Guest Post: Daniel Sell

My recent post on Fighting Fantasy was prompted by the role-playing game Troika!, which incorporates some Fighting Fantasy game mechanics.  However, Troika is not a retroclone.  It includes interesting rules for initiative.  Also, a d66 is used to determine a character's background.  (Optionally, a background may be chosen.)  Example backgrounds include 'Sorcerer of the Academy of Doors', 'Poorly Made Dwarf', and 'Sceptical Lammasu'.  An “artless edition” of Troika is available on a pay-what-you-want basis at RPGNow.

Anyway, I asked author Daniel Sell to write a guest post about Troika.  I suggested he might want to address the creative decisions he made regarding the game.  What follows is his submission:

Troika is the inevitable hospice of a tired mind. Exhausted from having to opine and comprehend, the mind rests in a comfortable bed in a room full of doors and corridors and trap doors and other doors but no windows. From the vantage point of the bed it watches orderlies come and go with food and care; it does not know where they come from, where they go to, why they never see the same one twice, how they got here and if they will ever leave. This creates a purple haze of confusion, lavender smelling, old and comfortable but bewildering at once.  On the edge of sleep it imagines what happens beyond the doors by running its day dreams together. That is Troika.

It was built as a strongly worded objection to the vogue of transparency and usefulness. It still holds immediacy, since anyone can play the game in a matter of hours if they want. They just need to go limp and enjoy a state of comfortable confusion. The book doesn’t need to tell people that it expects them to decide what is happening for themselves since it offers few answers and the answers present are contradictory.

Planescape was a hundred times better when I was a child who only owned a box set and no context or rules. A single book hinted at places just beyond the horizon, a teasing joy in incomplete knowledge. But then you get older and realise you can just get up and walk, read all the books and know all the secrets, only to learn that they were banal, soggy-minded. The illusion was better and more useful than the words on paper telling you exactly how Lawful Good these allegedly complex but somehow easily and briefly explained people and places are. Information kills knowledge.

Troika will never tell the truth. It will tell many truths, all of which are true and exist and invalidate everything else. If you can comprehend the structure of a fantastic universe while having no clue about the basic functioning of our own then there is nothing fantastic about it. So to create that same complexity of feeling without actually going to the trouble of reinventing reality you just induce the sensations associated with it. I want to look up at the imaginary stars with the same wonder as the real ones.

That being said, the book of Troika is limited. The current state is several steps from where it should be, but it’s following a pneumatic process. The next time the book emerges it will be larger, offering more truth than what is currently provided. Multiple books, the artefact must be large to strengthen the polite bewilderment, where a reader can wander in and out having not followed the same path twice. Except for the core of the thing it should be thick and sweet like treacle.

The game couldn’t afford to be as strange as it wants to be without that tiny solid core. However that core still plays into the lavender cloud by sweeping away the default dungeons and dragons and it’s N. People coming into contact with it might be familiar with its fighting fantasy routes, have shared my upbringing, and experience the feeling of having come home to find all the furniture rearranged; there is familiarity but mostly disquiet. For others they will be out on their ear experiencing a world that equally could have been if things were different. They can be as lost as their characters are.

I’m lost in explaining things. Troika is named for specific reasons, everything in it is considered and concrete. None of it will be explained for fear of ruining the tingly tension, the spark that Planescape stamped out. What we have is just the beginning of an outpouring. Whether it’s loved or hated, rich or poor, it will unravel to completion. I hope people like it, but it is what it is and there’s nothing you or I can do to change that.

The Ideal Introduction to the Fast-Growing World of Role-Playing Games

Art by Duncan Smith

Steve Jackson – not to be confused with Steve Jackson – was co-author (with Ian Livingstone) of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the “solo gamebook” that launched the Fighting Fantasy line.  Among many other accomplishments, Jackson was responsible for Fighting Fantasy: The Introductory Role-Playing Game which incorporated the 'system' used in the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks.  (Henceforth in this post, FF shall refer to the Fighting Fantasy: The Introductory Roll-Playing Game  book.)

Penguin Books, through its Puffin imprint, published FF in 1984 as a 240 page paperback.  From an American perspective, it may seem unusual to publish RPG rules in a paperback format, but in Britain it made sense to produce the rules in the same format as the gamebooks.  Corgi did the same thing with their edition of Tunnels & Trolls in 1986.

Although 240 pages, the bulk of the book is devoted to two sample adventures.  The rules section only encompasses about 58 pages and the font size is generous.  Still, the book accomplishes its goal of presenting a set of introductory RPG rules.  FF is intended for younger players, but it does not state the age of its demographic target.  However, in the introduction, Jackson writes:

Many of these role-playing games, like Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, Traveller and Warhammer, are quite complicated, and their manufacturers recommend them for twelve-year-olds and over.  They refer constantly to charts and tables in the rules and require a lot of book-keeping by the players.  But the spirit of role-playing games is not so much the tremendous detail and statistics they go into (although there are 'walking-encyclopedia' types who revel in the complications of such games).  For most players, the real fun comes from the adventure itself.

Jackson engages the reader in an informal tone and deftly explains the rules of the game and the function of the GamesMaster.  As we can see on the Adventure Sheet reproduced below, there are three 'characteristics'.

Skill (1d6 + 6):  “...indicates an adventurer's own skills in a variety of areas: swordsmanship and general fighting abilities; problem-solving; strength; intelligence; etc.”

Stamina (2d6 + 12):  “...represents fitness, will to survive, determination and general constitution.”  Should an adventurer's Stamina fall to zero, the adventurer dies.

Luck (1d6 + 6):  This score acts as a 'saving throw' in FF.  When a GamesMaster requires an adventurer to “test for Luck,” 2d6 are rolled.  If the result is equal to or less than the Luck value, the test is successful.  Regardless of the result, the Luck value is reduced by one; subsequent tests therefore become more difficult.

Combat occurs as a sequence of Attack Rounds.  In an Attack Round, each opponent rolls 2d6 and adds the result to his or her Skill value.  The total is the opponent's Attack Strength.  The Attack Strengths of opponents are compared; the opponent with the lower Attack Strength sustains a loss of two points of Stamina.  Attack Rounds repeat until combat concludes.  Upon sustaining a combat injury, an adventurer can test for Luck to reduce the amount of damage.  A successful test means a loss of only one point of Stamina, but a failed test means the adventurer loses three Stamina points.  When inflicting a combat injury, an adventurer can also test for Luck to cause more damage.  If successful, the adventurer causes four Stamina to be lost; however, if the test is not successful, the adventurer inflicts a loss of only one Stamina.

As presented, the rules in FF are limited, but the selling point is that it's an introductory system.  Also, as Jackson implied, the spirit of the game lies not in the rules but in the adventure itself – a sentiment that actually applies to all role-playing games.

Fighting Fantasy character sheet