The post Turns and Turn Order Are the Worst, so Why Do Roleplaying Games Make Us Spend So Much Time Deliberating Them? compared the two most common methods for setting turn order, player-driven and cyclic, and weighed their merits and flaws. This post shares suggestions for making player-driven turn orders play better.
Daggerheart and Draw Steel both feature advice for managing their particular versions of player-driven turn orders.
In Draw Steel, players decide which of their characters goes next. The game master chooses a monster to take a turn after each player’s turn. The rule book suggests, “To help track when creatures have already acted in the current round, each creature can have a coin, token or card they flip over on the table, or some kind of flag they set on their virtual tabletop token, once they’ve taken a turn.” (I like how Draw Steel refers to players at the table as creatures.)
This system helps, but players often forget to flip their cards. You want to see everyone’s turn status at a glance, but the scattered cards require a survey of the entire table. Also, this method does nothing to help GMs track which of their creatures have gone. As an improvement, Teos “Alphastream” Abadía created a GM’s screen display with cards representing each combatant. As players and monsters go, he flips down their card. “Because players will often look at the Director (GM), they see the state of battle. This worked well in play. It helped all of us have a better grasp of who was left and decide who should go.”
Tom Christy at d20Play runs games using a virtual tabletop where players can enter their initiative numbers. The VTT’s initiative tracker works with numbers, so numbers substitute for cards. He has players planning their turns enter an initiative of 0 to show that they’re unready to act. When they become ready to go, they enter 1. When they want to go immediately, they enter 2. He turns off the VTT’s automatic initiative sorting and arranges the order himself, dragging high numbers to the top to signal a turn, and then sliding creatures who act down into the next round. Tom explains his method to me in this video.
Daggerheart takes player-driven turn order further by letting players choose to allow one PC to take multiple turns in a row. For groups that prefer “structured player turns,” Daggerheart suggests players use tokens to represent the number of turns they can take, limiting everyone to three turns until everyone gets three.
Even if players choose not to limit turns this way, having a visual count of the number of turns each player takes helps show who needs spotlight time. Some game masters recommend that instead of counting down using tokens, gamers try counting up by taking tokens. Put a supply of turn tokens in the middle of the table. When players take a turn, they take a token from this pool and line it up at their place at the table so the other players can see how much time everyone has spent in the spotlight.
With player-driven turns, the biggest delays come from the moments when no one sees a reason to jump ahead of the other players. For any game with a player-driven turn order, choose a default order based on seating around the table. If no one sees an opportunity to go, just go around the table to the next person due a turn. A default turn sequence limits discussion and keeps things simple for new players and players who just want to take orderly turns. This avoids the situation where everyone tries to politely defer to the other players.
No thanks. Not interested in those games in the least and there’s nothing wrong with the way initiative and turn order already works and has historically worked in D&D.
D&D- Do everything in decency and in order.
Draw Steel- A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds
Daggerheart- Dogs and cats sleeping together
A couple immediately negative comments! I’ll take it a different way…
I’ll say that I don’t like the “suspension of logic” that the D&D turn order – *any* turn order, honestly – creates. I run up to you, swing, then you run away, and I get a free swing because I’m already there –> instead of “I run at you, you run away at the same time!” As a forever-DM, I fear when the initiative system – rules, choices, whatever – result in the unbalanced “all of one side goes first”, whether it’s the players (monsters get curb-stomped) or the monsters (PC’s get curbstomped).
The two systems I’ve seen that address this do so in different ways. The first – I apologize, I forget the game name – is that the monsters always go first… but the PCs can sacrifice half-a-turn to pre-empt them. I.e. make an attack but not move, or move but not attack. So it’s a risk-reward choice the players get to make. But is doesn’t address the “I do all my stuff, then you do all your stuff, no reactions.
The other, HackMaster (and to a certain extent, Champions/HERO and Car Wars), is that everything happens in increments/impulses. Call it 6/round, during which you can move 5′; at any time during the *round*, you can take your action. So you approach me 5′, I back up 5′; you shoot, I dodge. then your friend shoots, I already dodged, woe is me — but I back up another 5′. This gives the more chaotic swirling melee that is a bit harder to manage at the table, and works better with a computer running it. I’ve played 3-round Champions battles using this method that took 4 hours… But it also makes spellcasting feel more real and dangerous — casting a Fireball might take 2 full increments, for example, during which *everyone* on the map is moving up to 10′ (and fast creatures maybe 15′ or 20′)! You don’t know exactly where everyone will be when you release the spell – and enemies have a couple chances to act and disrupt you!
Alternating monster/pc/monster/etc. is another proposal I’ve seen in the past. But you still have all-of-one creature, then all-of-another. And almost all of these systems mostly invalidate a character-design choice of “built to go first” (be it from high-dexterity, or Alertness, or class abilities, or spells).
So the search continues!