Troika is a game that has long interested me. I find the art enthralling, the prose absolutely excellent, and the mechanics both lite and crunchy in interesting places. (Like some of the best peanut butter) Troika is a skill-based system but NOT like you might be thinking. It isn’t descended from the Chaosium lines like Call of Cthulhu or Elfquest, it comes from its own whole hereditary family that I think is called the Fighting Fantasy books? I’m not 100% certain on that but the point is its unique, and the main bulk of your characters are their Advanced Skills. Spells in this system are treated much like skills in that they’re Roll-Under and have set effects when cast successfully, but what if they were even more like the normal Advanced Skills; Broadly applicable, vaguely applied, and designed to encourage their creative use?
I recently put out a game jam entry called The Second Sun. Its really bad, but an idea I had was to use Spells as Skills. This game is based on the Rat System SRD so the skills aren’t actually the same as Troika, but for the sake of this blog post you can assume they work like Advanced Skills in Troika!
The reason I wanted to make spells into skills is to shift the narrative surrounding them. I love the way magic is treated in the OSR, as this mercurial chaotic force that cannot be tamed! For Second Sun, though, (which is mostly inspired by Adventure Time and other gonzo settings soaked to the bone in magic) I wanted the magic to feel more friendly and accessible. Is that silly? Yes, for sure, but that’s the goal. Using Magic at will with no serious negative consequences changes it from a loaded gun into a screwdriver. I think the GLOG does chaotic magic the best, tied with DCC, and casting a spell in these games feels like a child raising a pistol up shakily. Things are very very likely to go wrong. Adventure Time treats magic more lackadaisically, easy to learn in an afternoon and very reliable. I wanted that sort of feeling, so I said players can just name a spell and keep it as a skill.
This puts the magic firmly in a thiefy sort of Climb Sheer Surfaces space. Can I climb the tarrasque? I want players to be creative and feel very safe doing so, and I also want most characters to be a little magical. Finn is definitely a fighter, but he learns magic all the time!
I like the idea that a character sheet will have Climb, Plumbing, and Mornhorn’s Sonorous Yap in the same list of skills. What an odd sort of person! It sets the tone just right for this game. The world is weird and problems aren’t necessarily gonna be designed around making loud sounds but if you’re clever you can make it useful! Of course, the fun has to be moderated a little bit by the Referee in a system that relies on making compromises and negotiating the powers of a spell every time it's used.
So why not just use spell slots? 5e is a system that has a huge amount of magic, but its all cleanly codified. It feels more like pulling out the Hideous Laughter shaped key for the Hideous Laughter shaped keyhole, and less like spells can be uniquely applied to all sorts of situations. They can of course, but the way something is presented to the players shapes the way it will be thought of and used. I want the system to funnel players, ref included, into the thought processes I envision. That’s game design baby! Baby’s first game design, maybe, but I am a baby and be nice to me please.
So, on paper, all a wizard would have to do in Second Sun to cast fireball is to have some kind of spell that could conceivably form one. I like this because it leaves the door open for all sorts of avenues. Shape Flame, Summon Jim the Ifrit, literally just the word FIRE in all caps could all be argued to be capable of lobbing a lump of flame around the place. This makes spells more like superpowered innate abilities that can do whatever the writer (Players and Referee) need it to do, which makes a lot of sense. I’ve always been inspired by anime powers especially narrow little abilities that get used in unusual circumstances to awe and shock. My very first roleplaying game experience was a homebrewed Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure system, and the ingenuity on display was always the hook that kept me in those adventures.
I think the major risk with a system like this is that every character will covet powers like this, and it will be the major focus of a campaign, but honestly? I love things shaking out like that! Getting a wizard player hooked on finding more magic during character creation sounds like a success to me. Wizards are greedy, myopic things that center their worlds around their personal power, so giving them lots of little pocket-knives that can do a lot makes sense to me.
