The Gaming Den

I'm looking for interesting alternatives to modern D&D's "roll initiative, act in order". This being the den, I'd also like to know the pros and potential pitfalls of systems, or more in depth on what kind of game they go with.

Older D&D's "Player turn, Monster Turn" is something I'm already familiar with.

I know Shadowrun adds in initiative passes so some folks may act twice as often but at different intevals. But is it initiative order stuff to begin with?

I've found Riddle of Steel's to be really interesting... but it's structured only for one on one combat. The "you have two actions before your action-pool
resets" mechanic could be ported to other things though.

How about actions out of turn, like Opportunity Attacks and Interrupts that trigger from others actions. Any systems do something more interesting, or go into more focus on it than D&D3e/4e?

you are wanting...?
a- a new way to determine the order of activity
b- a way to allow people to choose to be active or inactive and save those actions or give them to someone else during a "round"

or both?

Here's one to try: Simultaneous Resolution. Like in diplomacy, or in Mafia. Everyone submits their actions all at once on slips of paper and then the DM resolves what happened that turn.

Init by group is best.

Players get to coordinate their actions; spellcasters target enemy with AOEs and ranged damage, then melee rush up to the front after the carnage.
It works better than half the players saying "I delay until X player is done"

Also makes DM's work easier with about 20 kobolds to roll for.

The Mistborn RPG has a 2-phase combat round:

Phase 1 is action declaration; in order of Wits, lowest to highest, everyone declares their actions, forming dicepools.

Phase 2 is action resolution; in order of size of dicepool, highest to lowest, everyone resolves their intended action. If you take an action besides the one you declared in Phase 1, your new dicepool is halved, and your spot in initiative order is adjusted likewise.

So, if a big, dumb bruiser declared an attack on the party healer, then the wizard with higher Wits can declare that he's going to destroy the floor from underneath him, forcing the big guy to change his action to a leap action to get away from it, his dicepool is halved, and he didn't attack the healer. There's some tactical depth to that. However, the length of each round is pretty long. This evens out a bit in that most combats are over in 2-3 rounds average, 5 rounds is a long, drawn-out battle, but it's still quite unwieldy.

Grek wrote:Here's one to try: Simultaneous Resolution. Like in diplomacy, or in Mafia.

Or the hand-to-hand combat system in Top Secret.

Warhammer Fantasy 3rd uses team initiative. Everyone rolls for init at the same time, and everyone acts in order, but it's separated out by PCs/NPCs. So if your team's init is 2, 2, 1, 3, and 5, and you rolled the 1 but *really* need to go first, you take the 5 init. Someone is gonna have to take that 1 though.

TheFlatline wrote:Warhammer Fantasy 3rd uses team initiative. Everyone rolls for init at the same time, and everyone acts in order, but it's separated out by PCs/NPCs. So if your team's init is 2, 2, 1, 3, and 5, and you rolled the 1 but *really* need to go first, you take the 5 init. Someone is gonna have to take that 1 though.

do individual's initiative scores affect this? Would an Elf allow a Dwarf to act faster by being in the same party?

OgreBattle wrote:

TheFlatline wrote:Warhammer Fantasy 3rd uses team initiative. Everyone rolls for init at the same time, and everyone acts in order, but it's separated out by PCs/NPCs. So if your team's init is 2, 2, 1, 3, and 5, and you rolled the 1 but *really* need to go first, you take the 5 init. Someone is gonna have to take that 1 though.

do individual's initiative scores affect this? Would an Elf allow a Dwarf to act faster by being in the same party?

Yup. But the Elf is going to be going slow as shit.

So human coachman rolls 2
elf wardancer rolls 4
Dwarf grudgebearer rolls a fat 0

The gnolls roll 1, 3, and 0

So init goes:
PC at 4
Gnoll at 3
PC at 2
Gnoll at 1
Gnoll and PC at zero (determined by dex score, so if the elf went here he'd probably be going second to last).

If the dwarf needed to go first he could.

Wouldn't that lead to arguments though?
With for example the rogue saying, I need to go first so I can sneak attack!
And the wizard I need to go first so I can disable them all with an area spell without hurting any allies!
And the fighter going, huh what combat time? I was playing smash heroes.

OgreBattle wrote:I know Shadowrun adds in initiative passes so some folks may act twice as often but at different intevals. But is it initiative order stuff to begin with?

Shadowrun 4 characters have an initiative score, which they then roll a dice pool of and add to their score to get their initiative roll. So if your initiative is 8 you'll act on 8 through 16 depending on your roll, but if your initiative score is 17 you'll always always go before the initiative 8 guy no matter what the two of your roll.

Then everyone goes in order of init result, highest to lowest. This takes up 1 of your "initiative passes". At the end of the round if anyone has any initiative passes left you go around again but this time only people who have a pass available get to act. Keep going until everyone is out of passes (max is 4; most people get 3 when they're doing "fast" things).

Then you're supposed to reroll everyone's initiative at the start of the next round, but I imagine many tables skip that part unless they have a program doing it all for them because it's a lot of rolling and sorting.

I'd use initiative turns, but include mechanics for an initiative reset that can be used periodically, possibly giving you and/or your side a boost or your enemies and/or their side a penalty. (big explosions, lulls in the battle, knocking someone prone).

I'm honestly surprised 4e didn't do junk like "And they get bumped down 2 places in the initiative order".

Maxus wrote:I'd use initiative turns, but include mechanics for an initiative reset that can be used periodically, possibly giving you and/or your side a boost or your enemies and/or their side a penalty. (big explosions, lulls in the battle, knocking someone prone).

I'm honestly surprised 4e didn't do junk like "And they get bumped down 2 places in the initiative order".

I was thinking that as a gridless way of playing 4e, you convert all "pull/push foe" and "shift ally" effects would bump you up and down initiative.


Fighter slams an orc in the face with his shield, knocking them backwards, Wizard hits them with a blast of thunder. If this knocks down the orc's initiative so the Cleric acts before them I think that's a good enough representation of tactical exploits.

Never tested it though so dont know how it breaks.

That sounds like it would run into FFTA's Smile Toss problem: two or more characters with the ability to make one of their friends go next taking all the turns until they decide they're ready to kill everything. If you can shift an ally and attack an enemy in the same turn, it's even worse.

If you can't let someone move again by pushing them above the current initiative step, then you run into the bug (feature?) of preventing someone from moving by increasing their initiative to a number above the current count, decreasing it again before their move next round, and increasing it above "now" again the next time. Still a stunlock, but at least you can probably only manage it with one or two people at a time instead of locking out everyone that isn't on Team Juggler.

rampaging-poet wrote:That sounds like it would run into FFTA's Smile Toss problem: two or more characters with the ability to make one of their friends go next taking all the turns until they decide they're ready to kill everything. If you can shift an ally and attack an enemy in the same turn, it's even worse.

If you can't let someone move again by pushing them above the current initiative step, then you run into the bug (feature?) of preventing someone from moving by increasing their initiative to a number above the current count, decreasing it again before their move next round, and increasing it above "now" again the next time. Still a stunlock, but at least you can probably only manage it with one or two people at a time instead of locking out everyone that isn't on Team Juggler.

I was thinking of that. Probably the way around it is to only allow for an initiative re-shuffle every few rounds. I mean, I can see that's how battles go. They hit a rhythm, they maintain that rhythm until something happens to break it. So it'd be like

"Fireball in the middle of the opposing side. Initiative re-roll, Team Hero gets a +3." Or "Killed half the goblins with some AoO's. The Goblin Cleric is now way surprised" or "Killed the Dread Knight. His minions are now in disarray."

So every so often, something unexpected or awesome happens and the battle changes. And it's possible to force it.

Passing initiative to your target could be interesting.

• Roll off at the beginning, high roll chooses who takes first initiative.
• If you target another creature on your turn, that creature gets next initiative.
• If initiative passes to you and you've already acted in the current round, you pass to creature of your choice.
  (Must be a creature that hasn't acted in the current round.)
• If your turn ends without targeting any other creature, you pass initiative to a creature of your choice.
  (Again, must be a creature that hasn't acted in the current round.)
• A "round" ends when every creature has acted, but you don't reroll initiative or go back to the first actor. Initiative just keeps passing from whoever acted last in the previous round.
• If you target multiple creatures, only one of them takes next initiative. If you've targeted both a PC and an NPC, PCs always pass to NPCs and vice versa. Otherwise the targets' players work out who takes next initiative at a metagame level. If the initiative gets passed to multiple NPCs, the DM should choose whichever is worst for the PCs.
  (This works the way it does to stop you from passing initiative to your allies by rolling free-action social checks at them or splashing them with your fireballs.)

sigma999 wrote:Init by group is best.

Players get to coordinate their actions; spellcasters target enemy with AOEs and ranged damage, then melee rush up to the front after the carnage.
It works better than half the players saying "I delay until X player is done"

Also makes DM's work easier with about 20 kobolds to roll for.

We do this constantly, because our DM is fond of throwing out things like "3d100 orcs" at us. We have a physical initiative chart, and if often looks like:

Player 1
Player 2
DM 1
Player 3
DM 2
Player 4

Where "DM 1" is 37 Kobolds and "DM 2" is 2 Flesh Golems. Basically, everything with the same init modifier gets lumped into a category.

ishy wrote:Wouldn't that lead to arguments though?
With for example the rogue saying, I need to go first so I can sneak attack!
And the wizard I need to go first so I can disable them all with an area spell without hurting any allies!
And the fighter going, huh what combat time? I was playing smash heroes.

It contributes to party discussion but not arguments. It's also very "gamey" and not terribly realistic as far as init goes.

But. In actual gameplay it tends to work out pretty well at fostering teamwork. Realize that an epic level Warhammer hero probably is like a level 5 D&D character though. Power levels are *way* wacky.

ModelCitizen wrote:Passing initiative to your target could be interesting.

• Roll off at the beginning, high roll chooses who takes first initiative.
• If you target another creature on your turn, that creature gets next initiative.
• If initiative passes to you and you've already acted in the current round, you pass to creature of your choice.
  (Must be a creature that hasn't acted in the current round.)
• If your turn ends without targeting any other creature, you pass initiative to a creature of your choice.
  (Again, must be a creature that hasn't acted in the current round.)
• A "round" ends when every creature has acted, but you don't reroll initiative or go back to the first actor. Initiative just keeps passing from whoever acted last in the previous round.
• If you target multiple creatures, only one of them takes next initiative. If you've targeted both a PC and an NPC, PCs always pass to NPCs and vice versa. Otherwise the targets' players work out who takes next initiative at a metagame level. If the initiative gets passed to multiple NPCs, the DM should choose whichever is worst for the PCs.
  (This works the way it does to stop you from passing initiative to your allies by rolling free-action social checks at them or splashing them with your fireballs.)

That's pretty cool, but looks like an awful lot of effort.

TheFlatline wrote: But. In actual gameplay it tends to work out pretty well at fostering teamwork. Realize that an epic level Warhammer hero probably is like a level 5 D&D character though. Power levels are *way* wacky.

Does the WHFRP approximate the power levels of the tabletop?

ex: Peak human ability is ws6 bs6 s4t4 w3 i5 a3 ld9-10
a well trained soldier is ws3 bs3 s3 t3 w1 i3 a1 ld7

Ravengm wrote: We do this constantly, because our DM is fond of throwing out things like "3d100 orcs" at us. We have a physical initiative chart, and if often looks like:

Player 1
Player 2
DM 1
Player 3
DM 2
Player 4

Where "DM 1" is 37 Kobolds and "DM 2" is 2 Flesh Golems. Basically, everything with the same init modifier gets lumped into a category.

Really? Huh. My old group init was like this:

Players
DM

or

DM
Players

After the first round it didn't matter anyway.


And I should mention, the player group would use the fastest init of the party.
It rewarded party composition much like having one caster buff the whole party helps too.
Makes sense in the way that the fast character is "scouting"

...You Lost Me wrote: That's pretty cool, but looks like an awful lot of effort.

It might be too much work, I'm not sure. It looks godawful there because I was trying to cover corner cases and exploits and shit, but I think it's pretty intuitive in the common case.

Simple Common-Case-Only Explanation: When you attack, you give next initiative to your target, or a creature of his choice if he's already gone in the current round. If you don't attack on your turn, you give initiative to a creature of your choice who hasn't gone yet.

Rifts (Palladium in general) has a bunch of "target loses Initiative" effects, which are basically like using a Power Fist in 40k: you go last, no matter what people roll. And if multiple people lose Initiative in the same round...

Hear the crickets chirp? Yeah.

Maybe the new guy who loses initiative is now going really last whereas the previous guy who thought he was going last is now going last except for the other guy. Or maybe they act at the same time. Nobody knows.

There are also a few things that let you win initiative and go first next round. Yeah, it's rolled on a round by round basis. The things that alter initiative can be kind of interesting:

Dude A: punches Dude B.
Dude B: judo-throws Dude A. Does piss-all damage, but Dude A loses 1 action and initiative.
Init goes from A, B to B, A
Dude B: stomps on Dude A's face.
Dude A: loses this action
Dude B: uppercuts Dude A
Dude A: finally gets to act
Dude B: another judo throw, lol

The "everyone declare, THEN roll and have actions interrupting actions" thing is a pain in the ass. It takes fucking ages to get anything done, and the "okay, your action is invalid. Lose your turn or [halve your dice pool/spend a Willpower] to change actions" is bullshit and pisses players off. It's like Stunning someone without needing to target them!

Each action has an initiative rank (say, 1-5) and actions of the same rank go off simultaneously.

So Strike First (2) happens before Strike Hard (3) happens before Aimed Shot (4). 1 and 5 are saved for special 'go first' and 'go last' effects.

Can someone give me a run down on why rolling initiative every round is a bad idea, please? The current Pathfinder game I'm in uses this as a house rule.