Initiative passes as a function of level advancement

[OgreBattle]

Found this neat idea in an old thread started by Lago Paranoia here:
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=52154

The idea being that as characters advance in levels they gain extra initiative passes that lower level characters don't have. One of the intended perks of this system is where a significantly higher leveled 'boss encounter' enemy has more initiative passes than the lower leveled party members. So a sample encounter would look like...

Level 1 Fighter, Mage, Thief, and Cleric are fighting a spooky lvl5 Mummy and his skeletal minions.

Round 1 1st pass) Fighter, Mage, Thief, Cleric, Mummy and Skeletons act
Round 1 2nd pass) Mummy acts
Round 2 1st pass) Fighter, Mage, Thief, Cleric, Mummy and skeletons act
Round 2 2nd pass) Mummy acts

Mashing it into existing D&D would bring up a lot of problems tho', so this is more speculation for a new fantasy heartbreaker. Are there any existing games that use initiative passes tied to level? The only ones I know of are like Shadowrun where it's a pointbuy system and meant to represent speed.

As for a 'new edition/fantasy heartbreaker' that follows the D&D level estimate of "every two levels you double in power so one lvl5 dude is equal to four lvl1 dudes" I'd do it something like...

-At level 1 you start off with a move, standard, and swift action.
-When you reach levels 3/6/9/12 you gain additional standard action at a 2nd/3rd/4th initiative pass, this standard action can be substituted for a move action if you didn't use a running action already (so this prevents people from suddenly moving twice as fast)

I picked out those levels so four lvl1 dudes fighting a single lvl5 foe has to deal with their foe getting an additional initiative pass compared to them, while four lvl3 dudes facing off against eight lvl1 dudes have a roughly equal amount of actions to use on each other. Then you can have your occasional super tough challenge where the one big bad dragon has two more initiative passes than the party members.

[deaddmwalking]

Deadlands (not d20) used a deck of cards for initiative with a possibility of going multiple times (if I recall correctly). More cards did represent being faster.

One way to do this in d20 is have a TN for initiative (like 20). Roll each round and only act if your initiative pool is 20 or more. Every time you act you subtract 20 from your initiative pool. Example: round 1 character a rolls 1d20+5 with a result of 19. He does not act in round 1. On round 2 he rolls a 1+5 for a total of 6. His initiative pool is now 25. He acts in round 2 (subtracting 20 from his initiative pool). Since he has 6 in his initiative pool, he needs a 14 or more (9 or better on his d20) to act again in round 3.

If level is added to initiative in some manner, higher level characters will have more actions (up to acting every round). Optionally you could allow a character with 40 in his initiative pool to take two actions in a round, but you could just as easily not allow more than a single round of actions...

[ishy]

Reminds me of a 4e fight I had once.
Basically went like this:

Round 1:
(me) SoD on boss > boss saves
(boss init pass 1) SoD on me > I save
(boss init pass 2) SoD on me > I save
(boss init pass 3) SoD on me > I fail my save and die

The boss fight was not satisfying and I tuned out for the rest of the fight, though I believe my party did win the fight.

[Kaelik]

The biggest problem I see is that it basically completely throws the idea of CR/EL out the window as something you could even possibly manage.

These huge fuckoff powerups come at times that have to be distinct, but because they are distinct, it follows that levels where you just get them are playing an entirely different fucking game than levels before, so there is no way to have a consistent "4 CR Xs is EL X+2" or similar framework, because X+2 might or might not give them an entire extra action.

Also, your game would kind of fuck over anyone using melee, because at level 12, ranged characters get to move once and then use five standard action attacks, an melee characters get to move once and then use a standard action attack, and then give up one of their attacks to move again, then attack again, then move but not attack.

[RadiantPhoenix]

deadDM's variant makes the change continuous (if you allow the spending of 40 initiative points at once), but could be very frustrating at low levels. (I keep rolling 1s! I never get to act!)

[Lokathor]

ADnD 2e did this with how melee attacks worked, so it's not impossible to integrate into DnD.

Initiative pass actions should probably be more limited in scope than standard actions are, given how most dnd games have save or die type effects. If the bonus passes are just movement and smaller attacks and they get a big attack once a round like everyone gets a big attack once a round, that might work out well.

[Kaelik]

ADnD 2e did this with how melee attacks worked, so it's not impossible to integrate into DnD.

Initiative pass actions should probably be more limited in scope than standard actions are, given how most dnd games have save or die type effects. If the bonus passes are just movement and smaller attacks and they get a big attack once a round like everyone gets a big attack once a round, that might work out well.

Maybe you could just have a single things called a full attack action where you get to attack multiple times!

You are so innovative Lokathor!

[Sigil]

The simplest way to state a system like this would also somewhat alleviate the problems of characters rolling poorly and never getting to act, instead of an initiative, characters simply have a pool of action points.

• When combat starts, characters each start with 10+Initiative Mod+1d10 AP. If one or more party is surprised, characters that are NOT surprised gain an extra 10 AP.
• The character with the most AP has the chance to declare actions first, move and standard actions cost 10 AP, full actions cost 20. If a character elects not to declare actions, their AP pool is reduced so that it is one less than the next highest character's.
• The character that now has the most AP has the opportunity to declare actions.
• Unspent AP reduced to a maximum of 10 at the end of the round.
• At the start of the new round everyone gets to roll 1d10+Init Mod+10 again and add it to their AP pool.

If you wanted to, such a system would allow you to be a little more modular with actions, you could for example list speeds in terms of distance/AP or have interrupt actions that cost varying amounts of AP (for instance you could declare that it costs one AP to catch an item thrown to you). You would want to avoid getting crazy though[/list]

[Username17]

Random extra actions is a non-starter for a bunch of reasons. It's too painful to track, it makes the "go faster" stat into a god stat, and so on. But the fact that bonus actions are large and handing them out randomly doesn't work doesn't mean that you have to hand them out in such a manner as to make the power level breakpoints destroy intergenerational conflicts. I mean, you could do that, b for example giving everyone a Paragon Action when they hit Paragon and tell everyone that there's a big power breakpoint there and fucking deal with it. But there are a number of ways to gradually introduce this shit.

First of all, you could give people a bonus action that is just a bonus Minor Action at Level X, and then a few levels later pokevolve that bonus action into a standard. Secondly, you could give out 4e style "action points" or 5e style limited use bonus actions. These allow characters to act more at higher level without making the characters become a true multiple of effectiveness when that happens. Or you could just plain make the action bonus levels coincide with no other bonuses - which if the swag you get at other levels is sufficiently good could balance out to a progression that felt reasonably smooth (think the 5th level of Wizard in 3e D&D when haste came online but you didn't really have enough spell slots to take advantage of it).

The thing is, this is a problem that D&D R&D has been working on for the last 25 years, and they've come up with a number of workable solutions.

-Username17

-Username17

[RadiantPhoenix]

I just realized that we're talking about

Tick.

Based.

Combat.

[Josh_Kablack]

Hrm. So sptiballing for a fantasty heartbreaker that steals 4e terminology, and allows you to trade actions down like 4e:

Lvl1: you get 1 Standard + 1 Move +1 Minor + 1 Interrupt/Opportunity

LvlX: you get 1 Standard + 1 Move +1 Minor + 2 Interrupt/Opportunity

LvlY: you get 1 Standard + 1 Move +2 Minor + 1 Interrupt/Opportunity

LvlZ: you get 1 Standard + 2 Move +1 Minor + 1 Interrupt/Opportunity

Paragon1: you get 2 Standard + 1 Move +1 Minor + 1 Interrupt/Opportunity

[TheFlatline]

Spycraft had a "fluid initiative" variant where if your init score was 25 or higher you could choose to act on your init count, drop 20 from your init score, and then go again on your new count, turning sheer speed into a tactical advantage.

It also had a bullshit chart of what could and couldn't add to your initiative. You also had a base combat maneuver where each half action gave you +5 to your init for the rest of combat.

I seem to remember init builds that focused on building your init up over and over and over so that you'd get a free action every few rounds, which ended up being pretty powerful.

[codeGlaze]

What about Edge to Initiative?
Or Advantage to Initiative... if you are a higher level than your opponent, you get to reroll a bad init.

[OgreBattle]

Getting lots of great feedback from y'all, gotta add it to the design notes folder...

Random extra actions is a non-starter for a bunch of reasons. It's too painful to track, it makes the "go faster" stat into a god stat, and so on. But the fact that bonus actions are large and handing them out randomly doesn't work doesn't mean that you have to hand them out in such a manner as to make the power level breakpoints destroy intergenerational conflicts.

Why use initiative passes for After Sundown then? Does it just work better in a pointbuy system somehow, or is it because AS combat is meant to be quick and take up less of a % than D&D combat that you can just not worry so much about imbalance?

[Seerow]

If random extra actions don't work, don't make them random?

Something along the lines of Josh's post where you get more/better action economy based on level at set levels seems good to me. Especially for any game where you want explicit tier breaks. If by epic level you just straight up have three times more actions than a heroic level chump, that's awesome. As long as other people on your epic tier have similar numbers of actions it should all balance out.

[Username17]

After Sundown uses fixed Initiative Passes rather than random ones. You get one, and then you can buy more with Edge (or Power Points if you have speed powers that let you do that). That being said, AS2 is going to handle the speed powers a little differently to speed up combat and get it out of the way.

-Username17

[Blade]

I don't like extra actions at all. It almost always slow down things and make it more boring for people who don't have any (or not as much as other characters).

I prefer to replace them with extra effects on some actions. For example, instead of hitting one target per action, you can hit x targets in a same action.

[TheFlatline]

I don't like extra actions at all. It almost always slow down things and make it more boring for people who don't have any (or not as much as other characters).

I prefer to replace them with extra effects on some actions. For example, instead of hitting one target per action, you can hit x targets in a same action.

I'll agree with the first half of this as a long time WoD player. Celerity actions = cigarette break if you don't have Celerity.

It also becomes a matter of the side with the most dots in celerity wins.

[Wulfbanes]

In Shadowrun I found that every player having the same amount of initiative passes makes them enjoy the game better when combat breaks out. All players having 2 passes, mooks having 1 pass, bad ass guys 2 passes and solo monstrosities 3 passes seems to make everything better, without characters having to focus on getting those wired reflexes, or this and that spell, etc. I doubt it works well in systems other than Shadowrun, since at least your speed is capped as a function of agility per round, not per pass.

[Username17]

Champions has something similar with the speed stat. Speed determines how many initiative passes you get in a 12 segment turn. Agents tend to have lower speeds than PCs, while uber boss villains have more. It can work pretty well, but it runs completely on gentleman's agreements. In our home game, the default PC speed value was 6, but other gamers find that fairly low or ridiculously high.

-Username17

[Orion]

I wonder if you could avoid needing to add extra actions if you turned things into non-actions instead. For instance, drawing a weapon is supposed to take an action in D&D, but if you take "quick draw" it becomes free. It was already free while moving and spending an action on it is terrible, but IF you made people spend an action to draw for some reason, quick draw would be a reasonable thing to give out free with level progression. So would rapid reloads for crossbows or guns. Quicken spells already do the thing where new spells start as standards and become swifts. You could have some spells actually scale down to non-actions. Buff like air walk or protection from arrows could become either unlimited always-on, or charge-based but not actions.

For melee, you go from having "full attack" as an action, to "pounce", to "dash-through-multicut."

[OgreBattle]

For melee, you go from having "full attack" as an action, to "pounce", to "dash-through-multicut."

That's where I'm leaning now after all the discussion in this thread that points out the many ways initiative passes can be clunky to deal with. I figure something like where your standard and full actions deal level appropriate effects while minor/swift action are more for knocking out hordes of weaker foes.


Say a level X Death Knight has his standard action death sword attack that hits hard, but can also spend a move action to send dark energy bursting from his body. The energy burst wouldn't do much at all against a level appropriate encounter but would send a group of lower level knights trying to flank him sprawling, and kill goblins outright.

There should also be more universal, readily available maneuvers for strong dudes to use against weaker guys,
things like D&D3e's trample maneuver should be something anyone can use on things smaller than themselves:

As a full-round action, a creature with this special attack can move up to twice its speed and literally run over any opponents at least one size category smaller than itself. The creature merely has to move over the opponents in its path; any creature whose space is completely covered by the trampling creature’s space is subject to the trample attack. If a target’s space is larger than 5 feet, it is only considered trampled if the trampling creature moves over all the squares it occupies. If the trampling creature moves over only some of a target’s space, the target can make an attack of opportunity against the trampling creature at a -4 penalty. A trampling creature that accidentally ends its movement in an illegal space returns to the last legal position it occupied, or the closest legal position, if there’s a legal position that’s closer.

Trampled opponents can attempt attacks of opportunity, but these take a -4 penalty. If they do not make attacks of opportunity, trampled opponents can attempt Reflex saves to take half damage.