Recycling Management

Classic Management Specialties

Leafing through classic missions from bygone PARANOIA, pregenerated characters sport several skills that have fallen into disuse. Given the current system offers such flexible possibilities for expansion, gamemasters can still utilize these skills to fill out character development and background. While current Management specialties already offer huge potential for distraction, confusion and verbal disorientation, you should never underestimate the fresh possibilities for pulling the wool of people’s eyes (or bot’s photoreceptors).

Skill Specialty

Motivation

Simple Description: Turn a burdensome task into an energized opportunity of considerable apparent benefit to the target.

A motivator extracts the essential benefits and rewards of a situation, no matter how minuscule they might be, and convinces the target that the successful resolution of the situation represents an ideal of great benefit to them. The motivator reinforces the beneficial and desirable aspects of the conclusion of the task, enforcing them as adequate balance to whatever hardships and difficulties might lie in between.

When the motivator tries to convince someone to do something, make a secret Motivation check. Success means that the target buys-in to the motivators take on the task and sets to it with enthusiasm and purpose, though such energy might be short lived if the task happens to be truly onerous or the success particularly marginal. While a small success could sell someone on the benefits of form filling, shovelling raw sewage or engaging in live ammo testing (as moving target) would require a more substantial success margin.

Failure means that commonsense holds sway and the target does not believe a single word of the motivator’s rhetoric. If the motivation was just to get some pointless forms filled out, the target will refuse to do it. If the request was more dubious or potentially treasonous, the motivator may find they now face potential blackmail or the possibility of late night visits by Internal Security.

Motivation tends to work best focussed on individuals of equal or lower Clearance.

Narrow Specialty

Confuse [Bot] with Spurious Logic

Simple Description: Disable a [specific bot-type] by making it calculate pi to several million decimal places and then multiplying the result by The Computer’s shoe size.

Application of spurious logic depends on the basic assumption that bots will always seek to serve and handle requests following the most logical route to a targeted conclusion. Rather than think a question through and decide that pursuing a conclusion would simply waste time, they seek an answer with unswerving logic and loyalty, possibly resulting in a self-destructive loop.

You may ask the player to describe the sort of question or calculations requested and then make a secret check against the narrow specialty – or just make the check if you feel particularly generous. Success means that the bot falls for the trick and becomes inactive or unproductive – running around in tight circles or muttering ‘Does not compute’ while flashing lights and releasing worrying puffs of smoke. Failure puts the bot on the back foot, delivering a prompt response that the request does not make sense, questioning the characters intentions and possibly alerting the local Computer subnode that a query has been raised that the bot cannot handle personally, which might warrant the attention of a higher authority with greater potential computing power. The Troubleshooter may want to find somewhere to hide at this point, or perhaps feign a troublesome head wound that might be impairing recent judgment.

A Troubleshooter cannot use Spurious Logic on a bot with disabled or missing asimov circuits, nor will it work on The Computer. The narrow specialty must be attuned to a particular class of bot – e.g. Docbot, Jackobot, Transbot.

(thanks to Allen V. and Saulres for the notes on ‘narrowing’ this narrow)