Initiative-less combat?

[SangoProduction]

I've made a couple alternative suggestions to initiative, as I've found it, and subsequent combat, lacking in 3.5/pf. It's workable enough for 4e, but not because of initiative. It's because of the actual choices in combat carrying the weight. None of my alternatives truly fixed combat's speed problems causing disengagement with the entire ordeal. Not even the simultaneous turns, which had a fair few test sessions.

But I continue my quest, inexorably on. If it can't be fixed... why not just throw it out entirely?

I've heard tales of the use of Dagger Heart in playtesting, where they don't roll initiative at all. People just call out their turns when they'd like to take them.
(And this is my addition to the idea:) We would keep track of who has acted in the round with turn tokens. Each round, all players are given their turn tokens, and they can use them whenever they find appropriate. When they've called their turn, they hand in their turn token.
This is easily done using glass beads, coins, or what have you. And in a VTT, you would just use a marker on the character, or pass each player a card, or some equivalent.

Seems like an interesting idea. What do you think?

Conceptually, I see a couple potential problems:
1) Everyone wants to go "first," and refuses to backdown and let anyone else speak. At that point, you really have to just intervene as a GM, and set some rules again. But the sort of thing can happen outside of initiative, and it's really not been an issue most players have. Could definitely have a transition period for handling it in combat though.

2) People start losing track of if the round is over. But that's what the turn tokens are for. I guess it would be more of an issue for the DM.
3) Everyone wants to go "last," or otherwise don't really take the initiative in combat. This would require prompting from the DM to get things moving (potentially in-game with enemies acting, or out of game). It could also hint at a few other dysfunctions in the group.

4) Players that are so inclined might disengage after calling their turn. Which is probably better than them disengaging until their turn it back, because your prompt for the player's turn would be everyone else's prompt when they get their turn tokens back, so it's no more need to prompt than everyone else.

5) Invalidating Initiative. It's a stat. Some people care for it. Some people care a lot. So much that I had to make special mention of initiative in my SiR series. (Almost want to keep doing that, and work on Guile... Just... can't be bothered to care for it.)
I'm clearly not a neutral observer with this opinion... but I don't think it's a huge loss. Those who really want to go first... just get to go first. Have fun. Those who care less about going first don't have to. Rather than that being randomly decided.
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Potential benefits:
1) Possibly more engagement. As you can take your turn whenever you please, you aren't waiting your turn. You are waiting for an opening. So rather than being on the phone, they might actually pay attention... or be on the phone until they are the last one to act and gets called on... Why do we have such a player? Well, for the less egregious players, you are probably going to be paying attention, at least until you've spent your turn, in order to tell if it's a good time to go.

2) Greater freedom in taking turns. A player who likes to be supportive can be early, granting buffs in combat (shh. Assume the buff's worth it), or debuffs, and then retreat to later for more reactive spells. Counter spell being an interesting utility.

3) Alternative to Readying Actions. Since you get to act *when it's appropriate,* you don't have to look into your crystal ball and decide if there's going to be something in the future that you want to react to. I mean... interrupting other turns as they're being taken is probably not what's intended, especially if you allow "I move backwards from the attack," to be any more than "I like that description of your AC."

4) Narrative Fluidity: With actions being less rigid, it ought to feel more like the RP side of the RPG, with any luck. (But it's still going to involve messing with mechanics rather than talking. And that's always going to feel different to just talking. Even in substantially more narrative-focused and rules-lite games like FATE.)
And with that fluidity, comes less predictability. It's not going to be the same order every single tim.

[Curse]

For any group that is very rpg oriented and cooperative that might work beautifully. Any group that is not cooperative you will have problems with any system so no loss there.
How are you imagining several actions? Does every player get as many tokens as there are actions?

I cannot picture yet how you deal with enemy actions. If there is an ambush it should be clear that enemies act first. How do you deal with everything else? Will you also "just say" that an enemy will act now or will you have player turn vs. enemy turn?

Edit: sorry I misunderstood the 50/50 thing.
I am not sure how far that will work with an action economy. Take a group of 4 players. In normal 3.5 rules and mid-level characters you should have something like 8 actions per turn. If enemies can only take a turn with 50% chance after a player - what about a larger group of enemies? What about just one big one? Will he get 8 chances to act then?

[NichG]

I run a superhero game this way basically, but there's the added wrinkle that 'actions' are extended courses of action and not just one-off things. So its less like 'what do you do right now' and more like 'what are you going to be doing, until its resolved?'. This is handled in sets of pairwise interactions (with some ability to intervene in someone else's interaction, but not if you yourself are embroiled in one).

Another very similar setup I used for a more D&D-like game was again that you could call out your actions, but 'Initiative' was a skill in the system that specifically was only used for the special action 'I try to do this before they do that', and it had to be something where the thing you're trying to do is aimed at interrupting or invalidating the thing they're trying to do. But you could wait until some of the consequences of not interrupting had been described if you want.

So like, lets say the DM declares 'the monster attacks this character'. Someone could say 'I teleport them out of the way before the attack lands' which would be an opposed Initiative check. But just 'I attack the monster first' doesn't get to be one - stuff like that would effectively be treated as non-blocking (so you and the monster could attack each-other and kill each-other with your damage, rather than it having to be A then B or B then A). However if for example the resolution of the monster's attack was something like 'the character dies', you could do an Initiative check post-hoc to take the blow in place of that character. It wasn't very formalized what things would qualify and what things wouldn't (and honestly the Initiative skill didn't get used all that much), but I sort of like this view of Initiative as being a special action specifically reserved for interrupting things, rather than the default assumption.

[Elves]

Getting rid of initiative rolls and instead using initiative modifier is an obvious answer, but not a good one — there needs to be a random element because acting first can be so decisive.

However, it might be random enough if only one side (PCs or NPCs) rolled, and the other side used 10 + modifier. PCs should use set scores if your concern is time, because coordinating multiple people is the time consuming part, and also because you can pre-roll NPC initiative scores before combat. This is what I'd do. It's a decent compromise because it keeps some randomness, but doesn't add any extra drag time in-combat compared to static scores as long as you preroll NPC initiative.

Frankly, you could also just have PCs pre-roll initiative at the end of a combat for whatever their next combat happens to be.


If you were OK with making initiative truly random you could distribute rather than frontload the burden of rolling initiative by randomly determining after each turn who will act next. Dex is a strong enough stat without also contributing to initiative. But having a modifier is probably important in a game like D&D.

[SangoProduction]

For any group that is very rpg oriented and cooperative that might work beautifully. Any group that is not cooperative you will have problems with any system so no loss there.
How are you imagining several actions? Does every player get as many tokens as there are actions?

I cannot picture yet how you deal with enemy actions. If there is an ambush it should be clear that enemies act first. How do you deal with everything else? Will you also "just say" that an enemy will act now or will you have player turn vs. enemy turn?

Edit: sorry I misunderstood the 50/50 thing.
I am not sure how far that will work with an action economy. Take a group of 4 players. In normal 3.5 rules and mid-level characters you should have something like 8 actions per turn. If enemies can only take a turn with 50% chance after a player - what about a larger group of enemies? What about just one big one? Will he get 8 chances to act then?

I think we may have a misunderstanding on the turn tokens. They are basically just there to say that you can still take your turn this round.
As for ambushes, you would just have the enemies act as appropriate. "You hear 4 arrows whistle from the trees. What's your AC, David?"
I think the half-remembered reference to Dagger Heart's system is more confusing than anything. I'm going to replace it more explicitly with my version.

I run a superhero game this way basically, but there's the added wrinkle that 'actions' are extended courses of action and not just one-off things. So its less like 'what do you do right now' and more like 'what are you going to be doing, until its resolved?'. This is handled in sets of pairwise interactions (with some ability to intervene in someone else's interaction, but not if you yourself are embroiled in one).

Another very similar setup I used for a more D&D-like game was again that you could call out your actions, but 'Initiative' was a skill in the system that specifically was only used for the special action 'I try to do this before they do that', and it had to be something where the thing you're trying to do is aimed at interrupting or invalidating the thing they're trying to do. But you could wait until some of the consequences of not interrupting had been described if you want.

So like, lets say the DM declares 'the monster attacks this character'. Someone could say 'I teleport them out of the way before the attack lands' which would be an opposed Initiative check. But just 'I attack the monster first' doesn't get to be one - stuff like that would effectively be treated as non-blocking (so you and the monster could attack each-other and kill each-other with your damage, rather than it having to be A then B or B then A). However if for example the resolution of the monster's attack was something like 'the character dies', you could do an Initiative check post-hoc to take the blow in place of that character. It wasn't very formalized what things would qualify and what things wouldn't (and honestly the Initiative skill didn't get used all that much), but I sort of like this view of Initiative as being a special action specifically reserved for interrupting things, rather than the default assumption.

I like that. Yeah, you could maintain initiative as a stat, and save it as an interruption ability, say once per round. (On success you immediately start your turn. On fail, you start after their turn is finished.) I still have apprehensions about some interruption that just says "No, I just walk away from the attack." But I guess that's what AoO is for. But for spells, you'd then have both the initiative interrupts and the save as failure points.
But maybe... that's... fine? Since it necessitates going after the target, and still succeeding on initiative to get the effect.
If it's (perhaps perceived as) too good, then some might feel pigion holed into going last. Which can feel rather bad.

Getting rid of initiative rolls and instead using initiative modifier is an obvious answer, but not a good one — there needs to be a random element because acting first can be so decisive.

However, it might be random enough if only one side (PCs or NPCs) rolled, and the other side used 10 + modifier. PCs should use set scores if your concern is time, because coordinating multiple people is the time consuming part, and also because you can pre-roll NPC initiative scores before combat. This is what I'd do. It's a decent compromise because it keeps some randomness, but doesn't add any extra drag time in-combat compared to static scores as long as you preroll NPC initiative.

Frankly, you could also just have PCs pre-roll initiative at the end of a combat for whatever their next combat happens to be.


If you were OK with making initiative truly random you could distribute rather than frontload the burden of rolling initiative by randomly determining after each turn who will act next. Dex is a strong enough stat without also contributing to initiative. But having a modifier is probably important in a game like D&D.

I was thinking of actually getting rid of initiative entirely.

[Elves]

I was thinking of actually getting rid of initiative entirely.

You're not getting rid of it you're just not making rules for it. Countless indie games like the one you mention pretend ignoring something ("just cooperate"!) is the same as solving it.

[Ozreth]

You're not getting rid of it you're just not making rules for it. Countless indie games like the one you mention pretend ignoring something ("just cooperate"!) is the same as solving it.

This ^^^.

I've dabbled with various initiative systems and approaches over the years thinking that I could speed up combat. The closest thing I got to something I liked was group initiative using a determining factor for which side acts first, and then all players act as they see fit. Thankfully with my group this worked out and they used it to more or less strategize. However, the discussions around strategy ended up adding more time to the combats than we saved. It turns out discussing strategy when the order of movements is predetermined for you by dice is a lot more efficient than beginning with that piece missing.

I've finally reverted back to RAW initiative. It is simple and it is fast. I have numbers 1 through 20 written out on the edge of our chessex mat. They players roll initiative and place paper tents with their names on them on top of the number they rolled. By the time I'm dumb rolling monster initiative and maybe throwing some minis out, the initiative order is set. Turns out players who like having fact acting characters as part of their concept enjoy the benefits of initiative as it is intended if they put resources into dex and other relevant stats.

All that being said, after about 10 years of veering off into OSR games and buying all of the trending towards "simple and fast" games, I came to really appreciate crunch in the rules as well as a slow approach to playing. Mine and my groups initial draw to the game was how cool it was that so many facets of a moving world could be represented at a tabletop via a rulebook. Rules for everything was so smart, cool and provided endless possibilities in our minds. When we played early on we didn't think about combat as "slow" or having rules to cover all sorts of out of combat situations as "fiddly". We just played.

[NichG]

I like that. Yeah, you could maintain initiative as a stat, and save it as an interruption ability, say once per round. (On success you immediately start your turn. On fail, you start after their turn is finished.) I still have apprehensions about some interruption that just says "No, I just walk away from the attack." But I guess that's what AoO is for. But for spells, you'd then have both the initiative interrupts and the save as failure points.
But maybe... that's... fine? Since it necessitates going after the target, and still succeeding on initiative to get the effect.
If it's (perhaps perceived as) too good, then some might feel pigion holed into going last. Which can feel rather bad.

I think it works better if you think of it like specific Immediate Action types of reactive actions that already exist. So its not that you can roll initiative to 'take your turn right now', its that you can choose to sacrifice your turn this round in order to roll initiative to 'do a very narrowly limited thing right now, that has to be specifically in response to what's currently going on'. Maybe you even have to explicitly have the thing on your sheet as a swift action/immediate action type of ability. So you can't, say, take a full attack on an initiative interrupt, but maybe you can sacrifice the rest of your round to make an AoO when you wouldn't otherwise qualify. Nor can you just do something like cast Teleport, but maybe you could do Quickened Teleport.

Alternately you could even make it so that if you do choose to trigger an initiative roll-off, you have some penalty with respect to the action you're taking compared to if you just took your time with it. So someone could say, every round, 'I want to attack this guy first before he goes' but they'd be attacking at a -4 penalty basically all the time compared to someone who says 'I'll attack them some time this round'. But that has more of the problem with as you say people feeling pigeonholed. If people are thinking 'I can go first at a penalty, or go last' then the philosophy of the thing existing as a skill hasn't been communicated well. It's like, you can think of opposed rolls as answering a question when there's tension - 'Do I push them or do they push me? Do I outrun them or do they outrun me? Do I hide successfully, or do they notice me?'. Initiative would then be a similar thing, only really applicable when there is a specific question of 'who goes first' with important consequences directly following from it. So it's appropriate if you're at a negotiation and someone decides to break truce, but it's not appropriate if you're already in a melee with other people attacking each-other.

[icefractal]

I've played some games with (partially) player-determined initiative, like Lancer, and I'm not sure if I like it.

To clarify, Lancer's system is, IIRC:
Players get the first initiative unless they're being ambushed; they collectively pick one player to act.
Then that player picks an enemy to act.
Then that enemy (so, the GM) picks a player to act. Repeat.
Everyone acts before a new round starts, so the larger side will get several turns in a row at the end.
Next round starts with whichever side didn't act last in the prior round, which member decided by the last person to act (or in practice, often the players collectively).

The main advantage is that deciding on the next person to act becomes a part of the tactics, and it encourages group coordination / discussion at the start of the battle.

The main disadvantage (for me) is that it makes me (as a player, not GM) responsible for managing other people's spotlight time and fun, where-as in D&D I could just enjoy my good luck guilt-free (or grumble at my bad luck without the target of that grumbling being another real human).

Also, having sometimes played with people who were oblivious spotlight-hogs (as in, not malicious, just genuinely so enthusiastic and full of urgent ideas that they jumped in whenever possible), it's rather nice to have mechanics that will effectively say "No judgement implied, I'm just a piece of plastic, but you need to shut up now and let the quiet player do things."

[RNightstalker]

Conceptually, I see a couple potential problems:
1) Everyone wants to go "first," and refuses to backdown and let anyone else speak. At that point, you really have to just intervene as a GM, and set some rules again. But the sort of thing can happen outside of initiative, and it's really not been an issue most players have. Could definitely have a transition period for handling it in combat though.

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Potential benefits:
1) Possibly more engagement. As you can take your turn whenever you please, you aren't waiting your turn. You are waiting for an opening. So rather than being on the phone, they might actually pay attention... or be on the phone until they are the last one to act and gets called on... Why do we have such a player? Well, for the less egregious players, you are probably going to be paying attention, at least until you've spent your turn, in order to tell if it's a good time to go.

A possible solution to problem number one is for initiative modifier to be the tie-breaker for whoever wants to go first. It will definitely change the way characters are built with most probably passing on Improved Initiative and spells/items that buff initiative.

I do like benefit number one as phone use at the table can be an issue. You don't want to be a tyrant as a DM especially with grown-ass adults at the table (at least my table). At the same time it can get old having to recap for someone every time it's their turn. I might have to invoke a recap rule (like you get one recap per session) for the chronically distracted player if we can't handle it away from the table.

Overall it is definitely something worth considering that I will most likely recommend to my table.

[SangoProduction]

A possible solution to problem number one is for initiative modifier to be the tie-breaker for whoever wants to go first. It will definitely change the way characters are built with most probably passing on Improved Initiative and spells/items that buff initiative.

I do like benefit number one as phone use at the table can be an issue. You don't want to be a tyrant as a DM especially with grown-ass adults at the table (at least my table). At the same time it can get old having to recap for someone every time it's their turn. I might have to invoke a recap rule (like you get one recap per session) for the chronically distracted player if we can't handle it away from the table.

Overall it is definitely something worth considering that I will most likely recommend to my table.

Awesome. Please tell me how it goes.
I took a break from DMing, since my dog was killed.

[RNightstalker]

Awesome. Please tell me how it goes.
I took a break from DMing, since my dog was killed.

I'm sorry to hear that but thanks for sharing that. What kind of pup?

[SangoProduction]

I'm sorry to hear that but thanks for sharing that. What kind of pup?

Little mutt. Was dumped as a pup, and basically left to die until my grandmother noticed it, and we nursed it to health. Spayed, vaccinated, all that jazz.
Would go with me everywhere, obediently following into the stores to get her food.