High Programmer > Blog Archive > Paranoia XP Mission Blender Online
Monday, January 24, 2005

Paranoia XP Mission Blender Online

There is a new version of the venerable Paranoia RPG: Paranoia XP. The GM screen includes the "Mission Blender," a pile of tables you can roll on to generate a random mission. The resulting missions were a bit confused, but it fits the game. And it seems like a great way to brainstorm. On the down side, it can take a long time to roll through all of the tables. There are about 100 tables and you'll need to make about 60 rolls to generate a single mission. It would be nice to be able to quickly generate multiple missions while brainstorming.

Clearly a call for a computer (if not The Computer).

With the generous permission of the copyright holders, I scanned the tables in, cleaned them up, and wrote a program to roll on them. I then spent lots of time tweaking the tables to improve the readability of the results. The original tables assumed that a human being was assembling the results and could sort out ambiguity. Computers don't like ambiguity.

The resulting program is about 500 lines long. The massaged data file is about 1,500 lines.

While I can't distribute it, you can use it for free online. Bounce on reload to get insane mission after mission. It will sometimes generate non-grammatical sentences; I'll keep hacking away at them, but it's an endless fight.

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