Paranioa, ...does it still exist? Options

[Rusted Scrap Met...]

I'm exhausted, I haven't slept in 3 days, so pardon me if this rambles a bit.

We started a new SR game about 6 months ago, using the SRII stuff we had laying around in boxes from years back. Everyone read what they thought they needed, and away we went.

Now, I'm old. Almost 40, and my wife is too. I worked in a pretty paranoid area for a long time, where Soviet intelligence knew who I was because of my job and who I was, and after the Soviet Union fell apart, we found out that there were honest to God KGB agents around where I worked and that the local control agent (who is who got rolled up) had a pretty large data compilation on all of us. I was in West Germany at the time, and I remember the posters that said such stuff as "Ivan Says Hello To Grandma!" to remind us that every phone was to be treated as if it was tapped. Where codes and locks and keycards were swapped out every 30-60 days, earlier if there was a suspected security breach.

It wasn't paranoia. They were really out to get us. My wife dealt with that kind of stuff, even though she was medical.

At the time SR came out, we were naturally paranoid just from our jobs. (Half the players and the GM worked in Military Intelligence, and 1 was a Ranger who was part of the detachment that provided security and overwatch for our unit and the MI unit, the other half were from my unit, meaning that if paranoia was an energy source, you probably could have lit up Bug City just from our gaming room) Shadowrun was perfect for us. Everyone was out to get you, and the only thing that people respected was just how bad you could hurt them if they came after you.

So, when I look at Shadowrun, when I make the characters, I immediately move back into OPSEC mode. Mission planning, research, probes, recon, the whole nine yards. During a run my character is constantly on edge, constantly keeping a lookout. The smallest detail out of place that gets noticed might move my character up a DEFCON level. My paranoia immediately returns to be manifested in my characters.

The other three players, two are in their 20's, and the other one in his early 30's. The one in his early 30's worked in a factory on an assembly line after college, so while he gets that it was a paranoid time, he wasn't immersed in it.

All of them started out snickering at my paranoia.

For example, during our very first ever run, my character comes out to find some ganger bent down looking under his Americar. Strontium Cowboy runs up, grabs the guy, slams his head against the pavement, and starts yelling "What did you put on my car? What were you doing? Who hired you!" and in general hammering this guy into mush. Everyone thought it was funny that he refused to get in his car until he checked it over for any "surprises" that the ganger might have left.

They thought it was stupid that I prepaid several months of several different lifestyles, all in different areas of Seattle, and had two fake SINs for my character. My character had gone to the point of even having different vehicles at each of the 3 different lifestyle dwellings that supported a garage. Different clothing styles, different jewelry, different vehicles, different apparent interests, stuff like that. Even to the point where he kept a chip loaded up with all the details on each of the cover identities in his pocket, so that he could avoid making simple mistakes.

They thought it was weird that I wanted to figure out who would benefit from the run, wanted to try to find out who had worked for this particular Mr. Johnson before, find out everything I could about the mission, and that while they were perfectly fine waiting in an alley for a fixer they didn't know to hand over some Grade-A Bang Bang, I wanted to do exchanges in places like wide open parks, underground parking garages, and stuff like that, always being careful to make sure that if I couldn't have the upper hand, nobody else could either. I had no problems with blind drops, codewords, phased or staged drops, etc.

Every time we did a run, I assumed that the opposing side had knowledge that we were on our way, had hired a team of runners to target us, or had put security on us, that we not only had to pull off the mission, but avoid getting the full weight of the target to drop on us.

Then, I started reading these boards awhile back, and started wondering...

Is the paranoia still as prevalent in the newer editions as it is back in SRI and SRII? Is it a way of life?

Is the fact that the players stay in the shadows the reason they still live? Are the shadows still as deep and dark as I picture them? Is everyone still out to screw each other over for the slightest bit of profit margin or to wrest that corner office away from a departmental competitor? Would Lone Star still hire Runners to frag over Hard Corps Security in order to paint Hard Corps as a bunch of incompetents? Would a Corp suit still hire the runners to act as bodyguards because Sam up in Personnel controls the Corp bodyguards and Sam's little brother Paul has his eye on Mr. Johnson's corner office?

To me, Shadowrun is a product of the Late 80's, a very very paranoid time. (Just ask some of our German forum members just how paranoid it was) Yeah, the 1980's styles are back for dress (of course, styles just come back around every 20 years or so, so that isn't too unrealistic) and all of that, but the 1980's paranoia should still be there.

However, one of the new players can't seem to wrap his head around the fact that because the Soviet Union didn't fall apart until the 2030's, and even then, it became the Soviet DisUnion rather than the Russian Republic (and all the horrifying projections of what might come out of the collapse of the Soviet Union seem to be Shadowrun reality, rather than just worst case scenarios) and how that, combined with the Balkanization of the world and the struggle of the governments against the Megacorps, create a very real Cold War attitude for Shadowrun.

Or, am I just being overly paranoid? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

(This rant and rambling BS brought to you by too little sleep)