I guess we'll never know how old that bread is.

Don't you have to eat the stale bread before you can touch the fresh bread?

But... it's not stale. It's fermented.

Mmmm... yeasty goodness.

I usually avoid the bread-type foods in favor of more of the main dish.

Now you've made me hungry--- SO I WILL EAT YOU ALL!!!

Jokes on you.  Beholder tastes awful!  :)

(For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Paranoia is a dystopian science fiction roleplaying game where the darkness of settings like "1984" meets the whacky humor of the likes of Douglas Adams.  All the players play clones who are paranoid that they will be turned in to "The Computer" for treason and executed.  They are Troubleshooters who try to fix problems designated by The Computer, which missions are assigned to them with no regard to whether they will survive or not.)

In my Paranoia game, I just had the Troubleshooters run into some cyborg flowers in an AWOL biodome.  The flowers had faces and mouths, but all they could do was insult the Troubleshooters.  (Imagine the scene where King Arthur is constantly insulted by the French in Monty Python's Holy Grail.)  They were protected by cyborg bees with sword-like stingers.

Some of the insults were memorable, if silly, such as:

One flower says in response, "Is your name Laryngitis because you're a pain in the neck...er, stem?"

Another says, "Clones with cameras are compensating for other areas of deficiency."

Yet another says, "I bet your puny clone brain feels as good as new, seeing that you don't use it."

"Clones are living proof of reincarnation. No one could possibly get to be so stupid in just one lifetime."

"You should have been decanted in the Dark Ages; you clones look terrible in the light."
"And this one's a couplet short of a sonnet."
"A vacuum-tube brain in a microchip world."
"He must be afraid he'll void his clone warranty if he thinks too much."

"Your human ancestors came looking for bananas, didn't they?" a flower quips, starting up the insults again.
"You must have a leaky sunroof."
"You must come from spliced genes."
"Neanderthal brains in Cro-Magnon bodies."

Unfortunately, they got past the flowers before I could get more insults thrown at them.

How to make the starter: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/a...dship-bread-starter/
Pretty much the same as beginning any sourdough bread starter.

I've never really understood the point of Paranoia or how to play it.  Thanks for the explanation. :)

Paranoia is a well designed game for people who have a sense of dark humor and don't want overly complicated rules.  It has an interesting traitor accusation method to see if you successfully accuse another player of treason or not.

It also has "perversity points," which are points (up to 5) that you can use to affect any roll that is about to take place (for yourself or others, to help your teammates or hurt them).  And there are many secrets each player has that, if found out, would result in a finding of treason.  Not the least of which is that each character has an illegal mutation power.

I'm in a game where my character saw a symbol and I, the player, recognize the symbol but my character doesn't, and probably no other player recognizes it either (it's pretty esoteric).  I think I'm just going to ignore my personal knowledge, since the GM might have a completely different meaning behind the symbol, although my player knowledge may suggest avenues of exploration that I and my character possibly might not have thought of with only in-game knowledge.

That's the problem with metaknowledge.  Ignore the elephant in the room?  No problem.  But when planning a road trip of 2,000 miles, when it's pointed out that you are going to be passing close by some tourist attraction that you hadn't heard of (and the attraction is explained), and you're deciding whether or not to stop there now, it's hard to decide whether or not you would have noticed it and if you had noticed it whether or not you would have chosen to stop there if someone else hadn't pointed it out to you.  If you do stop there, maybe you would have anyway.  If you decide not to stop there, maybe you wouldn't have anyway.  Either way, how can you be certain?

I did a similar thing in my game.  Being fluent in Japanese, I wrote the "foreign tongue" in Japanese symbols so that I would understand it (and not forget later on what it meant) but the others couldn't until they later had it translated.

Unbeknownst to me, one of the people there spoke at least some Japanese, but I don't think he metagamed much.

Sounds like what occasionally happens here.  Players leave 'private' notes to themselves.

Yeah, I create a "DM's Corner" thread in a private thread with all the secrets I don't want to forget.  Unfortunately, one time I accidentally placed a couple players in that private group...

Were they honest and tell you of your mistake?  Or did they just suddenly have inexplicable insight into your plans and schemes?

I don't know.  I caught it within a couple of weeks, and one of the players affected was effectively ousted by the other players anyway not long afterward, so it was probably fine.

The worst part was probably putting in motivations for my secret NPC's (those who appear to players as actual PCs until their motivations come out).  I always have one or more of them in a group.

As a player, knowing that would have ruined the fun

But of course, by now those NPCs are all long gone and any secrets are ancient history...literally, since they went through the time space continuum...

Travels in time and space?  Too cool for school

Actually, they went back in time, so they are now creating the history that they were reading about in the ancient scrolls prior to them accidentally putting events into place that destroyed the world.

So, if they read the scrolls, they should have some inkling as to what you throw at them next?

I still drop by and read your "ADnD 2nd - The Adventurers' Lounge" every so often, Heath.  I just really don't like ADnD as a system.  The game itself has some nice stories though. :)

Bart, I'd invite you to come and poke around in my other games but well... I don't have any.

In reply to Bart (msg # 160):

I could always reintroduce Va'a...  He never technically died.

I've been playing 2nd edition from the 80s, so it's the one that comes naturally to me, especially to DM it.

I'm thinking of making a game myself... it's about hackers who get trapped in a virtual reality world and will be free form. you guys should totes play,  yknow, once i make it...