Just watched a thing from the Dungeon Dudes (dumbass name, interesting channel) talking about five common houserule types that are actually kind of horrible. The last one they covered was something called Greyhawk Initiative, which was a system Mike Mearls devised himself and one they pretty much lambasted. I can see why - it's a lot of fiddling between rounds that players don't generally want to do.
But it reminded me of something I've been looking for an answer to for quite some time now, and that is the fact that the more I use it, the more I freaking hate fixed, "standard" initiative.
Your initiative score is basically pointless, unless it's so obnoxiously high that your lowest init roll is 16 or something. A bad roll at the start of a battle sinks you for an entire combat, while a really good roll on an otherwise slow, plodding armored juggernaut of a character means that character acts faster than every agile skirmisher on the field for the entire friggin' fight. There's almost no meaning whatsoever in even having an initiative modifier, since they tend to be small enough in absolute value that the weight of the d20 easily overwhelms them.
Beyond that, it makes combats entirely too predictable and encourages players to bog things down planning intricate, nitpicky maneuvers mid-combat since they know the exact order things will happen in. As a DM I have to constantly step on that crap - "you're in the middle of a bloody fight for your lives, you do not have time to hash out this plan. What are you doing, right now, on your turn?" I have no issue at all with players planning combo strategies, or even improvising on the fly - but when they start discussing the tactical merits of an improvised battle plan mid turn because the system encourages that kind of crap, it grinds my gears.
Any other method of determining initiative slows shit down though, and hurts the already kinda plodding pace of D&D combat. Anything I've seen/tried to mix up initiative order and get players to think more like combatants in the thick of a scrum and less like armchair generals on the sand table gets pushback, and not just from my players. I've seen a lot of people seriously badmouth any system that isn't standard, roll-once-and-suck-it initiative. Some of them have very good points, and I will admit - I still use standard initiative in my current campaign because I have yet to discover/design a better alternative.
But seriously. Am I the only one here who just...really kinda rolls their eyes at standard initiative? Nobody's ever been that rogue with a really high initiative modifier that can never seem to catch a damn break when it comes time, that once or twice a friggin' session, to use it? More importantly, does anyone have any ideas for a way to do round-by-round, variable initiative in a manner which is streamlined and easy to do quickly, even online/over Discord?
I'd love some advice here, and am willing to hear arguments either way.
As a longtime cleric player and healer, I don't like how I sometimes want to roll low initiative so I can heal my friends and then they can act before the monster can hit them again...it's very convoluted. So yes, there are problems with standard initiative. I'm not sure how I'd go about solving them though.
Quite fine with initiative during our sessions. Simple roll d20+dex and done.
Something dumb I might do is marching orderbonus. say going down a corridor and the people in front get a bonus to their score. They were the first ones inside after all. So I have 7 players. I might give like +4 to the first person then 3 and so on.
I just find it strange that the first person in could be last in the rotation. So a little bonus might help. I'll try it out and see what happens.
I don't have a problem with initiative. It really only matters on the first turn, after that order is relative since rounds are cyclical. After the first round every turn takes place after everyone else's turn and before everyone else's next turn regardless of initiative.
A more technical rule where initiative was decided at the begining of each round and weighted/modified by the difficulty of the action you were atempting to make that round would be more realistic and give initiative more meaning. But would it be more fun? Most would agree, it would not be fun.
Initiative is a quick and simple way to determine turn order while giving character abilities some weight to it. The idea being that what matters is what you do, not the order you do it in.
That might be true, D, if not for the fact that some entire subclasses are built off of whether they 'win' initiative despite having almost zero ability to influence that roll. Assassins basically shut off entirely if they drop initiative and their target moves before they do, and people who play Gloom Stalkers tend to do so pretty much specifically for Dread Ambusher and gaining a powerful edge early in the initiative order. Rogues and rangers in general suffer pretty hard if they drop init, and as Naivara pointed out, some players *want* to drop init but can't. The order can be really damn important for some folks, enough so that my table has asked me several times about possible variant initiative rules. Ironically, what a few of them want is to be able to purposely tank their initiative in order to act in the same turn as an ally, willingly give up a high roll in order to coordinate actions. Another thing the base rules make exceptionally friggin' difficult.
Now sure, variable initiative doesn't help the fact that the Assassin fails to function as a subclass if it punks its first turn, nor does it help Gloom Stalkers. But clerics that want to see how a battle unfolds before making their move, or skirmishers that want to strike quickly and seize advantageous terrain, wouldn't have to go every other fight with a thumb in their eye sockets because the dice told them to go f#@! themselves.
That might be true, D, if not for the fact that some entire subclasses are built off of whether they 'win' initiative despite having almost zero ability to influence that roll. Assassins basically shut off entirely if they drop initiative and their target moves before they do, and people who play Gloom Stalkers tend to do so pretty much specifically for Dread Ambusher and gaining a powerful edge early in the initiative order. Rogues and rangers in general suffer pretty hard if they drop init, and as Naivara pointed out, some players *want* to drop init but can't. The order can be really damn important for some folks, enough so that my table has asked me several times about possible variant initiative rules. Ironically, what a few of them want is to be able to purposely tank their initiative in order to act in the same turn as an ally, willingly give up a high roll in order to coordinate actions. Another thing the base rules make exceptionally friggin' difficult.
Now sure, variable initiative doesn't help the fact that the Assassin fails to function as a subclass if it punks its first turn, nor does it help Gloom Stalkers. But clerics that want to see how a battle unfolds before making their move, or skirmishers that want to strike quickly and seize advantageous terrain, wouldn't have to go every other fight with a thumb in their eye sockets because the dice told them to go f#@! themselves.
I did say it was only important in the first turn. That applies to assassin too. And rangers, Gloom stalker or otherwise don't have any features that depend on initiative order.
And also as I pointed out rounds are cyclical. If a character wants to see how combat plays out before they act they can do that for next round.
I think initiative is fine as is. Adding much that would make it more interesting would over complicate it and slow the game down too much.
I do think that assassins main ability doesn't work that great considering how variable initiative is. If they roll low their entire subclass feature is negated. That should definitely be fixed. I played an assassin for a one shot and got pretty unlucky with initiative. I never actually got to assassinate anyone and it made the subclass pretty disappointing.
I think initiative is fine as is. Adding much that would make it more interesting would over complicate it and slow the game down too much.
I do think that assassins main ability doesn't work that great considering how variable initiative is. If they roll low their entire subclass feature is negated. That should definitely be fixed. I played an assassin for a one shot and got pretty unlucky with initiative. I never actually got to assassinate anyone and it made the subclass pretty disappointing.
That is because Assassin is a trap subclass if you will, along with Berserker Barbarian, Sword Lock, Blade Bard, and the ENTIRE Sorcerer Class and Subclasses.
You're the DM. You can houserule whatever you want. For example:
Everyone rolls a d20 into a dice tray. You let the players pick the die they want from the tray... as long as they don't take forever doing it. Assassins pick the high dice, clerics pick the low dice. Have a timer ready and give them 5 seconds to sort it out.
What if, depending on a players Dex score or class, they rolled a different die for their initiative? So a rogue/monk would roll a d20 but heavy armoured paladin may only roll a d8? So you'd still have the chance of the paladin going first but it's highly unlikely.
@Kerrec: I know I can houserule whatever I want. Heh, the issue is that houseruling the wrong thing makes my game less fun. The Tyler Durden of Game Design is really damn good at kicking my ass on initiative modification.
Letting players pick the die roll they want results in players competing for the 'best' numbers, since most people want to go as quickly as possible. It extends the duration of pre-fight bookwork and is a prime opportunity for resentment to fester at the table. It could work in theory, but there's a lot of failure points I don't see players avoiding.
@Tomnick Easier would be to assign static bonuses or penalties to a fixed Initiative modifier based on class or equipment - which is something I've considered. Class/subclass offers an initiative bonus, medium and heavy armor have initiative penalties. Ended up abandoning the idea because it was too easy to game. Weapon-based bonuses/penalties didn't make sense because characters could - and should - exercise the option of deciding which weapon they wanted to engage with, and that defeated the purpose of a fixed, easy-as-normal initiative modifier. Also meant we were still stuck in fixed round order after the first roll, which is *really* what I want to kill.
If I had an A.I. to track my round counts for me and do all my game math, every action in my game would be assigned a weight, and your position in the next round's initiative order would be determined by the weight of whatever you did the round before. Heh, I don't have that magical D&D Math A.I. though, so I have to keep my bookkeeping lean and mean, pick my battles. Much as fixed initiative is a brain caltrop for me, Tyler Durden up there has the right of it when he says I need to do really damn good on any sort of fix to initiative.
Giving your players freedom shouldn't cause friction, it should be welcomed with open arms. At the end of a session you explain what you want to try during the next session. Up to them to decide the general order they want to have in the initiative order before hand and come to an agreement, so they are ready to go during the next session. No time wasting. If your players are really that immature, then you take their shiny toy away and go back to tried and true fixed initiative.
Even in my 7 person game I use round by round initiative.
Same, it is far more dynamic and since we are not in a race to the finish, then the extra time it takes each round is hardly even noticeable.
Right. I use an initiative tree with name clips on it to track initiative. At the end of the turn the players roll and place their clip based on the total. They talk to EACH OTHER to see who goes on the bottom. I just take over at the end and slide things here or there to introduce the antagonist or environmental effects order. Takes like a minute, minute and a half tops. As a result things are very dynamic at the table, with the possibility of a dragon going last on one turn, getting INITIATIVE and going FIRST the next round and really bringing it to the party.
A bad roll at the start of a battle sinks you for an entire combat, while a really good roll on an otherwise slow, plodding armored juggernaut of a character means that character acts faster than every agile skirmisher on the field for the entire friggin' fight.
Rounds are cyclic. Initiative determines who starts the cycle initially, but that's about it. My own house rule (discussed here), which greatly speeds things up is:
All monsters act on the same initiative. Player initiative determines who goes before the monsters on the first round, but after the monsters act the players can generally go in any order (usually in seating order clock-wise around the table, skipping unready players until they are ready) because they will all go before the monsters' next turn anyway.
Have you considered the variants given in the Dungeon Master's Guide like Side-Initiative, applying modifiers to initiative based on creature size and weapon/spell choice, or having everyone roll initiative every round after deciding what they're doing on the turn.
There's also nothing at all stopping you from using other systems such as from games like Vampire: The Masquerade which offers a less-rolling and more narrative driven turn-base initiative.
You can even use more than one system - choosing whichever one is more appropriate for that specific battle. This will certainly keep things interesting for the players since they'll never know how the battle is going to play out.
You could also take a cue from some videogames that try for turn-based combat that give everyone a speed factor and a number of turns in a round based on that speed - the faster you are, the more you can do in the same amount of time, which can makes spells like Haste and Slow more potent by increasing or decreasing the number of turns.
There's a lot of options available if you want to spice combat up in terms of initiative/turns.
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I group monsters by type: in a mixed encounter the hobgoblin archers, swordsmen, warmaster, and battlecaster each go on different totals. Since the players can see the tree they can anticipate how things are going. Now, I typically tank initiative regardless, so my mobs tend to be at the tail end of a round. I think I must have offended something in a prior life.
I group monsters by type: in a mixed encounter the hobgoblin archers, swordsmen, warmaster, and battlecaster each go on different totals. Since the players can see the tree they can anticipate how things are going. Now, I typically tank initiative regardless, so my mobs tend to be at the tail end of a round. I think I must have offended something in a prior life.
That's how I do it as well. And if things start to go down the route of planning coordinated moves mid fight that would take more than a simple shout from one player to another you can always limit turn times to a handful of seconds and then they are skipped.
I value the Alert feat very high in some cases thanks to the +5 to Initiative. With many fights lasting no more than 2 or 3 rounds, going first or at least early reduces the total incoming damage by a huge margin.
It's just the nature of turn-based games. :shrug:
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Just watched a thing from the Dungeon Dudes (dumbass name, interesting channel) talking about five common houserule types that are actually kind of horrible. The last one they covered was something called Greyhawk Initiative, which was a system Mike Mearls devised himself and one they pretty much lambasted. I can see why - it's a lot of fiddling between rounds that players don't generally want to do.
But it reminded me of something I've been looking for an answer to for quite some time now, and that is the fact that the more I use it, the more I freaking hate fixed, "standard" initiative.
Your initiative score is basically pointless, unless it's so obnoxiously high that your lowest init roll is 16 or something. A bad roll at the start of a battle sinks you for an entire combat, while a really good roll on an otherwise slow, plodding armored juggernaut of a character means that character acts faster than every agile skirmisher on the field for the entire friggin' fight. There's almost no meaning whatsoever in even having an initiative modifier, since they tend to be small enough in absolute value that the weight of the d20 easily overwhelms them.
Beyond that, it makes combats entirely too predictable and encourages players to bog things down planning intricate, nitpicky maneuvers mid-combat since they know the exact order things will happen in. As a DM I have to constantly step on that crap - "you're in the middle of a bloody fight for your lives, you do not have time to hash out this plan. What are you doing, right now, on your turn?" I have no issue at all with players planning combo strategies, or even improvising on the fly - but when they start discussing the tactical merits of an improvised battle plan mid turn because the system encourages that kind of crap, it grinds my gears.
Any other method of determining initiative slows shit down though, and hurts the already kinda plodding pace of D&D combat. Anything I've seen/tried to mix up initiative order and get players to think more like combatants in the thick of a scrum and less like armchair generals on the sand table gets pushback, and not just from my players. I've seen a lot of people seriously badmouth any system that isn't standard, roll-once-and-suck-it initiative. Some of them have very good points, and I will admit - I still use standard initiative in my current campaign because I have yet to discover/design a better alternative.
But seriously. Am I the only one here who just...really kinda rolls their eyes at standard initiative? Nobody's ever been that rogue with a really high initiative modifier that can never seem to catch a damn break when it comes time, that once or twice a friggin' session, to use it? More importantly, does anyone have any ideas for a way to do round-by-round, variable initiative in a manner which is streamlined and easy to do quickly, even online/over Discord?
I'd love some advice here, and am willing to hear arguments either way.
Please do not contact or message me.
As a longtime cleric player and healer, I don't like how I sometimes want to roll low initiative so I can heal my friends and then they can act before the monster can hit them again...it's very convoluted. So yes, there are problems with standard initiative. I'm not sure how I'd go about solving them though.
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
Quite fine with initiative during our sessions. Simple roll d20+dex and done.
Something dumb I might do is marching orderbonus. say going down a corridor and the people in front get a bonus to their score. They were the first ones inside after all. So I have 7 players. I might give like +4 to the first person then 3 and so on.
I just find it strange that the first person in could be last in the rotation. So a little bonus might help. I'll try it out and see what happens.
Even in my 7 person game I use round by round initiative.
I don't have a problem with initiative. It really only matters on the first turn, after that order is relative since rounds are cyclical. After the first round every turn takes place after everyone else's turn and before everyone else's next turn regardless of initiative.
A more technical rule where initiative was decided at the begining of each round and weighted/modified by the difficulty of the action you were atempting to make that round would be more realistic and give initiative more meaning. But would it be more fun? Most would agree, it would not be fun.
Initiative is a quick and simple way to determine turn order while giving character abilities some weight to it. The idea being that what matters is what you do, not the order you do it in.
That might be true, D, if not for the fact that some entire subclasses are built off of whether they 'win' initiative despite having almost zero ability to influence that roll. Assassins basically shut off entirely if they drop initiative and their target moves before they do, and people who play Gloom Stalkers tend to do so pretty much specifically for Dread Ambusher and gaining a powerful edge early in the initiative order. Rogues and rangers in general suffer pretty hard if they drop init, and as Naivara pointed out, some players *want* to drop init but can't. The order can be really damn important for some folks, enough so that my table has asked me several times about possible variant initiative rules. Ironically, what a few of them want is to be able to purposely tank their initiative in order to act in the same turn as an ally, willingly give up a high roll in order to coordinate actions. Another thing the base rules make exceptionally friggin' difficult.
Now sure, variable initiative doesn't help the fact that the Assassin fails to function as a subclass if it punks its first turn, nor does it help Gloom Stalkers. But clerics that want to see how a battle unfolds before making their move, or skirmishers that want to strike quickly and seize advantageous terrain, wouldn't have to go every other fight with a thumb in their eye sockets because the dice told them to go f#@! themselves.
Please do not contact or message me.
I did say it was only important in the first turn. That applies to assassin too. And rangers, Gloom stalker or otherwise don't have any features that depend on initiative order.
And also as I pointed out rounds are cyclical. If a character wants to see how combat plays out before they act they can do that for next round.
I think initiative is fine as is. Adding much that would make it more interesting would over complicate it and slow the game down too much.
I do think that assassins main ability doesn't work that great considering how variable initiative is. If they roll low their entire subclass feature is negated. That should definitely be fixed. I played an assassin for a one shot and got pretty unlucky with initiative. I never actually got to assassinate anyone and it made the subclass pretty disappointing.
That is because Assassin is a trap subclass if you will, along with Berserker Barbarian, Sword Lock, Blade Bard, and the ENTIRE Sorcerer Class and Subclasses.
You're the DM. You can houserule whatever you want. For example:
Everyone rolls a d20 into a dice tray. You let the players pick the die they want from the tray... as long as they don't take forever doing it. Assassins pick the high dice, clerics pick the low dice. Have a timer ready and give them 5 seconds to sort it out.
What if, depending on a players Dex score or class, they rolled a different die for their initiative? So a rogue/monk would roll a d20 but heavy armoured paladin may only roll a d8? So you'd still have the chance of the paladin going first but it's highly unlikely.
@Kerrec: I know I can houserule whatever I want. Heh, the issue is that houseruling the wrong thing makes my game less fun. The Tyler Durden of Game Design is really damn good at kicking my ass on initiative modification.
Letting players pick the die roll they want results in players competing for the 'best' numbers, since most people want to go as quickly as possible. It extends the duration of pre-fight bookwork and is a prime opportunity for resentment to fester at the table. It could work in theory, but there's a lot of failure points I don't see players avoiding.
@Tomnick
Easier would be to assign static bonuses or penalties to a fixed Initiative modifier based on class or equipment - which is something I've considered. Class/subclass offers an initiative bonus, medium and heavy armor have initiative penalties. Ended up abandoning the idea because it was too easy to game. Weapon-based bonuses/penalties didn't make sense because characters could - and should - exercise the option of deciding which weapon they wanted to engage with, and that defeated the purpose of a fixed, easy-as-normal initiative modifier. Also meant we were still stuck in fixed round order after the first roll, which is *really* what I want to kill.
If I had an A.I. to track my round counts for me and do all my game math, every action in my game would be assigned a weight, and your position in the next round's initiative order would be determined by the weight of whatever you did the round before. Heh, I don't have that magical D&D Math A.I. though, so I have to keep my bookkeeping lean and mean, pick my battles. Much as fixed initiative is a brain caltrop for me, Tyler Durden up there has the right of it when he says I need to do really damn good on any sort of fix to initiative.
Please do not contact or message me.
Giving your players freedom shouldn't cause friction, it should be welcomed with open arms. At the end of a session you explain what you want to try during the next session. Up to them to decide the general order they want to have in the initiative order before hand and come to an agreement, so they are ready to go during the next session. No time wasting. If your players are really that immature, then you take their shiny toy away and go back to tried and true fixed initiative.
Same, it is far more dynamic and since we are not in a race to the finish, then the extra time it takes each round is hardly even noticeable.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Right. I use an initiative tree with name clips on it to track initiative. At the end of the turn the players roll and place their clip based on the total. They talk to EACH OTHER to see who goes on the bottom. I just take over at the end and slide things here or there to introduce the antagonist or environmental effects order. Takes like a minute, minute and a half tops. As a result things are very dynamic at the table, with the possibility of a dragon going last on one turn, getting INITIATIVE and going FIRST the next round and really bringing it to the party.
Rounds are cyclic. Initiative determines who starts the cycle initially, but that's about it. My own house rule (discussed here), which greatly speeds things up is:
Have you considered the variants given in the Dungeon Master's Guide like Side-Initiative, applying modifiers to initiative based on creature size and weapon/spell choice, or having everyone roll initiative every round after deciding what they're doing on the turn.
There's also nothing at all stopping you from using other systems such as from games like Vampire: The Masquerade which offers a less-rolling and more narrative driven turn-base initiative.
You can even use more than one system - choosing whichever one is more appropriate for that specific battle. This will certainly keep things interesting for the players since they'll never know how the battle is going to play out.
You could also take a cue from some videogames that try for turn-based combat that give everyone a speed factor and a number of turns in a round based on that speed - the faster you are, the more you can do in the same amount of time, which can makes spells like Haste and Slow more potent by increasing or decreasing the number of turns.
There's a lot of options available if you want to spice combat up in terms of initiative/turns.
Click ✨ HERE ✨ For My Youtube Videos featuring Guides, Tips & Tricks for using D&D Beyond.
Need help with Homebrew? Check out ✨ this FAQ/Guide thread ✨ by IamSposta.
I group monsters by type: in a mixed encounter the hobgoblin archers, swordsmen, warmaster, and battlecaster each go on different totals. Since the players can see the tree they can anticipate how things are going. Now, I typically tank initiative regardless, so my mobs tend to be at the tail end of a round. I think I must have offended something in a prior life.
That's how I do it as well. And if things start to go down the route of planning coordinated moves mid fight that would take more than a simple shout from one player to another you can always limit turn times to a handful of seconds and then they are skipped.
I value the Alert feat very high in some cases thanks to the +5 to Initiative. With many fights lasting no more than 2 or 3 rounds, going first or at least early reduces the total incoming damage by a huge margin.
It's just the nature of turn-based games. :shrug: