cards in Paranoia: Red Clearance Edition.

Index & House Rules

A complete index as well as a collection of house rules is featured in the Paranoia Index on Google Drive. It’s unfortunately just started at this point, but if you want the rules below in a better printable format, there you go. I’ll revise that doc when I get around to it!

Simple Initiative System

Several of these optional card systems remove the Action cards, ignore the action order found on Mutant Power and Equipment cards, or otherwise interfere with the standard rule of having a character’s turn order determined by the cards in most combat or action scenes. Therefore, these systems usually assume all actions — attacking enemies with vibroknives or lasers, dodging, punching a bot in its sensor cluster, or yanking the steering wheel so they don’t crash — are handled as basic actions.

To determine acting order without reference to the cards, use this simple initiative system:

Everybody rolls 1 dice. The person who rolled the lowest number goes first, and then the next lowest, and so on. Basically, the GM just says “1s?” and whoever rolled a 1 goes. Then they say “2s?” and whoever rolled a 2 goes. And so on, up through the number 6.

Card Options

#1 Text Only

If you have the PDFs of the game and don’t mind taking the time to strip out the text of all pertinent cards, you can simply go “cardless” for your game and reference the text dump you make for any mechanical needs. Action order — found on Action, Equipment, and Mutant Power cards — can be ignored, and a simple initiative system instituted for determining who acts in what order during a fight scene.

#2 No Cards & Simple Initiative

You can ignore Action cards altogether, and ignore the action order number on Mutant Power and Equipment cards. All actions are basic actions, and everybody uses the simple initiative system. When an action of any kind is taken, each source of advantage — terrain, lighting, high ground, researching weaknesses ahead of time, etc. — provides a +1 dice bonus. Every source of disadvantage provides a -1 dice bonus. The total of all bonuses and penalties should not modify any dice roll above +3 dice or below -3 dice.

Ignore the whole idea of Reactions.

#3 Card Chaos

Use the text-only version of Powers and Equipment as reference material, ignoring action order. Most actions are basic actions, but there are also “Scene Actions” to up the chaos factor of combat. The GM draws 1 or 2 cards per player (their decision), and places them on the table (or virtually keeps the text of them handy in whatever manner works for them). These cards are available to anyone — Player or GM character — but as soon as someone uses them (either on their turn or as a Reaction if appropriate), that card is used up.

You can use the simple initiative system or you can draw additional cards for the players to determine their initiative, and then simply discard or reshuffle the cards that aren’t being used as Scene Actions whenever you feel like it.

#4 Grit, Guts, and Moxie

Use Equipment and Mutant Power cards as reference; action order doesn’t matter. Use the simple initiative system. Action/Reaction cards only come up when the following things occur:

Whenever the Computer die comes up with a Computer symbol, an Action card is immediately drawn and the GM plays it in whatever fashion they deem most interesting (it could help the player on their next action as sort of an “I’m sorry” for whatever chaos the Computer die causes, or it can be used by an opponent against the player immediately).

If a player spends 1 Moxie to do something, the GM draws an Action card and that player gets its effects as soon as they seem applicable, in addition to whatever the character spent Moxie for.

If a player wants to do a Reaction — dodge an attack, duck behind cover, raise their reflector shields, parry a vibroknife attack with the nearest chair — the player spends 1 Moxie and automatically avoids the attack. In addition, the GM draws an Action card and plays it as soon as it seems like it would fit, in the benefit of or against the player. Alternatively, the GM can have all Reaction cards separated out and simply allow PCs to spend a Moxie and they get to play a Reaction card.

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