Limit the change to Initiative to a player with a Lower initiative than you. I can understand waiting till a slower player goes than jumping ahead of someone faster.
I'm glad Alert is so strong - it makes the other strong 1st-level feats (e.g. Magic Initiate, Lucky, Lightly Armored, Initiate of High Sorcery, Squire of Solamnia, Strixhaven Initiate etc) have a higher opportunity cost, making the choice more meaningful. It also means the design space for 1st level feats is bigger for future releases.
two players take alert - okay just change the rules for initiative and roll one dice for the DM and one for the all the players as a group and let the players decide on what order they want to go in
because that’s what this new feat is, it is just initiative metagaming
It's possible to overthink this. Just because someone has Alert doesn't mean they'll use it well.
Just last session, I had a player insist that he needed to swap rolls with me to go earlier so he could get a particular AoE buff off. I kept telling him he didn't, but he insisted. So I gave in. (The whole discussion was about 30 seconds...so it really didn't slow play down.)
It ended up that my roll put him moving to where the party was split, so he couldn't actually cast the buff and basically wasted his turn. If he'd gone on his turn, he'd have moved up last and caught us all.
It's a great ability, but it's hardly game breaking. There are waaaaaaaaay bigger problems in the game than swapping a couple initiative rolls.
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Limit the change to Initiative to a player with a Lower initiative than you. I can understand waiting till a slower player goes than jumping ahead of someone faster.
I'm glad Alert is so strong - it makes the other strong 1st-level feats (e.g. Magic Initiate, Lucky, Lightly Armored, Initiate of High Sorcery, Squire of Solamnia, Strixhaven Initiate etc) have a higher opportunity cost, making the choice more meaningful. It also means the design space for 1st level feats is bigger for future releases.
two players take alert - okay just change the rules for initiative and roll one dice for the DM and one for the all the players as a group and let the players decide on what order they want to go in
because that’s what this new feat is, it is just initiative metagaming
It's possible to overthink this. Just because someone has Alert doesn't mean they'll use it well.
Just last session, I had a player insist that he needed to swap rolls with me to go earlier so he could get a particular AoE buff off. I kept telling him he didn't, but he insisted. So I gave in. (The whole discussion was about 30 seconds...so it really didn't slow play down.)
It ended up that my roll put him moving to where the party was split, so he couldn't actually cast the buff and basically wasted his turn. If he'd gone on his turn, he'd have moved up last and caught us all.
It's a great ability, but it's hardly game breaking. There are waaaaaaaaay bigger problems in the game than swapping a couple initiative rolls.