Even though I've concluded that the standard way of handling initiative is flawed and a group initiative system is better, I'd like to briefly cover some of the options for dealing with the standard initiative system.
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In the first game I played in, one of the players kept a list of the characters on a small whiteboard, and kept track of initiative with little numbers next to each name. This is adequate, though there's a (very) slight delay every time you look at the board and do the math to figure out what number comes after 4 or whatever, and try to find that number on the board. It was the initiative-keeper's job to announce whose turn it is and who's up next.
In that particular group, this system was much improved when the initiative-keeper got an iPad, and the iPad initiative app, which is much cleverer. You sort the characters into proper initiative order, then you push a button after each player goes, and it moves that player to the bottom of the list. An easy, simple visual representation of how soon your turn is.
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When I first started DMing, I used initiative cards (which, being a cheapskate, I created and printed myself). You put everybody's name on little cards, and write whatever initiative they rolled in one corner, and then sort them into order. After each player goes, take their card and put it at the bottom of the pile. These are handy.
Because I didn't at the time have any of the books or a laptop for consulting the SRD, I had to print out all the monsters I was going to use in condensed statblock form, so their statblock just joined the pile as their initiative card, as well as the place where I tracked how much HP each one had.
The downside of this system is that the players never know when they're going next. And the cards I printed were all different sizes, so sometimes people would get lost in the shuffle.
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When I got a laptop, I started increasingly switching over to completely paperless DMing. Because I no longer printed out the creature stats, I didn't automatically have an initiative card for each one, so I had no reason to keep this system.
So, for a while, I flirted with the technique of keeping the list on the big whiteboard behind me. I usually play in classrooms nowadays, and as long as I have the whiteboard markers out, I might as well use this vast empty space of whiteboard for something. This introduces an additional problem, in that I always sit facing away from the whiteboard (for various reasons involving being surrounded by D&D paraphernalia), so I have to turn around to see who's up next. Plus, I really should have designated a player to keep the initiative, doing it myself is a bottleneck on the whole process.
Then, for a few weeks, I switched to keeping half-cards with each character's name folded over the top of my DM screen, sorted into order. There was a gap the width of a card or two between the card of whichever character is currently going and the card of the next character up. When it's your turn, your card crosses the gap. At the top of the order, everybody's cards go back to the other side. A slightly more intuitive visual display, where you can tell who's up next by who's next on the screen.
I probably would have stuck with that method for awhile, cumbersome though it is, if I hadn't decided to switch over to the group initiative system.
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A side note, on the subject of initiative: if you're playing with group initiative, it turns out that if you run on "each group goes on the highest initiative rolled by anybody in that group", the PCs will go first nearly every time.
Consider this addendum: in any given group of NPCs, one of them took the Unreactive flaw (-6 initiative) and gave his bonus feat to another one, who took the Improved Initiative feat (+4 initiative). This should mix it up a little without significantly altering balance.
Showing posts with label initiative. Show all posts
Showing posts with label initiative. Show all posts
Friday, July 8, 2011
Monday, May 16, 2011
Rethinking Initiative
I recently read "Initiative: the Silent Killer" on Ars Ludi (no, I didn't get the idea for a D&D blog with a Latin name containing the word for "game" from Ars Ludi - I don't recall even hearing about it until after starting this blog).
The idea is that if you have the players all acting one at a time, they'll lapse into just waiting for their turn to come up, which means they'll stop paying attention to the game. Which, yes, does tend to happen.
So for the third episode of my Open Game Table, I instituted the suggested new rule: all the PCs go at once, and all the monsters go at once.
Whenever combat came up, I called for each character to roll initiative, confer amongst themselves, then tell me the highest roll. Meanwhile, behind the screen, I rolled initiative once for each of the monsters, and took their highest roll. Whichever group gets the highest initiative roll goes first.
Under normal rules, I would just roll once for each group of monsters, but if the PCs get to roll 6 times and take the best, and the monsters only get to roll once, the PCs will nearly always wind up going first.
Of course, this reduces the impact of things like the Unreactive flaw and the Improved Initiative feat. All you really need is one or two players with Improved Initiative, and everybody else can take Unreactive, and the PC party will still usually wind up going first. So an alternate method would be to have all the PCs roll, and announce the highest and lowest roll they made, which are then averaged together and compared to the highest and lowest roll of the monsters.
But if you're going to get that complicated, you could just average together all the rolls from each group and compare the averages. It all winds up unnecessary, and defeating part of what turns out to be the real reason to do it in the first place.
To wit: in practice, this method had negligible impact on how much the players were paying attention. (I think the players actually were paying attention slightly more than usual, but I think that was a combination of fewer people wandering in being distracting than usual and that I mentioned at the beginning of the session, as the justification for this experiment, wanting people to pay more attention, so they were simply more aware than usual that it bothers the DM when his players get distracted.)
Moreover, the "taking turns" mindset is so ingrained into players at this point that they still wound up effectively taking turns. Several of the most self-motivated players would take their actions, then I would figure out who hadn't yet gone and prompt them to go. This is not, however, bad - I was afraid it would be much more chaotic, but with this mindset still in place, it winds up being quite orderly.
The real benefit I noticed at the time is how much faster this method is at resolving initiative. Under normal circumstances, the DM needs to roll each group of NPCs, then take a number from each player, then sort all the numbers in order, then combat may commence. Unless the DM is really fast (I am not), he is the bottleneck on this procedure. I've played in games where one of the players is delegated to gathering all the initiative numbers and resolving an initiative order from them, which is slightly better, but still involves a bottleneck.
Under this system, the DM can roll all his NPCs and come up with one number while the players are all rolling and consulting amongst themselves, and once they come up with another number, they're compared against each other and instantly you know which team goes first.
I think in the event of a surprise round, I may forgo calling for initiative at all. I may even forgo the surprise round (where the ambushers get a half turn before real initiative begins) and say that the benefit of having a surprise round is simply that your group automatically wins initiative.
But perhaps the best part is that, under this system, none of the players has the opportunity to be a bottleneck on combat. Under a normal initiative scheme, there's always at least one player where you get to his turn and only then does he start thinking about what he's going to do, slowing down the pace of combat and making everybody else wait interminably. Under a normal initiative scheme, one must either tolerate this or resort to bringing in an egg timer and saying "you have thirty seconds to declare your actions or you forfeit your turn". Under this group initiative system, if you don't know what you're doing, that's okay, the rest of the party can go before you.
The idea is that if you have the players all acting one at a time, they'll lapse into just waiting for their turn to come up, which means they'll stop paying attention to the game. Which, yes, does tend to happen.
So for the third episode of my Open Game Table, I instituted the suggested new rule: all the PCs go at once, and all the monsters go at once.
Whenever combat came up, I called for each character to roll initiative, confer amongst themselves, then tell me the highest roll. Meanwhile, behind the screen, I rolled initiative once for each of the monsters, and took their highest roll. Whichever group gets the highest initiative roll goes first.
Under normal rules, I would just roll once for each group of monsters, but if the PCs get to roll 6 times and take the best, and the monsters only get to roll once, the PCs will nearly always wind up going first.
Of course, this reduces the impact of things like the Unreactive flaw and the Improved Initiative feat. All you really need is one or two players with Improved Initiative, and everybody else can take Unreactive, and the PC party will still usually wind up going first. So an alternate method would be to have all the PCs roll, and announce the highest and lowest roll they made, which are then averaged together and compared to the highest and lowest roll of the monsters.
But if you're going to get that complicated, you could just average together all the rolls from each group and compare the averages. It all winds up unnecessary, and defeating part of what turns out to be the real reason to do it in the first place.
To wit: in practice, this method had negligible impact on how much the players were paying attention. (I think the players actually were paying attention slightly more than usual, but I think that was a combination of fewer people wandering in being distracting than usual and that I mentioned at the beginning of the session, as the justification for this experiment, wanting people to pay more attention, so they were simply more aware than usual that it bothers the DM when his players get distracted.)
Moreover, the "taking turns" mindset is so ingrained into players at this point that they still wound up effectively taking turns. Several of the most self-motivated players would take their actions, then I would figure out who hadn't yet gone and prompt them to go. This is not, however, bad - I was afraid it would be much more chaotic, but with this mindset still in place, it winds up being quite orderly.
The real benefit I noticed at the time is how much faster this method is at resolving initiative. Under normal circumstances, the DM needs to roll each group of NPCs, then take a number from each player, then sort all the numbers in order, then combat may commence. Unless the DM is really fast (I am not), he is the bottleneck on this procedure. I've played in games where one of the players is delegated to gathering all the initiative numbers and resolving an initiative order from them, which is slightly better, but still involves a bottleneck.
Under this system, the DM can roll all his NPCs and come up with one number while the players are all rolling and consulting amongst themselves, and once they come up with another number, they're compared against each other and instantly you know which team goes first.
I think in the event of a surprise round, I may forgo calling for initiative at all. I may even forgo the surprise round (where the ambushers get a half turn before real initiative begins) and say that the benefit of having a surprise round is simply that your group automatically wins initiative.
But perhaps the best part is that, under this system, none of the players has the opportunity to be a bottleneck on combat. Under a normal initiative scheme, there's always at least one player where you get to his turn and only then does he start thinking about what he's going to do, slowing down the pace of combat and making everybody else wait interminably. Under a normal initiative scheme, one must either tolerate this or resort to bringing in an egg timer and saying "you have thirty seconds to declare your actions or you forfeit your turn". Under this group initiative system, if you don't know what you're doing, that's okay, the rest of the party can go before you.
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