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” Abadíacreated 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.
What rates as the most exciting phrase spoken in a Dungeons & Dragons game? “Roll for initiative.” What rates as the most unwelcome task? After those three words, the minutes of bookkeeping required to set the initiative order. Instead of riding the excitement of an attack, the chore drains the energy from the game.
Rather than seeking ways to minimize this delay, the 2024 D&D design team extended it. Just about every 2024 game includes a character with the Alert feat, which postpones the start of each fight with another minute of talk about who wants to swap initiative. In a wild west shootout, Black Bart reaches for his revolver, his gang raises weapons, and then the heroes take a time out to discuss who should have the quickest draw today.
To avoid stalling games just as a fight begins, some DMs have players roll initiative for the next encounter at the end of each encounter, but the Alert feat hampers this trick.
To be fair, some gamers do enjoy wringing every advantage from initiative order, but most players just want the action to start. Often, the decision of who goes next hardly matters. That can prolong the discussion as everyone politely offers the initiative to anyone else.
The trouble with talking about who goes next
The Alert feat highlights two problems with encouraging discussion about who goes next.
The extra deliberation slows play when the game should give a sense of fast action.
Talking about who goes next distracts from the game world to spotlight turn order—one of the most awkward abstractions in any RPG.
Aside from the effects of injury and the notion that everyone easily rests while spending eight hours sleeping on cold stone in a murder hole, turns rate as most unrealistic thing in D&D. The weirdness goes way deeper than how the game stops time for a discussion of who has the fastest draw today.
Turns knot time in ridiculous ways
In six seconds of actual fighting, everyone acts at the same time. But in a D&D round, turns serve as a simple but unrealistic way to make sense of six seconds. The compromise knots time in ridiculous ways. The last creature to take a turn in a round ostensibly acts in the same six seconds as the first, but typically many creatures have moved. With fifth edition’s six-second rounds, one character can end their six-second turn next to a character about to start their turn and therefore six seconds in the past. If they pass a relay baton, the baton jumps six seconds back in time. If enough characters share the same six seconds running with the baton, the object outraces a jet. Want to get the most from a Wand of Magic Missiles? Just pass it between party members and let everyone fire during the same round. Turn a Horn of Blasting into a six-second barrage!
Games like early versions of D&D, Shadowdark, and Shadow of the Weird Wizard all lack a Ready action. This simplicity exposes another awkward problem with turns: Combatants normally stay frozen in time until their turn arrives. D&D’s Blink spell only brings an advantage because foes are usually not ready to interrupt the blinker’s turn. In a chase, the distance between creatures yo-yos by 60-some feet as everyone trades turns.
Players most often exploit this unreal situation by only emerging from total cover during their turns. Imagine the party must cross a field scattered with boulders to reach a wall protected by 100 archers. In a game without a Ready action, the party can move out in plain sight, and as long as everyone ends their turn in total cover behind a boulder, then they can cross without the archers ever getting a shot. Sure, game masters can improvise a way to bring common sense, but the rules as written still fail.
Adding complexity to simulate simultaneous turns
When fourth edition D&D introduced the Ready action, D&D gained a formal rule that closed this loophole. Ready actions made turns knottier and the game more complicated, but they proved essential.
To add some of sense of turns being simultaneous, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons had people declare their actions at the start of a turn, move first, and then attack. Based on this big picture, DMs might rule that characters couldn’t reuse the same magic item during a turn, and also rule that the archers could attack when the party broke cover. But declaring actions proved cumbersome and often the changing battlefield invalidated the players’ intentions. 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.” Many tables ignored the process. Nonetheless, on the 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide presents declaring actions as an optional initiative variant (p.270).
Who goes next
For the awkward necessity of turns to function, games need rules about who goes first and who goes next. D&D started simple. The group with the highest roll on a d6 went first. But soon these rules became complicated. First to account for things like weapon size in the name of realism, and in recent years, to emphasize tactical options or storytelling.
Modern games typically decide who goes next using one of two broad approaches:
Player-driven turn order. Games like Draw Steel, Daggerheart, and even original D&D let players decide who among the party goes next, so players can decide on the strongest order of actions. This encourages teamwork.
Cyclic turn order. Games like fifth edition D&D and Shadowdark set a turn order, and then cycle through the same order throughout the battle. This approach avoids weighing combat with ongoing decisions about who goes next, so combat moves quicker.
Side initiative
The idea of allowing players to decide the order PCs take action dates to original D&D.
Original D&D used side initiative where each group of allies took their turns together. While the player’s side has initiative, they decided how to order their character’s turns. Side initiative features the simplicity of nothing to track except who has already acted. And since players set the order for their side, they could orchestrate action combinations.
Games like Shadow of the Weird Wizard and the Cosmere Roleplaying Game use a variant of side initiative where the monsters always go first, but where players can spend one of their actions to go before the monsters. This skips an initiative roll and gives players control over when they act. The method starts each round with an engaging decision over whether to go first or to hold back and do more.
The best feature of side initiative is subtle. Side initiative (with help from early D&D’s lack of opportunity attacks) made running away from a fight much easier. When a side started their turn, they gained a chance to plan and execute an orderly retreat without any enemies interfering until everyone acted. Unlike modern D&D, where DMs typically serve fights contrived to ensure players win, early D&D’s random monsters often landed groups in deadly fights where running was the winning strategy.
To recapture some of the original game’s speed and simplicity, the fifth edition design team considered side initiative, but especially at low levels, the side that acted first gained a deadly advantage. Low level characters lack enough hit points to survive an entire round of enemy attacks. At higher levels, side initiative can turn still battles into one-sided romps when powerful spells shut down foes and attack combinations pile damage. Sure, an occasional batch of high initiative rolls can bring the same swings, but not consistently. (Side initiative appears as a variant on page 270 of the 2014 DMG.)
Players decide who goes next
Modern games with player-driven initiative typically give game masters rules for when the monsters can intrude on the turn order. So, in Daggerheart, the monsters take a turn after a player rolls with Fear. In Draw Steel, a monster goes after each player. Either way, these methods improve on side initiative by avoiding one-sided victories won because an entire side took their turns before their foes made a single action.
When players choose when characters take turns, they can make teamwork into a fun advantage where PCs get to flaunt their strengths. The caster can fireball before any allies rush into melee. The tank can rush to block charging monsters and give the rogue an opening to sneak attack. The healer can deliver a cure just in time to keep everyone fighting.
Player-driven turn orders can also foster the sort of dramatic moments common in cinema. Countless action movies set up a situation where the villain prepares a killing blow, and then gets shot when hero’s unseen ally suddenly appears. The situation counts as cliché, but we love it anyway. Systems where players can jump into initiative at any moment promote similar dramatic reversals.
Cinematic, player-driven turn order
Daggerheart takes player-driven turn order further by letting players choose to allow one PC to take multiple turns in a row. This enables the sort of sequencing common in movie battles where multiple combatants like the Avengers face off with multiple foes. The editing highlights one hero trading blows with an enemy, showing the upward beats that make for heroic moments and building tension whenever evil gains an edge (when the player rolls with Fear and the villain acts). Scenes like this rarely cut from character to character with each attack; they keep focus on a single hero until a dramatic moment prompts a cut away.
Of course, Daggerheart still plays as a game, so the optimal strategy in a fight may be to let your side’s best attacker take all the turns and make all the attacks while everyone else stands around and poses. I’ve seen movie fights like that too.
When I played fights in Daggerheart, my characters would sometimes chase foes to the edges of the map, finish them, and wind up too far away from the rest of the fight for me to feel good about asking someone to give up attacks just so I could move back. Unlike in a movie, nothing happens off camera.
Analyzing turn orders to create a narrative feels more like the judgments filmmakers make in an editing bay than like the split-second choices fighters make in combat. Perhaps the cinematic version of player-driven initiative in Daggerheart works best for players performing for an audience rather than for players making their own thrills in the moment at the table.
Weighing the merits of player-driver turn orders
How much does player-driven turn order multiply the flaws of the Alert feat by delaying the real fun of taking action? How much does it add teamwork and drama?
Player-driven turn orders add the most friction when no one sees a particular reason to jump ahead of one of their friends. Players don’t care who goes, so they act like the overly polite Goofy Gophers. “After you. No. I insist. After you.”
Player-driven turn orders play best when they enable the sort of choices a character might make in a battle: Delaying for a split second so an ally can open an advantage. Readying an attack for when a foe leaves cover.
Some of my favorite D&D sessions came when I competed in the fourth edition D&D Championship tournaments. The rules for changing turn orders offered two options: Delay and Ready. My teammates and I used those options to order turns in our favor and loved the tactical options. Besides the urgency of limited time, two factors helped us orchestrate actions without wasting time:
D&D’s cyclic initiative made changing the turn order an option rather than a constant necessity.
Before the tournaments, we practiced with the characters, so we knew the other PCs well enough to share similar opinions on who should act.
Recent games like Draw Steel and Daggerheart favor the flexibility of player-driven turn orders, but fourth edition’s take on cyclic initiative brings a better mix of play speed with decisions close to the ones combatants might make in a fight. The 13th Age roleplaying game by Jonathan Tweet and fourth edition designer Rob Heinsoo uses the fourth edition system. This game’s latest edition declares, “Jonathan introduced cyclic initiative in F20 gaming 25 years ago and we are never going back.” I understand why.
One of the great innovations of roleplaying game design came in 1977 when Steve Perrin and his Runequest design friends realized the advantage of using the same mechanic for attacks and skill checks. One core mechanic replaced the jumble of different mechanics that D&D used to determine if an attack landed, if a lock opened, if a secret door was spotted, and so on. Core mechanics brought a simplicity and consistency that makes RPGs easier to learn and play. Now even D&D follows Runequest’s example. Attacks work almost exactly like ability checks and saving throws.
But do roleplaying games play better when attack rolls work differently from other ability or skill checks? After all, D&D characters tend to make far more attack rolls than ability checks. And unlike most attack rolls, single ability checks open doors—literally and figuratively, and steer the course of an adventure.
Some newer games break the pattern of making checks and attacks the same. In Draw Steel attack rolls and ability checks differ, mainly because checks can fail, but attacks always succeed enough to do damage. The attack roll determines the amount of damage dealt. Even in D&D, attack rolls and ability checks work a bit differently. A natural-20 attack always hits and scores a critical, but the king disregards your natural-20 Persuasion roll. He still won’t give you his crown.
Treating attack rolls and ability tests differently recognizes that the two types of checks differ in key ways.
Frequent rolls even out highs and lows
A d20 roll yields extreme numbers like 1 and 20 as frequently as middle numbers, creating unpredictable results and adding excitement. D&D swingy d20 attack rolls play well because players make far more attack rolls than other tests. The high number of attack rolls tends to even out the random swings of each roll. Characters sometimes miss, but they hit often and still contribute to the fight.
For ability checks, that d20 roll creates a different dynamic where the roll of the die weighs much more than the +5 attribute bonus of the most exceptional characters. In D&D worlds, the mighty barbarian fails to open a pickle jar, and then hands it to the pencil-necked wizard who easily opens the lid. Such outcomes feel wrong. (See Why D&D’s d20 Tests Make Experts Look Inept and How to Make the Best of It.)
Depending on your distaste for a game like D&D that adds surprises at the price of making experts look inept by routinely letting them fail easy checks, the game might play better with something like a 3d6 roll for resolving ability checks. D&D has a precedent for checks based on a bell-curve die roll. Before D&D added ability check mechanics, some gamers used this house rule: You succeed if a 3d6 roll totals less than your relevant ability score. So a PC with an ability score 11 succeeded half the time, while someone with a 17 almost always succeeded. You can quibble about aspects of this mechanic, but it made high and low scores decisive enough for these traits to show in play. A similar mechanic would never work for to-hit rolls. Characters would virtually always hit, making attack rolls perfunctory. In 2004, the third-edition Unearthed Arcana book proposed a rule variant substituting a 3d6 roll for the d20. “The bell curve variant rewards bonuses relatively more and the die roll relatively less.” A D&D-like system might find an ideal compromise by using d20 attacks and either 3d6 or 2d10 ability checks. Such a compromise would lose the elegance of a single core mechanic, but original D&D used different mechanics for everything and the game thrived, so perhaps we could adapt to two.
Rolls where nothing happens
Repeating the same attack can be fun. Even a missed attack only brings momentary disappointment; the game speeds on to another turn. In contrast, an ability check that fails may create an inconclusive result that invites another try, perhaps starting a tiresome series of attempts that go nowhere and stall the game. Many newer games try to break such patterns. “In Daggerheart, every time you roll the dice, the scene changes in some way. There is no such thing as a roll where ‘nothing happens,’ because the fiction should constantly be evolving based on the successes and failures of the characters.
“A ‘failure’ should never mean that a character simply doesn’t get what they want, especially when that would result in a moment of inaction. Every action the players take should yield an active outcome—something that changes the situation they’re in.”
D&D assumes that ability checks work using the same principles as attacks, so as with an attack, a character can keep trying the same check. For both attacks and checks, circumstances might force a character to stop trying, but otherwise players keep rolling until they get the result they want. One check just represents one attempt of what could be many, and the outcome of a roll might be that nothing happens. Roll again and hope for a 20. The process can become so tiresome that third edition invented the “take 20” rule to skip to any mathematical inevitability.
Checks that focus on intent
D&D-style games tend to treat checks and attack rolls as the indifferent physics of the game world. Imagine an omnipresent DM rolling a DC 1 dexterity check every time a creature crosses the room. (With a swingy d20 roll, that means someone like me with a -1 Dexterity modifier fails to cross 1-in-20 rooms.) Intentions, drama, and fun hardly matter. Creatures can climb half their speed, making checks every turn, until they reach the top or fall to their death.
Games like Burning Wheel break the pattern retries by making checks start with a player declaring what they intend to accomplish, and then letting a roll decisively answer whether the character succeeds at their intent. “A player shall roll once for an applicable test and shall not roll again unless conditions legitimately and drastically change.” To reach a decisive answer, the difficulty of the check depends on intent. So a test to see if a character can pick a lock becomes harder if the character wants to work quietly, and harder still if they want to finish quickly before the guards return.
This attention to intent lets a failed check result in more natural consequences than a temporary failure and “I want to take another Utilize action to try again.” Instead, something behind the door hears the tampering and opens the door. Or the guards come into view the moment the lock pops. Either way, instead of stalling at a locked door, the game races ahead. Even if the check only reveals that the character fails to open the lock, the result is decisive and the players learn the lock surpasses their skills. Instead of trying again, they must find another route. Maybe just ring the bell and bluff. The story continues.
Such decisive checks assume that the character makes their best effort to succeed under the circumstances. You can’t try picking the lock with your non-dominant hand first, so that you gain a second attempt using your dominant hand. You can’t get a second attempt by oiling the lock. Your rogue almost certainly knows more about picking locks than you; they already tried the oil.
Focusing on intent also enables one check to apply for an entire task. Burning Wheel calls this the “Let it Ride” rule. Especially with that swingy d20, a series of checks nearly guarantees a failure. The expert climber falls and the master sneak breaks wind. Letting it ride means that one roll decides whether a character reaches their intended goal unless conditions drastically change.
You might protest that a good DM can run checks this way in D&D. Exactly. That’s the brilliance of focusing on intent and letting checks give decisive results. Even though the D&D rules steer toward a different style of play, DMs can opt for a decisive approach that works better.
Degrees of success and failure
Except for critical hits and a few powers with effects that get worse “if the saving throw fails by 5 or more,” D&D tests never show degrees of success or failure. D&D started without crits and only includes them now because players love them. Few players realize that crits hurt their characters more than monsters. Monsters typically die in three rounds. If they take a crit, that makes two. PCs may take hundreds of hits and numerous crits over their career. One crit could end a long run. Fumbles used to be as common a D&D house rule as crits, but when gamers realized that the skilled warriors with multiple attacks also rolled the most natural ones, fumbles fell from favor. D&D co-creator Gary Gygax knew crits and fumbles hurt PCs more than monsters and fought to keep them out of the game.
Other games have check mechanics that do show success and failure. For example, Fate includes a range of 11 adjectives from “terrible” to “legendary” describing degrees. Many gamers love the storytelling potential of a range of potential outcomes. The challenge of such mechanics comes when game masters keep facing the task of inventing the benefits of a “superb” success and the consequences of a “poor” failure. Also, as a player who enjoys the tactical decisions of combat, I favor games where I know the potential results of my attack rolls and rarely wonder what the game master might invent.
Most RPGs with a big combat pillar tend to tabulate the possible outcomes of good and bad attack rolls. A strong attack can always deal extra damage. In the heyday of critical hits and fumbles, games included grisly tables of potential outcomes and characters took to tying weapons to their hands to avoid all the dropped swords. None of this benefited the fighters who made most of the attacks or the PCs in general, who suffered from every monsters’ limb-severing crit.
If ability checks with degrees of success and failure tax the creativity of game masters, and if crits and fumbles punish PCs more than their foes, then how can degree of success and failure work?
Daggerheart stands out for letting bad attack rolls hurt attackers, but only with mild and indirect consequences: Initiative passes to the players’ foes and the game master gains Fear points to boost monsters. The Hope and Fear points that come from good and bad combat rolls just power characters and their foes.
For most play styles, fumbles on to-hit rolls don’t work. Pathfinder 2 includes critical successes and failures for both ability checks and saves, but the game skips fumbles for attack rolls. This stands as an instance where different rules apply to different types of checks. Modern games where players can fumble attacks either tend not to feature combat or tend to have characters that make equal numbers of attack rolls.
Pathfinder tries to ease the GM’s creative load by specifying the results of critical success and failure for most saves and actions. For instance, a critical success on a save might mean that you take no damage instead of half. And a critical failure on an attempt to pick a lock means you break your tools. Nonetheless, without factoring intent into the consequences, Pathfinder has limited possibilities for outcomes. How many times will the rogue break a lockpick before they just start packing 20 extras?
Decisive checks that factor intent work better because they lead to more natural consequences and because they never stall the game with inconclusive results and a pile of broken lock picks.
Different mechanics
Draw Steel shows a state-of-the art example of attack rolls and ability checks that use different mechanics. Ability checks show decisive answers with degrees of success. Bad failures bring complications that raise tension. Attack rolls skip fumble results, but include degrees of success that replace separate damage rolls. This streamlines the attacks in a D&D-style game, and cutting perhaps 20 seconds from each of a hundred attack rolls made during a session leads to a faster pace. As for the advantages of a 3d6 bell curve versus a d20 swing, Draw Steel splits the difference with a 2d10 triangle.
