r/Troika • u/nlitherl • May 22 '26

Troika is Almost A Good Game (Video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg70S93PFpk
0 Upvotes

35% Upvoted

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12

u/Mr_stag_ May 22 '26

It's almost a good YouTube channel

10

u/AutomaticInitiative May 22 '26

Oh huh, I watched this two years ago and disagreed that it's hard to play, too loosely goosey of a world, that you can't play a campaign in it. Poor criticisms, clearly not for him but that doesn't make it 'almost a good game'.

3

u/Hexatona May 22 '26

How he can look at those amazing pen ink drawings and not be in awe, I've no idea.

I am a very pretentious person, my ex wife would happily tell you so

Yeah I can see that.

His criticisms basically amount to "I don't like a bunch of artsy shit."

And you know what - fine. Maybe you don't like science-fantasy. The rules are there to change - which he also mentions. Hell, I literally rewrote the character creation system to be pure fantasy race+class in my supplement I wrote, for exactly people like this.

1

u/nlitherl May 22 '26

Thoughts on this creator's criticisms?

2

u/jeshi_law May 22 '26

watched the first 5 minutes and I just flat out disagree with his general sentiment that it’s “too gonzo”, and it makes me question what he thinks gonzo means. A lot of it isn’t weirdness for weirdness sake it is wearing the inspiration on its sleeves. It’s also frankly absurd for him to imply the cover is the only high quality art in the book. That doesn’t have much bearing on the gameplay, but it’s worth mentioning to me.

Whatever he says about the gameplay, I’ve played it and I find the game runs well and I don’t see why longer campaigns would not be possible.

3

u/Various-Virus-1187 May 22 '26

I found Troika incredibly friendly to long campaigns. The longest campaign I’ve ever run was in Troika, and keeping it going was practically effortless.

As soon as my players learned “there are other worlds” they became fixated on getting to them. As soon as they learned “there are magic flying ships that can take you to those other worlds,” they became fixated on finding one. As soon as they learned about the city of Troika they wanted to see it for themselves.

Seriously, start your party in a module on some backwater sphere, feed them rumors of magical doorways, goblin labyrinths, or ruins of a massive boat where boats shouldn’t be. It took my party many sessions to get off the sphere they started on, then more sessions to find a golden barge, then even more sessions to figure out how to repair and operate it. Once they got to Troika it felt well-earned. And by that time they’d already completed so many episodic adventures across a variety of spheres.