Yesterday I mentioned the Paranoia reboot, which is crowdfunding on Kickstarter until December 3, 2014. If you're interested in learning more about the new incarnation of the game, there's an interview on RPG.net with the three designers working on the reboot: James Wallis, Grant Howitt, and Paul Dean. There's a bit of background on the designers and their interest in Paranoia, but there's also more now about the new system, which as far as I knew was to be more streamlined and involve cards. That's...pretty much what they say in the interview, too, but with a little more detail. (In a nutshell: yes, there are cards; no, there are not only cards.)
Since developing more of an interest in the theory and process of RPG design, I've become more and more fascinated by the use of mechanics and systems to support a kind of story or the feel of a setting. This idea is illustrated nicely by this comment from James Wallis:
Cards bring all sorts of inherent mechanics about managing scarce resources, hiding and revealing information, and playing the hand you're dealt. And those, for me, are all core to what Paranoia is about.
It can't be put more plainly than that, can it?
Knowing more now about the design goals for the system, especially that the dice are still used for the core resolution mechanic and that cards are an aspect of the system additional to that, I'm even more excited about getting my hands on this new edition. If you are similarly moved, I'd recommend checking out their Kickstarter page and considering backing the project.
Fun fact: the interviewer in that RPG.net piece is Shannon Appelcline, author of the seminal work Designers & Dragons, which was just recently funded for a revival and reprint through Evil Hat Productions. It's a decade-by-decade deep dive into 40 years of the history of the role-playing game hobby, and you can rest assured that a copy of the set will be sitting on my shelf as quickly as the shipping gods can get it to me. Which, latest news indicates, should be next month for Kickstarter backers. The books are due for retail release in January of 2015. I hesitate to explore the levels of nerdery required to be so excited about a multi-volume book set on the history of tabletop role-playing games, but suffice it to say, for my purposes, the closest second to actually playing RPGs is reading about RPGs.