Yeah? Do tell. I tried a few things along this line, like only letting people do damage on their initiative token. (If they were fighting on someone else’s token they did no damage if they won; they just prevented damage from happening to them. But it was only so-so satisfying and kind of hard to remember.)
Great post BTW. This is a good discussion.
I do think that the initiative tokens in Troika! are the attempt to solve this problem. I haven’t tried it, so I don’t understand it deeply.
My method was to make initiative irrelevant for everybody who was intending to fight in melee. You just roll against each other. (Defense only is possible, and necessary to disengage.)
Here’s a snippet from my rules.
In lieu of initiative, you state your goal or target. (Who are you trying to hit?)
Then everybody rolls.
Totals that beat targets’ totals hit.
For groups in melee:
This is all exactly as in AFF2e (p. 59), although I think I have presented it more neatly, instead of tucking the “ganging up” rules into a list of 24 possible modifiers.
After using it for… gosh, more than a year… I’ve given up on the FF way, or rather modified it much further to the point that no addition is required. The FF way has been fun, it works, but it requires too much adding of little digits on the spot (1D+1D+Skill+Trait) and then waiting to hear totals declared. As referee, I found myself jotting down numbers and comparing attackers’ totals to defenders’ totals. Long pauses might ensue. (In combat, fifteen to twenty seconds between dice roll and learning if you hit is a long pause, for my table, and it’s not easy to fill the space with lively combat narrative while adding numbers.)
Exactly what you said: “it was only so-so satisfying and kind of hard to remember.”
I had a way to speed it up drastically with player-facing rolls only, which I called “Fray Mode,” but that too works best in one-on-one combat.
The underlying model for FF combat, T&T, made more sense of group combat. In Tunnels & Trolls:
Because FF depends on the same 2D total for each fighter, it’s really best for one-on-one combat, for which it was designed and pioneered. Group foes in FF (like swarms of rats) have single stats for the collective.
One lesson I’ve taken from this is that FF systems (like Troika!) should be truly excellent for duet play (referee + 1 player). Referees often ask about recommendations for that. It moves very fast with one or two players only, and I found that to be the case in practice in one-shots, but large melees with many participants strain the combat mechanics by requiring memory of added-up outcomes for half a minute at a time. Basically, AFF is ideal for one-on-one games. (It’s not ideal for large groups.)
I decided to try and unify Troika!'s resolution a different way. I ditched base skill entirely and just have 2d6 + Advanced Skill against PbtA bands:
Luck starts a little lower and Luck rolls are resolved the same way.
That way, everything is roll high.
Interesting! Do you run this with combat as a series of alternating blows, or as a contest (i.e. beat the foe’s score)? If the latter, then how do you handle multiple combatants? Do you have any considerations for armor?
For what it’s worth, my AFF revisions included name changes. For example, Skill becomes Ability (and hence reveals its kinship with the D&D concept of Level) and Special Skills become Traits. That also removes any need to distinguish “Skill” from “Special Skills.”
Do you run this with combat as a series of alternating blows, or as a contest (i.e. beat the foe’s score)? If the latter, then how do you handle multiple combatants?
With the PbtA bands, melee combat tends to be single roll, adjusted as necessary with bonuses or penalties depending on opponent. 6- opponent lands a blow on you; 7-9 you each land blows on the other, 10+ you land a blow on your opponent. Ranged combat is usually adjudicated in the moment, but along those lines, depending on whether the opponent is aware, armed with a ranged weapon, armed with a melee weapon, interested in closing the distance or getting away, &c.
Do you have any considerations for armor?
Armor remains ablative. I like Knave’s rule about critical attacks reducing the armor’s effectiveness. And I like Shields Will Be Broken! rules where you can let armor break to absorb all damage from a single blow.
One thing I was thinking about Troika! follows from my observation that the combat system (which is that of Fighting Fantasy) works best with one or maybe two players. Much of the charm of Troika! comes from the random character templates, which are both varied and deliberately quirky, with insistently odd mostly implied backgrounds emergent in play in a group (as opposed to solo play where that weird/gonzo implied background would become overwhelmingly important).
Likewise, the sheer variety of oddball characters lends itself to group play. A solo game about a vendor of edible monkeys, or a solo game about a devotee of beef steak, or a solo game about a lawyer-duelist in a white wig might get old quickly. Put them all together, though, and you have a quirky team ready to explore the asteroids of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry indefinitely.
BUT if I’m right that group combat is a (moderate) weakness of FF mechanics, and that they are more suited for solo play, wouldn’t a variety of Troika! with broader, more iconic, accessible, clichéd character types be more suitable? After all, the solo gamebooks for which the rules were designed featured characters that were featureless fighters, more or less a vague and almost completely uncharacterized fantasy avatar of the reader-player of the book.
Or wouldn’t Troika! be better with mechanics for group contests (like combat) that are smoother with groups of oddballs?
Note that I have nothing against Troika! It’s great to see a Fighting Fantasy revival (even if it’s covertly so). I’m just interested in matching mechanics to content, following the queries that launched this thread.
Characters made for emergent play in a group + mechanics made for solo combat = ?
Or it might be the basis for an upcoming dedicated supplement 
[NB, the campaign has less than a day to go] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/loottheroom/down-in-yongardy-a-troika-solo-gamebook
That shows how little I know!
Seriously, though, I would imagine that a gamebook would be different than duet live play. And it still might get old quickly if it was not a novel-like format.
I say bravo to the makers of this book!
It seems very much to be developed in the vein of the original Fighting Fantasy books, with a fairly set plot that you work through as a Yongardy Lawyer 
I love Troika! a whole lot.
I love “roll opposed, winner does damage”. I also love that damage is not the value on the die, and instead is a value in a table, because it’s super unique to have weapons that all scale completely differently.
I love how the bag pull initiative works - some folks don’t dig it because they don’t like how unfair it is, but balance is something we often throw out. I haven’t found that it leaves anyone out of the action, because with “winner does damage”, being attacked and attacking are mechanically identical.
It’s true that you can’t do clever non-combat things or cast a spell until you get a chance to act, but combat is hectic and being clever and casting magical spells under pressure is hard, and the initiative emulates that without raising difficulty thresholds or calling for concentration checks.
Also, very often once the wizard in the group gets to cast a spell, they’re going to end the fight by scaring the enemy away with claps of thunder or by transforming themselves into a piano-sized bird cage around the enemy leader.
I found the deck of cards to be much easier than the bag, but in the end I went with @rayotus approach and just stopped using the built-in initiative.
I recall in an interview of the creator, Daniel Sell, he said the initiative system was added because people asked for one. I don’t think he uses it either.
Personally, I kind of want to get the cards…
I don’t mind the way the initiative system adds to play in Troika! and one thing I’ll often do is add markers/tokens/cards for external battlefield events (a pool of acid bubbling up and splashing the unwary, a stalactite crashing down, grasping skeletal hands erupting from the damp soil and snagging legs) that can occur during the round. Just adds to the dynamism and unpredictable nature.
I’ve also put together a bunch of open-ended Background Questions based on the standard Troika! backgrounds that have been really fun to use. There’s so much implied setting and unanswered questions shoved in those, that letting the players answer them has been really rewarding.
@ktrey great idea; that makes me think I should just use blank business cards with character/creature names on them, and “end round” on one, and then just write whatever I want on others (like “acid sloshes”) so that I can use the card-based version without having to recall which character or effect each card or token colour represents.
I absolutely LOVE the setting of Troika, I think a rust some people miss is that it’s in a tradition of surreal British humour, particular Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy.
The rules I love less - coming straight from Into the Odd, they felt very complicated, I had to refer back to the book way too I often.
The one part of the rules which I do love though is the initiative - it’s like a game-within-a-game. I’d actually thought of using Troika-style initiative in ItO, where the “players always go first” initiative system is very broken.
I had some playing card blanks sitting around, so I got my players to each design their own 2 cards for initiative, which was an extra fun element.
I think noisms’ criticisms of it here are valid though, in particular that it seems more a game for one-offs than for campaigns:
Disclaimer to all this is that I have only run it once, and that game was a lot shorter than I’d hoped. It was also with my wife & daughter as players, both of whom have virtually no RPG experience. I wrote it up here:
Revolution Comes to the Kingdom pretty much combines Into the Odd with Troika‘s initiative system. It‘s particularly good for stealth mode, sneaking and hiding: Revolution Comes to the Kingdom: Playing the Game - Porcupine Publishing | DriveThruRPG.com
(As an aside, I believe characters only go first in ItO if they make a Dex roll?)
No, there is no Dex roll - had this conversation on the Discord a couple of weeks ago, there’s no rules for initiative but the wording is something vague like “player characters usually go first unless they are surprised”. That’s exactly how I played it, and the PCs won most combats before their opponents got an attack.
Bastionland gang rules fix this, but Dex rolls would certainly be another way to make it work. In the Discord chat, I think Chris pretty much admitted it’s broken but said he didn’t want to change the original rules.
I’m enjoying it quite a bit. We made characters and they were so much fun that we decided we had to play them. I love the d66 chargen tables for whenever I need to flesh out a dungeon.
Great blog post! I’m considering running the very same adventure with my family (wife and at least one of the kids) if I can get any of them interested. I bought Troika! recently because of how… cool it looks, and well I just hope I get to use it. Anyway, I haven’t run across any AP vids of Troika yet, so it was nice to read your post. Maybe I’ll work in some fictional suggestions that they take the damned lift, lol.
BTW. I ran Troika! a few times at Gary Con and I really feel like the initiative system is 100% ok, as written. It worked well. Here are my ongoing “complaints” about Troika, and they are pretty minor.
It’s a lot of addition. You roll 2d6, add those together, plus your Skill, plus your Advance Skill. That gets compared to me as the GM rolling 2d6 and adding the enemy’s Skill. (Generally I pick a target number that is the average, rounded down instead of rolling.) So, I can add (for example) 3 + 5 + 2 + 4. But it’s not instantaneous and I often have to re-add it in my head quickly to double check myself. Even when you chunk it. Like, say, you look at the dice and see 3+5=8. Then you look at your sheet where the Skill and Advanced Skill ranks are already added to 6. Now you are adding 8+6. It almost always ends up in the teens and it’s “just enough” over the “simple” line to make you second guess yourself for a second.
People get confused about when to roll over vs. roll under no matter how clearly you explain it. I find myself, in every session, giving out gentle reminders about which kind of roll is being made at the table for the whole session, every session. That gets old. It’s just not very intuitive even though it is logical.
Initiative. Despite what I said above, it’s pretty artificial. No more so than traditional D&D, though. There are upsides and downsides to it. Ups = everyone pays attention as it could be their turn at any time. Downs = there’s precious seconds lost every time a draw is supposed to happen when someone realizes “oh, it’s time to draw!” or “Oh, I have the bag.” This might be because I pass the bag around. Whenever there’s a reshuffle it goes to the next person. Again, this keeps everyone engaged, but it’s a bit gimmicky. OTOH, the initiative can be used for all kinds of cool stuff! Like throwing in tokens for environment effects or a timer.
So … my whole summation of Troika is … Great game! Can be used to emulate all kinds of weird fiction. A bit gimmicky, though.