How D&D Got an Initiative System Rooted in California House Rules

Some groups playing first-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons might have run initiative by the book, but with the incomprehensible rules text, no one knew for sure. Besides, the full rules proved so complicated and cumbersome that most groups threw some out in favor of a faster pace. Even AD&D author Gary Gygax ignored most of it. “We played to have fun, and in the throws of a hot melee, rules were mostly forgotten.” (See For 10 Years Dungeons & Dragons Suffered From an Unplayable Initiative System. Blame the Game’s Wargaming Roots.)

For the designers working on second-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, updating these rules posed a challenge. D&D’s management had required the designers to make their new version of AD&D broadly compatible with the original. Even after years on store shelves, plenty of first-edition products continued to sell. TSR wanted to keep that income coming. (See From the Brown Books to Next, D&D Tries for Elegance.)

So second edition needed a version of the first-edition initiative rules, but which rules? First-edition players handled initiative in countless ways, none precisely by the book. The second-edition team settled on all of those ways. Like before, each side rolled a die and the winning roll went first. Beyond that, second edition offered enough optional rules to reconstruct whatever system a group already used. Groups that favored a system complicated by spell casting times and weapon speed factors could keep it.

Second edition also kept the wargame-inspired rule where players declared their actions before a round, and then had to stick to plan as best they could. Many groups chose to ignore this rule. Wizards of the Coast founder Peter Adkison says, “I’ve had many conversations with fans who were really big fans of AD&D and who never really left second edition. I would say, ‘So you like the declaration phase?’ And the answer would always be, ‘Oh we don’t play that way.’ So you like AD&D better because you don’t play by the rules!”

When Adkison led Wizards of the Coast to buy TSR, he granted the third-edition design team permission to redesign initiative—and the rest of D&D—without keeping broad compatibility. Adkison simply charged the team with creating the best D&D game possible.

To start, the team looked at how gamers actually played second edition. Few groups declared actions before a round, and groups that did found the process slowed the game. Third-edition lead designer Jonathan Tweet explains, “Eventually what you ended up doing is you had to tell the DM what you were doing every round twice.”

Most tables did roll initiative every round. That added some exciting uncertainly, but also friction. “It takes forever to go through the round because no one knows who’s next and people get dropped.”

Despite having so many systems to choose from, none of the options pleased anyone. Co-designer Monte Cook says, “Initiative was probably the longest knock down drag out kind of fight. We must have gone through—no exaggeration—like 8 different, completely different, initiative systems.”

Meanwhile, in Tweet’s home games, he used a system that he hesitated to propose to the other designers. “I said to the group, ‘I want to try this cyclical initiative. It’s always worked for me, but it’s so different from AD&D. You know what, it’s probably so different that even if it’s better, people would not like it.’”

For the origin of cyclical initiative, the story goes back to D&D’s early days.

The original D&D books omitted a rule for who acts first in a fight. For that, co-designer Gary Gygax supposed gamers would refer to his earlier Chainmail miniatures rules. In practice, players rarely saw those old rules. As the game spread virally from the creators’ local groups and from the conventions they attended, gamers in the Midwest learned to play D&D.

Gamers in the West found D&D too, but those communities lacked the same word-of-mouth connection to the game’s creators. Necessity forced those players to make up rules to patch the gaps in the rule books. Copies of these fans’ informal game supplements spread from table-to-table.

Warlock in the Spartan Simulation Gaming Journal #9 August 1975

A group of gamers around Caltech created Warlock. “What we have tried to do is present a way of expanding D&D without the contradictions and loopholes inherent in the original rules and with various supplements.”

Future RuneQuest designer and D&D supplement author Steve Perrin wrote a set of house rules that came to be called The Perrin Conventions. He distributed his rules at California’s DunDraCon I in March 1976.

The enthusiasts working on these West coast D&D enhancements lacked Dave and Gary’s deep roots in wargaming, so they found fresh answers to the question of who goes first. Instead of an arcane system built on weapon types, they worked from the description of the Dexterity attribute in original D&D’s Men & Magic booklet (p.11). Dexterity indicates the characters “speed with actions such as firing first, getting off a spell, etc.” So Warlock lets the spellcaster with the highest Dexterity goes first, and The Perrin Conventions explain, “First strike in any situation, whether melee combat, spell casting, or whatever depends on who has the highest dexterity.”

Meanwhile, D&D hooked California physician J. Eric Holmes, but the original game’s obtuse and incomplete rules frustrated him as much as anyone. So he contacted Gygax and volunteered to write rules for beginners. Gygax already wanted such an introduction, but he lacked time to write one because he also wanted to create his new advanced version of D&D. He welcomed Holmes’s unexpected offer and compared it to divine inspiration.

Starting with the original rule books plus the Blackmoor and Greyhawk supplements, Holmes made D&D comprehensible while keeping “the flavor and excitement of the original rules.” As much as he could, he reused wording from the original game. But J. Eric Holmes had learned to play D&D from the Caltech Warlock rules and he probably had seen The Perrin Conventions. That experience led him to pitch Warlock’s spell-point system to Gygax. We know how that turned out. Gary hated spell points. However, Holmes’s take on D&D included one West coast innovation: The character with the highest Dexterity struck first. Back then, monster stats lacked a number for Dexterity, so the rules explain, “If the Dungeon Master does not know the dexterity of an attacking monster, he rolls it on the spot.”

Holmes’ revision became the 1977 Basic Set known for its rule book’s blue cover. That version of the rules introduced young Jonathan Tweet to D&D. Even when new versions of D&D appeared, Tweet stuck to his interpretation of the 1977 initiative rule. “It was really fast. Everyone knew what order you went in.”

Fast forward twenty-some years to the design of third edition when Tweet proposed his home initiative system inspired by that blue rule book. He called the system cyclical because instead of re-rolling initiative every round, turns cycled through the same order.

The design team’s third member, Skip Williams brought deep roots into AD&D. Williams had played in Gary Gygax’s home campaign and came from years of experience answering AD&D questions as Dragon magazine’s sage. Tweet suspected Williams would hesitate to test an initiative system that defied AD&D tradition, but Williams said, “Well, let’s try it.”

“We played one battle using initiative that goes around in a circle instead of being different every round and it was so much faster,” Tweet recalls. “It feels more like combat because it’s faster. By the end of the turn, by the end of the 5 hours playing D&D, you’ve had way more fun because things have gone faster.

“One of the big things that I learned from that experience is how well people took to a rule that on paper they rejected but in practice they saw how well it played.”

Monte Cook says, “If you can look at something that happens 20, 30, 50 times during a game session, and eliminate that or decrease it hugely, you’re going to make the game run faster, more smoothly. That idea is now a big part of my game designer toolbox.”

In today’s fifth edition, cyclic initiative now seems like an obvious choice, but the D&D team still considered alternatives. Some players tout the side initiative system described on page 270 of the fifth-edition Dungeon Masters Guide. The opposing groups of heroes and monsters each roll a die, and then everyone in the group with the highest roll goes. Unlike in past editions, nobody re-rolls initiative; the sides just trade turns. The designers chose against this method because the side that wins initiative can gang up on enemies and finish them before they act. At low levels, when a single blow can take out a foe, winning side initiative creates an overwhelming advantage.

Many players find side initiative even faster than individual initiative. Side initiative could also encourage tactically-minded players to spend time each round planning an optimal order for their turns. Some players enjoy that focus. However, if you aim for fast fights where rounds capture the mayhem of 6-seconds of actual battle, avoid encouraging such discussion.

Why do you prefer your favorite method for deciding who goes first?

Related: 13 of the Craziest Quirks in the Dungeons & Dragons Rules

16 thoughts on “How D&D Got an Initiative System Rooted in California House Rules

    1. Travis Henry

      Yeah, I’m sorta surprised that more in-house design drafts (from various editions of D&D) haven’t turned up over the years, from ex-TSR and ex-WotC folk. I suppose such things bump up against post-severance “gag agreements”. And maybe most these ephemeral documents, notes, and files were thrown away or deleted. But, probably on some WotC harddrive, there’s pre-publication drafts of 3E (and 4E), which would be interesting to see, from a research perspective.

      Reply
  1. Wik

    Battletech initiative. Roll a die. One person on the winning side goes. Then one person o losing side. Keep doing that until everyone’s gone.

    If at any point there are more than twice as many actions on one side, that side gets two activations on that phase.

    Lots of fun, encourages tactical play, and w the right group can run quite smoothly. For the wrong group though it’s the absolute worst.

    Reply
  2. Austin Ballard

    My favorite way to play is to roll initiative and then have whoever is highest go first and then decide which direction around the table the order goes. Obviously, this lends itself to give the players an advantage, but if there are multiple monsters I split them equidistantly around the table, and the speed that a battle can get started just makes everything go so much faster.

    Reply
  3. Michael B

    I use standard 5e initiative since my games are currently pandemic Roll20 based. But when at a table for the months prior to the pandemic, I had been going around the table in seating order. Whoever rolled the highest initiative goes first, and the second highest gets to pick the direction around the table – clockwise or counter-clockwise.

    Reply
  4. Matt P

    I prefer the “side-based, reroll every round” system of B/X at the moment. The possibility for one side to move twice (at the end of one round and at the beginning of the next) makes combat incredibly dangerous, which is a plus for the “combat as war” type of game I’m running right now (and wouldn’t work for a “combat as sport” type game). There’s also about a 1 in 6 chance of a simultaneous round, which is always interesting.

    Reply
  5. alphastream

    5E’s initiative system works fine for me, especially with initiative tents so everyone knows when their turn is coming.

    That said, I do really like the “popcorn” initiative some systems, such as Gumshoe, use. The GM determines who goes first based on the situation. Maybe it’s the PC opening the door, or the most alert or fast monster. It’s not hard to determine once you get the hang of it. That creature takes it’s turn, and chooses who goes next. Players or the GM can choose to have all their creatures go, but that has a big risk if the other side goes last and then chooses to go first next round, so you generally have some fun tactics around choosing order so you don’t just have your entire team go in a row.

    Popcorn initiative sounds bad to most people, but it’s really fun. You get to set things up, as if you constantly had ready actions. “How about you let me go next, and I’ll open the door for Sara’s character so she can drop a fireball?” You get a lot of creative play with popcorn initiative.

    Reply
  6. Muhammad Indra Fatmoko

    I prefer the 5e standard initiative. In terms of speed, nothing can beat it as it require very little afterthought. With team initiative for example, players tend to extend the process with discussing who would go first.

    Reply
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  8. Mr Christopher Tamm

    just what i needed to read as a question for my homebrew rules and im using d10 with Dex mod per side one roll in start of fight – possibly roll again if certain things happen on battlefield like a fire or if nobody does anything effective for a round. Im open at moment to simplifying and this and surprise rules. Post on surprise rules – over years would follow this well.

    Inspired to revise my homebrew right now and asking my players…

    Reply
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  10. Shane

    My group did play with the declare action phase of 2nd Edition, and I don’t recall us having issues with it.
    I’ve been running games both 5e and other systems, and the ‘problem’ I’ve seen is how optimal the process is for the players to all focus on a single enemy, not wasting any resources switching targets as needed.
    I’ve recently been thinking back on how players had to tactically weigh if they wanted to all gang up on a target potentially wasting actions in order to get rid of the threat. I was trying to find a more modern system that used something similar (and failing). Interesting to read it was so often ignored.
    Probably some sort of nostalgia looking back at it. I don’t think my younger players would be fond of me implementing it, and my guess would add as many problems as it fixes, so I doubt I’ll be using it. Oh well.

    Reply
  11. Jude W Mire

    I currently use standard 5e for rolling the original cycle of initiative, but once established, there’s ways to change the spots in it. There are things that can happen that make a player or enemy location in the cycle shift between one round and another. If a player chooses to hold their action, whatever spot in the initiative they finally take their action, is where they stay for the remainder of the combat (unless they do it again, until they hit dead last all the time). If they take no action at all on their turn they jump to the top of the initiative on the next round. Also, Conditions like Grappled or Restrained will lower your spot in the initiative by a number of spots equal to the character Initiative Rating, effectively removing it as a result of their entrapment. We also roll on Critical Hits and there’s a 50/50 chance the victim drops 1d4 spots in the rotation due to being stunned.

    Doing this adds a bit of variety to the rotation and isn’t too cumbersome.

    Reply
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