Troika is Trash

Originally posted on December 17, 2021.

Over in an RPG-focused group on Facebook, someone asked about a slew of games, one of which was Mork Borg. I posted my very in-depth review, and among the various conversations that trickled in, someone brought up Troika. Well, most of the games were brought up at one point or another, but Troika stood out because someone claimed that it was similar to both Spelljammer and Planescape.

I don’t really care for and know much about the former (D&D in fantasy space, I suppose), but I did play a lot of the latter in the 90s, and while I haven’t used the books in decades for anything beyond some ideas for other stuff I’ve worked on, I decided to check it out.

Not because I wanted to see how someone else might take the concept of ubiquitous planar travel and expand on it, rework it, give it some sort of innovative twist. Oh no, no no no. Just look at the cover:

Just look at it. Lazy. Sloppy. Amateur. Worse, it only serves to convey a lack of vision. Of creativity. Not merely a lack of passion, but caring in general. Seeing the entirety of the cover doesn’t help, either:

Complete RPG my ass.

What’s with the guy on the left? What’s he doing? Whistling? What’s with this arms? See how stunted they are? Is he wearing scale armor? Why are all the scales different colors? Why does it barely go down to his stomach? What’s with the noodles coming out of his head?

And the thing next to him: see the right hand? Look how big and meaty is is compared to everything else? Why is the sword shaped like that? And then you have the robot leading them: what is it doing? Are they supposed to be sneaking? Is the robot jumping? 

If you were to just see that picture, what would you assume the game is about? Lumpy, ugly things talking to stupidly designed robots?

I’ve read the book, so I know what it’s about. Or rather, what it was supposed to be about. What it could have been about. But I knew what I was getting into from the cover alone: pretentious, gimmicky, postmodern trash shoveled out by a lazy, untalented narcissist that really loves the phrase "humpbacked sky".

I’m not sure whether it disappointed me. Not because it's bad. I knew it would be, but because I'm not sure whether it exceeded my lack of expectations.

First off, it's not like either Spelljammer or Planescape. It mentions portals, and crystal spheres, and "golden-sailed barges", but they are never described in any capacity. How to the portals work? What do they look like? Do they need "keys", as in Planescape?

Up to you.

How big are the "golden-sailed barges"? How much do they cost? How durable are they? How fast do they travel?

Also entirely up to you.

My charitable assumption would be that whoever said that has never played in either campaign settings, and at best heard about them from a friend of a friend, and assumed that Spelljammer only mentioned the magical flying ships, but never detailed them, and the same goes for Planescape and portals. But those campaign settings did, in extensive detail.

Troika just tosses the terms about, not caring if the readers would want to know the basics. Or perhaps the author knows his audience, that they don't really give a fuck, or are so stupid that they won't even realize that some very, very obvious questions go unanswered. Or maybe he knows that they aren't going to play it, anyway, and just churn out equally awful adventures, supplements, and pointlessly derivative "hacks".

Speaking of hacks, I didn't know at first that this is a rip-off of Fighting Fantasy, a series of choose your own adventure books that actually features a combat mechanic and an inventory. I can only imagine that the author settled on this because d20 has been overdone, and in so many insipid iterations, and there was no way he could compete. That and because he didn't want to put in too much work, despite actual roleplaying games permitting actual freedom and creativity.

Not to say you couldn't. You could take the base mechanic--largely roll-under 2d6--and flesh it out, ensure that it can survive player contact, but unsurpringly that's not what happened here. Sure, it tells you how to hit things, how to inflict damage, what to do if something tries to hit you (and succeeds), but what if you want to, say, buy some food? Adventurer's gotta eat, right?

Well, maybe not, as while the effects of eating food are described--by which I mean lifted from Fighting Fantasy--their cost is not. Likewise for the effects of hunger and starvation. So, really, by the book food just serves to heal you an arbitrary three times per day (Fighting Fantasy differs in that there is no per-day limit). Good to know, I guess.

Maybe you want to buy a donkey or horse to carry your...well, I suppose starting gear, as there are no tables for treasure. The term treasure is written four times throughout the entire book (less than "humpbacked sky"), but the only actual example is in the godawful adventure shoehorned in the back, where you can attempt to steal a bauble worth 2d6 pence.

Just as well: some of the "classes" can start with one, but name aside there is no cost, description, or statistics for any pack animal.

There's a page and a half devoted to gear (a quarter page is eaten up by trash art), but none of it is essential, and none of it has a price. Knuckle dice are made from the knuckle bones of goblins, and "make excellent two sided dice" but fuck if the book tells you the cost, and it's not like anyone needed to know how much a torch costs. Or what it does.

Oh, but there's a tea set, which grants +1 Etiquette when you sit with something and try to impress them. Again, no price, but surely that makes up for not even mentioning rope, rations, lanterns, oil, you know, all that "normal", not lol-so-random stuff adventurers would actually need cart along.

Purely for the sake of being thorough, might as well go through character generation, such as it is.

To create a character you roll for several stats, record some equipment that isn't explained, and then roll on a background table that doesn’t exist. Instead of a twenty-sider, or even a percentile, it goes with a gimmicky “d66” thing, where you roll 2d6, with one being the ones and the other beings the tens, so really there are only 37 try-hard results.

None of them are interesting, or possess mechanics that support the flavor. For example, there's the Ardent Giant of Corda. You’re a giant, I suppose, though there’s no indication of how big you are, and what benefits and drawbacks your size affords. You start with a star map though, which lets you tell where a given portal goes assuming you pass the requisite skill check.

This sounds more useful than it is, because as has been mentioned nothing about portals are explained or described. So, have fun with that.

The next background is Befouler of Ponds. You are supposed to minister ponds for an unexplained Toad God, so no idea why you would go anywhere, but you can. You can befoul no ponds at all and nothing bad happens. In fact, you could actively clean a pond, wiping out any insects, frogs, toads, etc, and nothing bad would happen. It's not like you have any spells or special abilities that could be revoked.

You start with smelly robes that make it easy to sneak in swamps, harder elsewhere, but you can just take them off so there’s really no downside. For some reason your wooden ladle is equally as effective as a mace. I think this is just here to make easily impressed dumbasses go "Oh, wow, a ladle as a mace! Oh man can you imagine that!" You can drink stagnant liquid without getting sick, something that has never, ever come up in my 20+ years of gaming.

Burglar is next on the list. Your only background-specific ability is that you can test your Luck to “find and get in with the local criminal underbelly”. If one exists, of course. So, no need to roleplay. Just roll Luck. Like a lazy DM letting you try a single Charisma-based check in an actual RPG to find and buddy up with a thieves guild.

Of course, you might be a Cacogen, which has no unique-if-underwhelming feature. Just some gear and skills that anyone could have, including Golden Barge Pilot. You know, if you find one. Then you can roll for...what, exactly? What does a failed pilot check mean? Do you just not go anywhere? Run into something? Is there a lot of stuff between the crystal spheres for you to crash into? How long does it take to travel from sphere to sphere? Does it matter? There's no random encounter table, or drawbacks for not eating food.

Here's the entire page for it:

This is all classes, mind you. This is all that goes into them. This is what you're paying for: bad art, a gear and skill list, and flowery, pretentious description. 

The last one I’ll touch on is the Chaos Champion, so-called because once per day (gotta love those arbitrary, nonsense limitations) you can try call upon your patron. You have to roll three 6s on 3d6, so good luck with that, and it’s entirely up to the GM to determine the results. The best part is? There’s no requirement that you even need to ever do anything to benefit your patron in any way. It’s pure lip service, like everything millennial pretend to care about.

Imagine if Dungeons & Dragons phoned it in this blatantly. Imagine you had to roll for your class, but the only difference between a fighter and rogue is gear. Gear that the rogue could just as easily get (assuming there was an actual equipment list and treasure to be had, of course). But then imagine that the rogue gets a largely useless ability on the side. And then imagine that the only difference between the fighter, rogue, and cleric is that the cleric can try to “call upon” his god once per day, albeit with a ridiculously low chance of success.

Two are at least marginally better than the others, but frankly they all suck. You don’t need to pay someone to come up with such pathetic concepts like the monkeymonger, who is basically a completely normal guy that starts with 1d6 monkeys. He is objectively inferior to any actual class from an actually complete role-playing game that buys at least one monkey before the game starts.

This is not the bare minimum. The bare minimum is to set it up so that every class, concept, background, archetype, whatever the fuck you want to call it, all of them have something meaningful that differentiates them from the others. Something that can't simply be picked or bought.

Even if you give the fighter +1 to hit, reflecting skill with weapons, the thief +1 to steal, the cleric a once per day heal, and a wizard a once per day +1 to, well, anything, reflecting the I guess broad utility of his magic, that would still be utterly fucking pathetic, because those are so barebones that anyone could easily conceive of them.

But it would still be better than Troika. 

Really though, after trash like Mork Bog and Sharp Spells I’m not surprised. This is about the quality I’d expected: swaths of white space, post modern art, and pointless, stupid mechanics blatantly ripped off from a choose your own adventure book series. All to fuel some so-called designer’s ego.

A bunch of pages later and we arrive at Rules. I know I’m at Rules because in the upper left-hand cover it just says The Rules, with absolutely no visual cue that you’ve transition from one section to another.

Here we learn that you only ever roll d6s, usually 2d6. The gimmick here is that you want to Roll Under, which isn’t accurate because you can also succeed by rolling the target number. The stupid part, well, the other stupid part, is that you might have to Roll Versus, in which case you and an opponent roll 2d6, add modifiers, and try to roll higher than the other.

Stamina is your hit points. It doesn’t tell you how combat works until much later, but going to 0 Stamina means that you either die randomly during combat, or some undefined length of time out of combat: it just says “your friends have one opportunity to Heal you”, but doesn’t explain what this means: a few seconds? A minute? A few minutes?

You regain 2d6 Stamina by resting, or 1d6 by eating something. So...someone is dying? Eat a sandwhich. Going off of Skyrim logic, here. Well, not quite, as I mentioned before you can arbitrarily only eat three things a day to heal. Why so? If you’re going to permit utterly nonsense mechanics, why not go all the way?

When combat breaks out you “assemble the stack”, which is also misleading because you really throw tokens or something into a bag or other container, and then draw them out randomly to see who goes when. Characters get two tokens, monsters get equal to their Initiative stat. There’s also an end of round token, meaning rounds taken a random amount of time. Doesn’t make any sense, but then neither does gobbling down a pie to somehow heal your wounds.

The retarded rationale is that a randomized Turn length adds a “degree of uncertainty”, where you never know how much time you have left. What makes it somehow stupider is that goblins have “few” Tokens because they are cowardly, while dragons have many because they know what they want.

Even though they could just not act for one or more rounds. Unlikely, but possible. And even if players know what they want, they just get two. They’re just slightly less cowardly and uncertain than goblins, I guess. All of them. 

The encumbrance system is basically the same dumbass design that’s been done to death, where you can only carry x items, in this case twelve. Would you be surprised that “small items” only take up one slot, unless you have a lot, and that what counts as a lot is up to the group? What about “large items” taking up two slots? It’s just worse because this value cannot be changed: doesn’t matter if you’re a human or giant, everyone gets twelve slots.

Oh but it’s not done, yet. As part of a tremendously retarded rules gimmick, the order you write them on the list determines also how easy they are to get, because the game presumes that for no discernible reason your character just somehow stacks everything in one or more packs (even if you don't own any). And that it is impossible to put two items on the same "layer" when packing anything.

Rigging stuff on belts, so it’s easy to get? Nope. Using scabbards? Come on, that’s sooo standard role-playing game logic. In Troika we just dump everything in a pack (which isn't described anywhere in the book), and it magically gets arranged in a specific top-down order. Even if the stuff you're carrying couldn't possibly fit in a backpack. Even if you sew side pouches and such onto your pack.

Why is the order important? Because, if you look through your bags that, again, aren't described anywhere in the book, and only a couple "classes" even start with, you have to roll 2d6 and try to get that item's place or higher in your list. What makes this dumber is that you can roll 1d6 and put that many things down, regardless of placement.

You can also drop 2d6 different items on the ground, though magically they are always broken or somehow last. Maybe they just clip through the world, like a badly coded video game.

Monsters have a single stat, Skill, which covers everything they want to do. So a lizardman uses his Skill 8 for stabbing you, sneaking around, running, climbing, gambling, feminist gender studies slam poetry, everything. Because it was too hard to just give all of 36 monsters some variety.

The stat blocks, if you can call them that, have a table for a "mien", which essentially means behavior (the author is just trying to sound smarter than he is). Each table has six results, and they're just one word like paranoid, smug, or hungry and so don't really add anything. Here's an example of one:

So, what, all trolls are just guards? Of what? Of where? What do they look like? Who is hiring them? And, yes, why? If they're just lazy assholes, what's the point? Or, is this an attempt to be humorous? Because, if so, it's as flat as the implied setting. 

It finally wraps up with an atrocious "adventure", in which you apparently decide to stay at a hotel for no particular reason (you're just there and really need the room), but there's only one room available, and are essentially railroaded into trying to get there. I guess you get what you pay for, which is nothing, because no prices are mentioned. You're also encouraged to attend the "Feast of the Chiliarch", which isn't described at all.

There's a bar where you can buy a "dizzying array of exotic pickled vegetables", none of which are described of course, but only sells one type of alcoholic beverage, presumably because the author couldn't be bothered to write "a dizzying array of exotic alcoholic beverages". As with everything else, no prices are mentioned.

Really it's a bunch of random nonsense with no larger point or purpose. You eventually get to your room, or don't, and if you bother to go to the nondescript party can "mingle" to roll on a table to see what other stupid lolsorandom mission you can do, next, like investigate where two brothers got "paper hats of scandalous style and unknown origin", or investigate why some street has been overrun by stray cats.

Yeah, this sounds just like Planescape. Personally we went plane-hopping, going to other places like the Outlands, the heavens, hells, Mechanus, but no, delivering a sausage roll to a lamassu (this is one of the options on the table) is just as interesting, exciting, and rewarding, and not at all lolsorandom.