Tag Archives: initiative

Making the Most of Cyclic Turn Order in Games Like D&D and Pathfinder

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My 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 cyclic turn orders play better.

Dungeons & Dragons and closely related games like Pathfinder and Shadowdark use cyclic initiative where a set a turn order is set at the start of a fight and combatants cycle through the same order throughout the battle.

Initiative tents

The two best methods for tracking cyclic use cards folded into tents. Such tents enable two methods with different strengths. One technique only puts numbers on the tents, the other uses names and numbers.

  • To use numbers only, create a set of tents numbered from 1 up. When initiative starts, everyone compares numbers and take the card the matches their place in the order. The highest takes 1, second highest 2, and so on. The DM takes cards for the monsters’ place in the order. Everyone shows their number at their spot at the table so others can see their place. The technique always uses the same numbered tents, so it skips the need to write anything. This method doesn’t work with games like Pathfinder where a Delay action can change the initiative order.
  • To use names and numbers, each player puts their character name on a card. When initiative starts, the players roll and write their scores on their card. Someone collects the cards, and lines them up in initiative order where everyone can see. I drape these cards on my DM screen, but this technique also lets someone other than the game master track initiative. I delegate sorting the cards to a player.

These tracking methods make the initiative order visible to everyone. When players can see the tents and initiative order, they can see when their turn is coming and plan their actions. This speeds play. Plus, the visible initiative invites players to remind less-attentive people of their turns. It prevents GMs from accidentally skipping someone’s turn.

Pre-rolling initiative

Combat runs better when exploration or interaction flips immediately to attack rolls without the minutes of bookkeeping required to set an initiative order. To avoid postponing the action, try rolling initiative in advance, either at the end of the last fight or at the start of a session. Pre-rolling works best with names and numbers on initiative tents.

At the start of the session, while everyone unpacks their dice and chats, I typically have players pre-roll initiative for a few fights. These initiative rolls build anticipation for the session to come and fit easily in the pregame chatter. Players write their scores on initiative tents. Before the next fight starts, I delegate the task of sorting the tents. If a player wants to use Alert, the person sorting organizes the swap.

Delay adds flexibility and complexity

Unlike conferring with allies to arrange when everyone takes a turn, Ready and Delay feel like battle strategies characters might take in a split second of mayhem.

Roleplaying games with combat rules need something like the Ready action to cope with the way one creature’s turn freezes time for every other creature. Strangely, many games omit such a rule and either rely on game masters to improvise one or on players to never abuse total cover by not giving foes a sporting chance to shoot back.

Fourth edition D&D and Pathfinder also include a Delay action. In a way, this action gives players a more powerful way to tinker with the turn order than games like Draw Steel and Daggerheart, because unlike those games where the game master can intrude between two characters’ turns, Delay allows characters to coordinate actions without monsters getting turns in between. Delay also brings a price, because characters who delay fall back in initiative and keep the later place. Such tradeoffs make interesting tactical choices.

The fifth edition design team opted for a simpler game when they dropped the Delay action. The game plays fine without it, but players lose flexibility to change the turn order in a way that seems natural.

Although Delaying seems simple, it requires intricate rules. In D&D, many effects trigger at the start or end of a creature’s turn, so fourth edition needed rules summarized by this text: “You can’t Delay to avoid negative consequences that would happen on your turn or to extend beneficial effects that would end on your turn.” The fifth edition designers opted to skip all that baggage.

For an easy house rule, allow players to delay at the start of initiative before their character acts. This adds no rules complications while still creating tactical options. Delaying at the start of combat might allow the rogue to flank after the fighter moves adjacent to a foe and sets up a sneak attack.

For the players who enjoy the tactical intricacies brought by the full Delay action, groups can import the delay rules from fourth edition D&D. Here are the rules the fifth edition designers wished to avoid.

Delay

By choosing to delay, you take no action and then act normally on whatever initiative count you decide to act. When you delay, you voluntarily reduce your own initiative result for the rest of the combat. When your new, lower initiative count comes up later in the same round, you can act normally. You can specify this new initiative result or just wait until sometime later in the round and act then, thus fixing your new initiative count at that point.

You never get back the time you spend waiting to see what’s going to happen. You also can’t interrupt anyone else’s action (as you can with a readied action).

Your initiative result becomes the count on which you took the delayed action. If you come to your next action and have not yet performed an action, you don’t get to take a delayed action (though you can delay again).

If you take a delayed action in the next round, before your regular turn comes up, your initiative count rises to that new point in the order of battle, and you do not get your regular action that round.

When you Delay, any persistent damage or other negative effects that normally occur at the start or end of your turn occur immediately when you use the Delay action. Any beneficial effects that would end at any point during your turn also end. You can’t Delay to avoid negative consequences that would happen on your turn or to extend beneficial effects that would end on your turn.

Related: What to Do When a D&D Player Wants to Be Ready, Call a Shot, or Delay
New Printable Initiative Trackers for Dungeons & Dragons
What to do when a player interrupts a role-playing scene to start a battle

Making the Best of Roleplaying Games Like Draw Steel and Daggerheart With Player-Driven Turn Orders

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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.

3d dungeon terrain from gamehole con 2025

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.

Turns and Turn Order Are the Worst, so Why Do Roleplaying Games Make Us Spend So Much Time Deliberating Them?

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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.

Related:
For 10 Years D&D Suffered From an Unplayable Initiative System. Blame the Game’s Wargaming Roots
How D&D Got an Initiative System Rooted in California House Rules

Daggerheart vs. the MCDM RPG vs. D&D: A Playtest Comparison

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If games to suit every play style and new games bringing fresh ideas makes a golden age, then the best time for gamers is now. In the past weeks, I’ve played preview releases of two upcoming games: the MCDM RPG championed by Matt Colville with lead designer James Introcaso, and the Daggerheart RPG championed by Matt Mercer with lead designer Spenser Starke. Both games play in the same genre and style as D&D, but each aims to prove more fun for certain styles of play. The MCDM RPG seeks to recreate some of the tactical play exemplified by fourth edition D&D in fast-paced, cinematic battles. Daggerheart targets a more narrative, rules-light style that fosters heroic moments and chances for players to reveal their characters.

Core mechanics

The core mechanics of these games target 3 common gripes about the core mechanic of D&D.

  • A lack of degrees of success or failure limits the potential outcomes of a check.
  • Players experience a feel-bad moment when they miss and lose their opportunity to do something interesting on their turn.
  • The swinginess of D&D’s d20 mechanic, which can make experts look inept and zeros look like heroes.

Degrees of success

In Daggerheart’s core mechanic, players roll a pair of 12-sided dice and add the numbers. If the total exceeds a target number, then the roll succeeds. Aside from the different dice, this resembles a d20 check, but Daggerheart adds a twist. One of the d12s is marked as the Hope die and the other the Fear die. The die that rolls higher adds Hope or Fear to the result. Whether or not a roll succeeds, a roll with Hope brings a boost in the form of a Hope token players can spend to benefit their character. A roll with Fear brings complications, potentially success at a price. The game master gains a fear token they can spend to make the character’s predicament more difficult. Hope and Fear create a range of heroic moments and setbacks that players and game masters can use to inspire storytelling.

Games with such success-with-complications, fail-forward mechanics weigh game masters with the extra creative burden of improvising complications to pair with success. For combat rolls though, Daggerheart gives GMs who gain Fear a menu of complications to select. The first complication is that players lose initiative, something this post will discuss later.

The MCDM RPG bakes degrees of success into the game’s power roll mechanic. The higher the sum of 2d6, the better the degree. They even have names for the degrees: tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3. Perhaps they considered reaching to older games like Marvel Super Heroes for tier names like good, excellent, and remarkable, but for one type of rolls tier 1 means a small success, and for another type, tier 1 means failure. The game features two types of power rolls: ability rolls, which correspond to D&D’s attack rolls, and tests, which correspond to D&D’s ability checks. Ability rolls don’t have a chance of failure, which leads to the second common gripe levelled at the D&D’s core d20 mechanic.

No missed attacks

The MCDM RPG tries to eliminate the down moments when a player misses an attack and wastes their turn. All ability rolls succeed, with an outcome that determines a degree of success and sets an amount of damage. Without damage rolls, the system plays faster. No one likes to lose a turn to a miss, but in play I found that the lack of failure in attack rolls made combat feel less compelling. The reason comes down to something psychologists call intermittent reinforcement where a behavior like rolling attacks earns inconsistent and unpredictable rewards. Intermittent reinforcement built the casinos along the Las Vegas Strip and it’s why no one would play a slot machine that returns exactly $0.97 every time you drop a dollar. To be fair, the version of the MCDM RPG I played used a different combat mechanic where players just rolled damage, so even the biggest roll on a formula like 2d6+6 yielded just 5 more points than average. The new mechanic allows bigger results for big rolls and undoubtedly plays better.

Swingy d20s

Both the MCDM RPG and Daggerheart adopt core mechanics that have players rolling two dice and summing the total. In the MCDM RPG it’s 2d6; in Daggerheart it’s 2d12. Both games have a good reason to avoid the single d20 roll in D&D. When you roll 2 dice and sum the results, numbers in the middle become much more common, creating a bell curve. When you roll just one 20-sided die, extreme results prove just as common as average results. That leads to the sort of wacky outcomes that frequently seen in D&D games where the mighty thewed barbarian slams into the door, rolls a 2, and bounces off. Next, the pencil-necked gnome wizard kicks the door, rolls an 18 and it crashes open. With a d20 roll, the roll swamps the influence of a character’s abilities. Some d20 games try to reward expert characters by giving them very high modifiers. A character with something a +15 skill bonus stands out from one with no bonus, but then to challenge that character, GMs need difficulty classes like 30, which become completely unreachable for most characters. So high-level adventures start including impossible obstacles for parties that lack the right sort of character. (See Why D&D’s d20 Tests Make Experts Look Inept and How to Make the Best of It.)

By adding two die rolls to get a bell curve of results, expert characters start to feel like experts who reliably succeed, and average characters need extraordinary luck to accomplish difficult tasks. All that happens without forcing the game to set difficulties that make tasks impossible for average characters.

Advantage and disadvantage.

Gamers love how fifth edition’s advantage and disadvantage mechanic streamlines all the fiddly +1 and +2 modifiers included in earlier editions of the game. The new edition also removes past rules for how these modifiers stack. Instead, advantage and disadvantage provide a simple, compelling alternative. It’s a blunt adjustment, but considering how swingy d20 rolls are anyway, the coarse mechanic hardly seems to matter in play.

To me, and apparently to the designers of the MCDM RPG and Daggerheart, the worst part of advantage and disadvantage stems from how it never stacks. If a character has a consistent way of gaining advantage, other decisions, tactics and character traits that grant advantage stop mattering. The game feels flat. This is why cover—an easy advantage to consistently gain—typically imposes a -2 penalty rather than imposing disadvantage on attackers.

In Daggerheart, advantage and disadvantage don’t entirely wash out. If a character has two sources of advantage and one source of disadvantage, they still gain one advantage die. Because of the 2d12 bell curve, small modifiers make bigger differences, so advantage means just rolling an extra d6 and adding the results.

In the MCDM RPG, the 2d6 rolls provide an even narrower range of numbers, so the design team settled on modifying the roll with up to two edges of + 1 or two banes of –1. That feels less exciting than rolling extra dice, but it worked best in testing.

Initiative

Both Daggerheart and the MCDM RPG attempt to improve on D&D’s cyclical initiative system.

In the MCDM RPG, characters can go in any order as decided by their players. The game master takes a turn after each of the character’s turns. In D&D, when a solo monster rolls a poor initiative, the entire party gets to unleash their best spells and attacks first, potentially turning an exciting fight into a quick execution. The MCDM RPG’s alternating initiative prevents such a letdown while providing a more consistent experience.

Daggerheart goes for a looser system that feels even more freewheeling and narrative. Players can take a turn whenever they like. One player can even take multiple turns in a row. I suspect the designers intend to enable heroic moments where characters can string actions into sequences that feel cinematic without the game’s turn order interrupting each moment with 10 minutes of everyone else’s turns.

This goal doesn’t always happen, because a roll with Fear gives the next turn to the GM, but with a bit of luck the game can unlock cinematic, heroic moments.

Naturally, some gamers worry that such a loose system will encourage players to hog the spotlight, and certainly that fear seems valid. I’ve played games where one player with the party’s best interests at heart tried to help us “win” by dominating the action like a superior basketball player might try to help the team by taking every shot.

Still, D&D became a better game when designers stopped trying to fix obnoxious players. Most players strive to share the spotlight. However, the real trouble is that both MCDM and Daggerheart’s systems threaten to slow the game’s pace during combat.

Before third edition, most D&D groups used side initiative, so the party and the DM each rolled a die and the side with the best roll went first. During a party’s initiative, they decided the characters’ turns to act. Most tables rolled initiative every round, and that added some exciting uncertainly, but all this added friction. Third edition’s lead designer Jonathan Tweet says, “It takes forever to go through the round because no one knows who’s next and people get dropped.”

The third-edition team decided to try a rule that originated in some West Coast D&D variants like the Warlock rules devised at Caltech and the Perrin Conventions created by future Runequest designer and D&D contributor Steve Perrin. That variant was cyclical initiative where everyone rolls to establish an order and the order stays the same throughout the fight. “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.”

Fifth edition’s initiative system removes decision making to make play faster. Unlike in past editions, players can’t even delay their turns. The designers imposed this restriction to speed the pace of combat.

Designer 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.”

Combat escalation

In D&D, major battles typically start with characters unleashing their most powerful spells and abilities, sometimes turning a climactic showdown into an anticlimactic beat down. But if the foes survive and the fight wears on, depleted characters start grinding with basic attacks. Instead of rising excitement, the game sputters. Both the MCDM RPG and Daggerheart give characters resources that can replenish or even increase during combat. In the MCDM RPG, various heroic resources like rage can increase; in Daggerheart Hope can increase. Especially in the MCDM RPG, this helps create a sense of escalating action in battles. Meanwhile, a growing stack of Fear tokens can lead to a growing sense of peril.

The MCDM RPG even adds a resource called victories that makes characters stronger as they press on during an adventuring day. Instead of encouraging a 5-minute adventuring day, the system encourages players to test their limits like real heroes.

Resolution transparency

When I played Daggerheart, my character Garrick included a feature that seemed intended to foster looser, more narrative play. His battle strategist feature made him especially good at combat maneuvers like shoves, grapples, and trips. However, the playtest lacks any rules for these sorts of maneuvers. Perhaps I’m shackled to an outdated mindset, but I feel more comfortable playing in a system where I understand how my character’s actions will be resolved. If every use of an ability means that the GM and I must improvise a fair way to resolve the action, then I’m inclined to skip delaying the game for that discussion.

Ability scores

Both Daggerheart and the MCDM RPG use ability scores that parallel the scores used in D&D. Both systems take advantage of their clean-sheet designs to replace some of the scores’ names with more suitable terms. For example, both systems replace Charisma with Presence, a term that removes the implication of comeliness, leaving just force of personality. Daggerheart makes another interesting revision. It replaces Dexterity with two scores: Agility and Finesse. In D&D, Dexterity proves too valuable, so players build quick characters and the PCs in play show less variety. By turning Dexterity into two scores, Daggerheart gives each score a more equal value in the game. Daggerheart drops another score that D&D makes too valuable: Constitution. Every D&D character is alike in boasting a stout Constitution, and that means the score does little to make characters distinct. Instead, in Daggerheart, a character’s hit points mainly depend on their class.

Death

D&D makes dropping to zero hit points easy but dying—except at first level—nearly impossible. This makes difficult battles into unintentionally comical scenes where characters keep flopping to the ground, presumably at death’s door, only to be repeatedly revived. The rules even inspire a counterintuitive strategy where a player might refuse to heal friends until they lay dying because damage below 0 heals for free. This robs any sense of peril from going near death. Players with a dying character worry more about losing a turn than losing a character. If no one bothers to pour a potion in your character’s mouth, then rolling a death save instead of taking an action provides D&D’s ultimate feel-bad moment.

When a D&D character defies the odds and really dies, the game tends to make the big moment into the anticlimactic result of a series of lost turns and bad death saves. We want characters to die in heroic blazes of glory that feel cinematic rather than by bleeding out into the dirt.

Both Daggerheart and the MCDM RPG introduce rules for death and dying that vastly improve on D&D by giving characters a shot at a heroic finale.

In the MCDM RPG, a character with 0 or less Health becomes unbalanced. They can still act but most actions cost them 5 more Health. If the negative Health value reaches half their Health maximum value, they die. This challenges players to decide how much they wish to press their luck. Should a character risk a blaze of glory or shrink back to safety? Characters die because they dared for glory.

Daggerheart gives characters with no hit points a choice of death moves:

  • They can take an action, gain an automatic critical success, and then die.
  • They can risk their lives on a die roll. If they roll Hope, they regain Hit Points; if the roll Fear, they die.
  • They can drop unconscious and “work with the GM to describe how the situation gets much worse.” This option risks permanently reducing your character’s capacity for Hope by one. New Characters can accumulate up to 5 Hope tokens. If that capacity ever drops to 0, the hopeless character must end their journey.

When designers create D&D’s sixth edition, they should look to Daggerheart and the MCDM RPG for inspiration, but until then these rules count as the best ideas to steal for your game.

Durable first level characters

In D&D, first level characters are a durable as soap bubbles, so new players typically enter the game at its most dangerous. New players who lose characters often have a bad play experience and decide D&D isn’t the game for them. They might be wrong, but they walk away anyway. Both the MCDM RPG and Daggerheart make new characters durable, a feature that D&D gained with fourth edition and lost with fifth. If you’re listening to me now, you might be a D&D enthusiast who lost characters in their first game and kept playing, so you might argue that I am making a problem out of nothing, but that’s survival bias that ignores all the potential fans who quit because their characters died during their first session. None of those folks are reading this post now.

As for my first games of the MCDM RPG and Daggerheart, both games left me ready for more.

3 Reasons to Never Split the Party and How to Ignore Them

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Everyone who plays roleplaying games learns the Dungeons & Dragons adage never split the party.

In the hobby’s early days, when dungeon masters were referees and players chose difficulty by dungeon level, never splitting the party always made good strategy. Parties found safety in numbers. In a dungeon stocked with encounters suited for a full party, splitting the party jeopardizes everyone.

In today’s game, player characters do more than assault dungeons. Sometimes the elf and wizard must persuade the emissary, the thief and warlock need to infiltrate a manor house, and the bard and noble paladin need to charm guests at a ball. They could work better separately, but players insist on keeping the party together. So the dwarf insults the emissary, the paladin’s chainmail racket alerts the manor guards, and a motley band of killers sours the ball. Then midnight tolls and evil triumphs.

Never split the party started as a good strategy, but now it feels like part of the game’s social contract. Even when splitting the party seems logical, players keep the group together for three metagame reasons.

1. Players fear encounters designed for a full party.

Players expect combat encounters designed to challenge a group of 4 to 7 characters. If they split up before a fight erupts, then an undermanned party becomes overmatched.

Typically though, groups split to tackle roleplaying, stealth, and investigation challenges that seem unlikely to lead to fights.

If half of a split party lands in a fight, DMs can adjust the difficulty of the foes, but leaving the opposition unchanged may play better. Players who split up despite perilous situations know they’re taking an extra risk and they feel a greater sense of peril, especially when their own decisions lead to danger. They use stealth and cunning in ways they might not with a full group, when they assume they can defeat any monsters set before them. In a way, adjusting threats steals the players’ agency by nullifying the consequences of their actions. (See How to Scare D&D Players—Even When They Play Mighty Heroes.)

2. Players stay together as a courtesy to the game master.

By staying together, players avoid forcing the GM to juggle two separate narratives. But splitting attention between two groups can play well as long as each of the smaller groups faces their own challenges. The trick comes from devising situations that keep each part of the group thinking.

When a subgroup needs time to plan or plot their next move, cut from their scene to a scene featuring players ready for action. With a full group, planning means waiting for a decision while you as the DM worries that the idle time creates a slow place. With a split group, the game hurtles ahead and the subgroup facing a choice can plan without feeling rushed. The session feels brisk and pacing feels effortless!

Usually, game time between the subgroups can pass at different rates as long as the players in real time feel engaged. D&D scenarios seldom rely on precise timekeeping anyway.

The troublesome situations come when one party member wanders while the rest wait. A short scouting mission can give some players a break to grab a snack, but when reconnaissance takes too long, restless players start wondering why they showed up. For advice on handling scouting, see 4 Tips For When One Player Scouts the Dungeon.

3. Players stay together to keep everyone involved in the action.

A split party inevitably forces some players to wait until the spotlight returns to them. But unexpectedly, splitting the party can make players feel more active. In a smaller subgroup, each individual gains a greater role. And as the DM cuts between subgroups, the inactive players can stay busy planning their next move.

Even when the entire party faces a roleplaying scene, typically only one or two players participate. The rest watch. Sometimes the player with the most charismatic character serves as the face with the highest bonus. Often the player with the most forceful personality does all the talking.

But when a party splits, soft-spoken players gain time in the spotlight. Player characters gain unique chances to reveal their character’s personality and talents. So the wizard finally gets to cast Sending and the thief gets to sneak without some armored clod making a racket.

Instead of avoiding challenges suited to split parties, look for situations where dividing the party gives everyone a chance to show their talents and to roleplay.

Typically, time pressure leads groups to split up. If the characters only need to gain the support of the head of the merchant council, then one player makes all the diplomacy rolls. If the characters must split up to convince every member of the merchant council before their vote, then every player must help. Forcing a party to divide and conquer invites everyone to contribute.

If done well, splitting the party creates more spotlight time for every player at the table.

Cut from one group to the next every few minutes. Some DMs even set a timer for about 4 minutes. If you tend to lose track of time, then a countdown helps.

The best moment to switch subgroups comes when the active group faces a choice. While players debate their next move, cut to the other half of the table. This sort of switch keeps half the players busy planning while the rest act. Such decision points typically come after the group makes a discovery or when their situation changes. These situations make players wonder what happens next, and that curiosity keeps them engaged while they wait to regain the spotlight.

If you can’t switch scenes on a decision point, switch on a moment of tension, ideally a cliffhanger.

A split party invites some techniques that help one keep everyone busy.

If two subgroups land in a fight, run both battles on the same initiative count. This keeps everyone busy while using a familiar game mechanic to cut between scenes. The technique works so well that, as a DM, I feel tempted to start a second fight whenever half of a split party buys trouble. Time to roll a random encounter behind the screen.

Delegate the non-player characters and even monsters to the idle players. For groups who particularly enjoy roleplaying and collaborative storytelling, write down a few quick notes about NPCs on a card. When the NPC enters a scene, give control of the character to a player.

Depending on your players’ dispositions, you might also recruit idle players to run monsters in a battle. This works especially well in a simple fight where you expect the PCs to win. If the foes bring complicated abilities or motives, or if their power threatens to slay characters, I would avoid giving up control. When a GM kills a character, it comes in the line of duty, but a player should not take the heat for killing a PC.

Separate the players into their own rooms. Even when you split a party, players tend to remain at the same table. This lets inactive players watch the story and lets the DM switch easily from one subgroup to another.

While sharing a table, the spectators learn things that their characters don’t. Most players take it as a point of honor not to use their unearned knowledge. If not, remind them to play in character based on what their character knows.

Occasionaly separating players to different rooms can add fun though. No player has access to hidden information, so decisions become more interesting. Everyone feels an added sense of peril and concern for their missing comrades.

If you separate players, frequent switches become more important, so the groups should be as near as the kitchen and the dining room. Make the separation temporary. Your players came to play together.

Go ahead. Split the party. For a DM running a divided party, the second hardest trick comes from finding situations where all the subgroups remain engaged. The hardest trick? Encouraging the players to defy protocol and split up when splitting makes sense.

Scrutinizing the 9 Most Popular House Rules for D&D

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In the beginning, Dungeons & Dragons required house rules to run. For instance, for 10 years the game suffered from an unplayable initiative system, so everyone used a house rule. Every dungeon master grew accustomed to tinkering with the game, leading to a generation of amateur game designers who sometimes graduated to the pros.

Fifth edition has proved sound enough that the game’s designers resist tweaking even the worst parts of the game. The reluctance makes sense: No customer wants to learn that the rules in their game book are changed by some notice on the Internet.

Nonetheless, everyone who plays the game long enough wishes something played a bit differently, perhaps a bit better. Forty-some years on, the roleplayer’s urge to design and redesign remains. My search for fifth-edition house rules turned up an avalanche of favorites.

What are the most popular house rules for D&D and how do they stand to scrutiny?

Players may spend inspiration to a gain a reroll.

Spending inspiration gives you advantage an attack roll, saving throw, or ability check, so you must choose to use inspiration before the roll. Meanwhile, so many people think that inspiration allows a reroll that every convention DM who runs by the book can tell a story of being falsely accused of not knowing the rules. “You may be right,” we lie. “Go ahead and look that up for me.”

Advantage. The original conception of Inspiration supposed that players would gain inspiration more frequently than typical now. During the edition’s design, Mike Mearls wrote, “A player can gain it once per significant scene or important combat. Inspiration fades quickly, so you must spend it within a few minutes in game time before you lose it.” The lighter benefit of advantage suited this frequency. With most DMs awarding Inspiration less often, a stronger reroll benefit works fine.

Disadvantage. You may foster a misunderstanding that causes your players to call out some poor DM who plays by the book.

Players roll their characters’ death saves in secret.

Groups who adopt this house rule allow players to override their secret saving roles to spare their character or, I suppose, speed a tragic end. This change doesn’t actually change D&D rules, so the pedant in me wants to call it a table convention.

Advantage. By rolling their character’s death saves secretly, players gain more control over whether their character dies. This suits groups who emphasize story and would rather not see the campaign arc overturned by a blown save.

Disadvantage. Allowing players to choose not to die may seem like a violation of the game’s spirit to players who value a genuine threat of death.

See How Character Death Lands D&D in a Tug-of-War Between Game and Story.

DMs roll the characters’ death saves in secret.

Advantage. If you play fifth edition long enough, you suffer through this scene: Your character drops early in a fight, and because you never fail a death save, no one bothers to heal you. The players know your character remains 3 turns from death, so no one feels urgency. Meanwhile, for all the characters know, their friend is hearing her dead parents calling her toward the light. (As an adventurer, her parents are as inevitably dead as a Disney lead’s mother.)

If the DM rolls death saves, or the player rolls and only shares the result with the DM, the rest of the party stops gaining metagame information about a dying character’s closeness to the final curtain. This adds urgency to the need to heal fallen characters and can heighten feelings of peril. Such secrecy encourages players to quickly bring their friends back into the action.

Disadvantage. Particularly if the DM rolls, the players lose a sense of control over their fate, even if that false sense only comes from throwing the die.

Precedent. If Gary had invented death saves, you know that he would have rolled them secretly for players.

Critical hits deal maximum damage plus damage from a second roll of the dice.

Advantage. In fifth edition, we’ve all experienced the excitement of a critical, followed by the roll of a handful of dice that yields mostly ones, twos, and a big letdown. Reinforcing critical hits guarantees big damage. This favors divine smiters, sneak attackers, and the kid at my game table whose “practice” rolls uncannily end when he rolls a 20. “Look! Another critical!”

Disadvantage. Apparently, none of the folks bolstering criticals have played a paladin and realized that the class rates as almost too good without smites backed by stronger crits.

Criticals offer fun, but they are secretly bad for players because characters endure far more critical hits than any monster. Dialing up extra damage increases the chance that a monster’s attack will kill a character dead. For criticals that avoid the bummer of low rolls without adding risk to player characters, make criticals deal maximum damage.

Precedent. In third edition, criticals let you double your damage bonuses along with your damage dice. Fourth edition backed away from doubling damage bonuses by just making criticals deal maximum damage. That favored players, but eliminated the fun of the roll and the chance of huge damage against monsters. The fifth-edition system opts for a mechanic converging on maximum damage, but with extra dice to roll.

Lesser Restoration and remove curse won’t automatically remove diseases, poisons, and curses.

Lesser restoration and remove curse turn poisoning, diseases, and curses in D&D into the loss of a spell or a donation at the local temple. To match folklore and for story, we want curses and other afflictions to prompt quests, so many groups add limits to the spell remedies. The limits run from an ability check similar to dispel magic, to a requirement for special material components, to more. Adventurers League administrator Greg Marks writes, “I’m a big fan of any story-based poison or disease requiring a story-based solution in addition.” If a character gets hit with a bestow curse spell in a random encounter, then remove curse fixes it. If the party is cursed by the dying breath of a witch queen, then that’s an adventure to fix.

Advantage. Limiting lesser Restoration and remove curse opens D&D to a type of story that pervades the tales that inspired the game.

Disadvantage. Limiting these spells hurts characters who prepare them, but not as much as in earlier editions. Originally, clerics who prepared a just-in-case spell like remove curse lost a spell slot, which they could have devoted to a healing spell that would always prove useful.

Precedent. Many adventures through D&D’s history include curses and other afflictions that resist mere spells.

Healing potions can be consumed with a bonus action.

A character can spend a bonus action to drink a healing potion. Administering a potion to another character still requires an action.

Advantage. When a typical round takes several minutes of real time, losing an action to drink a healing potion feels like a bummer. Also, a player who needs a potion probably needs that action to turn the tide of battle.

Disadvantage. If your campaign awards a typical amount of treasure, then the 50 gp cost of a healing potion quickly becomes negligible, especially when characters have little else to spend money on. If drinking becomes a bonus, expect smart players to litter battlefields with empty vials. Still, this change probably won’t upset the game’s balance.

Lead rules designer Jeremy Crawford might prefer that you not mistreat bonus actions as just a lesser sort of action though.

Characters gain a bonus feat at first level.

Advantage. Granting characters an extra feat enables more customization, especially for groups who tend to shorter, low-level campaigns. Some DMs even allow characters who reach ability score increases to gain both an increase and a feat rather than choosing one.

Disadvantage. Some feats grant big boosts in power. See The Two D&D Feats Everyone Loves, How to Build a D&D Polearm Master That Might Be Better Than a Sharpshooter, and How to Build a Sharpshooter Who Wins D&D. Also, the Lucky feat may as well be called Never Fail a Save. The power of feats means that bonus feats steeply increase the power curve for characters. Some groups don’t mind because they see combat as a way for characters to show off their prowess rather than a challenge that endangers heroes. Some DMs don’t mind because they happily dial up the opposition to match.

Also, pairing extra feats with ability score increases strongly encourages multi-class characters to take class levels in blocks of 4.

Precedent. If you like this rule because it allows extra customization, you may benefit by switching game systems. Pathfinder 2 modularizes character advancement into choices of feats and allows much more customization of characters.

Players can delay their turn to take a later place in initiative.

Advantage. Too often, the slow, tough characters who open the dungeon door roll a low initiative while the quicker skirmishers in back roll high. The tanks in front wind up bottling up the door because the rules offer no way for the bladesinger in back to just wait for the paladin to step out of the damn way.

Also, some groups enjoy the tactical options unlocked by letting characters delay.

Disadvantage. The D&D designers sought faster play and a leaner game by dropping the delay option. For more, see 3 Actions D&D Players Want That Defy the Game’s Design Choices.

I favor a lightweight alternative to a full delay option. Before combat starts, let players opt for a lower initiative than they rolled.

Precedent. Third and fourth edition both included a delay option. For a suggested delay rule adapted from those editions, see What to Do When a D&D Player Wants to Be Ready, Call a Shot, or Delay.

Characters who fail a death save suffer a level of exhaustion.

Advantage. Players intent on wringing every advantage from the game rules will only heal characters when they drop, because damage below 0 heals for free. Imagine being injured but denied healing until you lie dying on the dungeon floor because the magic somehow works better that way. As an adventurer, I would find a less psycho group of comrades in arms.

By making characters who fail a death save suffer a level of exhaustion, the dying condition becomes something to be realistically feared rather than an inconvenience where players can exploit their metagame understanding of fifth edition’s lack of negative hit points.

Disadvantage. Although this penalty encourages players to keep their friends in the game rather than incapacitated by 0 hit points, the rule remains a penalty that will sometimes prove unavoidable.

Precedent. In first edition, characters brought to 0 or fewer hit points needed a week of rest. “The character cannot attack, defend, cast spells, use magic devices, carry burdens, run, study, research, or do anything else.” However, due to house rules, I never saw this penalty enforced.

What to Do When a D&D Player Wants to Be Ready, Call a Shot, or Delay

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Without knowing any rules—without knowing a d20 from a d12—new Dungeons & Dragons players can join a party and love the game at least as much as veteran players. Everything feels fresh and thrilling, so often the newcomers have more fun. They play without rules by just imagining themselves as heroes and asking what they would do.

For the rest of us, knowing the rules can interfere with that primal experience. Instead of interacting with the D&D world, we slip into interacting with the rules. So when we hear footsteps approaching a door, instead of nocking an arrow and drawing a bow, we ask to ready an attack action for when a monster opens the door. In this example, that ready action breaks the rules because ready only applies during combat’s initiative order.

My last post described 3 times when players ask to use rules not even in the game. The game omits the supposed rules because they would run against D&D’s design approach. Often, past editions of the game even included these extra rules, but fifth edition’s more economical design forced them out. That post explained the designers’ choices and how to explain the missing rules to players.

Still, although the rules only allow ready actions in combat, lack a system for called shots, and omit the delay action, characters can still aim a drawn bow at a closed door, shoot for the tentacle gripping a friend, and perhaps even wait for the slow paladin to stop blocking the door.

This post offers advice for ruling on all those requests without inventing rules that the designers skipped for good reasons.

1. Readying an action outside of combat.

Players usually ask to ready outside combat for one of two reasons:

  • They expect trouble and want to stay alert.

  • They want to attack first. 

D&D lead rules designer Jeremy Crawford explained how he handles the request to stay alert. “Usually what that means is they won’t be surprised at my table.” Alternately, you could grant the character advantage on perception checks and a cooresponding +5 to passive perception until the situation changes or you judge that the characters’ attention would ease to a normal level. Nobody can stay especially alert all the time except barbarians with Feral Instinct. Impinging on a class feature would make barbarians angry. You wouldn’t like that.

Often, attempts to gain the first attack fall under surprise rules. When a party prepares to attack something inside a closed door and that foe remains unaware of the threat, then the monster starts combat surprised. If the monster knows about the threat, then the situation matches the usual start of a fight: Everyone is ready. Roll initiative to see who goes first. DMs who rule that a character with an arrow pulled only needs an instant to aim and shoot might give that character advantage on initiative. Don’t make the first attack automatic. We’ve all seen countless scenes where some skilled fighter stares down a poised weapon, and then uses lightning reflexes to strike first.

2. Called shots.

Usually players ask to call shots to gain a quicker route to taking a foe from a fight. To that I say, “Your characters are experts at combat. With each attack, they use their skills to find the best opportunity to land a blow that deals the most damage and that offers the best chance of taking your foe out of the fight.”

The second-edition Dungeon Master’s Guide limited called shots with a rule that remains sound in fifth. “Against a creature, a called shot will only cause the normal amount of damage allowed by the weapon. Attempts to blind, cripple, or maim will not succeed.”

Such a limit quashes most interest in called shots, so the designers opted for rules economy over adding rules for called shots. Still, players may want to temporarily impose a condition like Blinded, Deafened, or Prone. Conditions in D&D typically last a round or allow saves every turn. Players could also aim to distract, slow movement, or disarm.

The latest Dungeon Master’s Guide includes rules for disarming a foe (p.257). For other conditions, game designer Justin Alexander suggests some sensible, but untested rules. His post details the design decisions behind called shots. Called shots typically suffer a penalty of -2 or -4 as judged by the DM. (Don’t impose disadvantage, because that creates an incentive to call a shot whenever an attack would suffer disadvantage anyway. D&D lacks double disadvantage.) If the called shot succeeds, then you deal damage normally and the target must make an appropriate saving throw or suffer the effect. I recommend calculating a saving throw DC using a formula similar to the Battle Master fighter’s Maneuver save DC. Add 5 + your proficiency bonus + your choice of Strength or Dexterity modifier. 

Delay a turn.

Fifth edition skips the delay action because the extra option adds extra rules baggage and may slow play.

Nonetheless, in one case players who delay their place in initiative can smooth play without adding any complexity to the rules. That case comes when you first arrange initiative before any creature takes an action. Too often, the slow, tough characters at the door roll low while the quicker skirmishers in back roll high. Those tanks wind up bottling up the door because the rules offer no way for the bladesinger in back to just wait for the paladin to step out of the damn way. Before initiative starts, let players opt for a lower initiative count.

For the players who enjoy the tactical intricacies brought by the delay action, groups can import the delay rules in earlier editions of D&D and in D&D’s sister system Pathfinder. Here are the rules the designers wished to avoid.

Delay

By choosing to delay, you take no action and then act normally on whatever initiative count you decide to act. When you delay, you voluntarily reduce your own initiative result for the rest of the combat. When your new, lower initiative count comes up later in the same round, you can act normally. You can specify this new initiative result or just wait until sometime later in the round and act then, thus fixing your new initiative count at that point.

You never get back the time you spend waiting to see what’s going to happen. You also can’t interrupt anyone else’s action (as you can with a readied action).

Your initiative result becomes the count on which you took the delayed action. If you come to your next action and have not yet performed an action, you don’t get to take a delayed action (though you can delay again).

If you take a delayed action in the next round, before your regular turn comes up, your initiative count rises to that new point in the order of battle, and you do not get your regular action that round.

When you Delay, any persistent damage or other negative effects that normally occur at the start or end of your turn occur immediately when you use the Delay action. Any beneficial effects that would end at any point during your turn also end. You can’t Delay to avoid negative consequences that would happen on your turn or to extend beneficial effects that would end on your turn.

3 Actions D&D Players Want That Defy the Game’s Design Choices

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Sometimes Dungeons & Dragons players ask to do things that the rules don’t handle—and not just because no roleplaying game’s rules can cover everything. The game omits the added rules because they would run against D&D’s design approach. Often, past editions of the game even included these extra rules, but fifth edition’s more consistent design forced them out.

This post isn’t about the rules fifth-edition Dungeons & Dragons could have included, but which the design skips for brevity. The D&D designers intentionally avoid providing rules for everything. “We want a system that trusts the DM to make the right call for any particular situation, rather than create many highly specific chunks of rules text in an attempt to cover every possible situation,” writes designer Rodney Thompson.

What actions aren’t covered by the D&D rules because they defy the game’s design choices?

1. Readying an action outside of combat.

In the early days of D&D, players liked saying, “I ready my sword” or “I nock an arrow.” Back then, initiative ran by house rules and DM whim, so this sort of declaration might win an edge. In an example of playing D&D that Gary Gygax wrote for the Europa zine in 1976, the DM grants the party +1 to a d6 initiative roll for being prepared. Only Unearthed Arcana (1985) actually put a benefit for readiness into print. “A bow specialist who begins the round with arrow nocked, shaft drawn, and target in sight is entitled to loose that arrow prior to any initiative check.” (See For 10 Years D&D Suffered From an Unplayable Initiative System. Blame the Game’s Wargaming Roots.)

Despite the lack of rules benefits, such declarations might prevent an adversarial dungeon master from deciding that because you never said that your sword was drawn, a fight caught you unprepared. In those days, many gamers saw thwarting and punishing players as part of the DM’s role. That attitude has fallen from favor. Nowadays, even though you never mention that your character started the day by putting on pants, we still assume pants.

The old spirit of readiness continues today. In a Sage Advice segment, D&D lead rules designer Jeremy Crawford says, “People often want to ready actions before combat has even started.”

Why “readying” does nothing. Jeremy says, “The ready action is an action you take in combat, so there’s really no such thing as readying before combat has started.”

What a DM should say. Maybe nothing. “I rarely correct them,” Jeremy says. He interprets the ready request as the player signaling their intent to stay alert. “Usually what that means is they won’t be surprised at my table. So even though I won’t have the mechanics of the ready action play out, I will still reward them for thinking in advance and signaling intent.”

To more rules-oriented players say, “In D&D, everyone who isn’t surprised starts a fight ready. Initiative lets us decide who among the ready combatants goes first.” (Surprised combatants also have a place in initiative, but they take no actions while surprised.) For more on what to tell players about initiative, see What to do when a player interrupts a role-playing scene to start a battle.

2. Called shots.

Sometime in every player’s D&D career, they get the idea of skipping the process of hacking through all a creature’s hit points by simply chopping off their weapon hand or blinding them with a blow to the eyes. Earlier editions of D&D termed attacks that aimed for a specific body part “called shots” and the game once included rules for such strikes. No more.

Why the rules don’t include called shots. The fifth-edition Player’s Handbook explains, “Hit points represent a combination of physical and mental durability, the will to live, and luck.” That’s a lot of possibilities. The game rules rely on this vagueness to allow characters to regain all their hit points after a short rest rather than a long hospital stay.

The moment characters start attempting to gouge their foes’ eyes out and villains return the favor, the game loses the useful abstraction of hit points. Also, if aiming for a particular body part proved more effective, why would anyone bother with regular attacks? The second-edition Dungeon Master’s Guide allowed called shots, but explained, “Because the AD&D game uses a generalized system for damage, called shots cannot be used to accomplish certain things. Against a creature, a called shot will only cause the normal amount of damage allowed the weapon. Attempts to blind, cripple, or maim will not succeed.”

What a DM should say. “Your characters are experts at combat. With each attack, they use their skills to find the best opportunity to land a blow that deals the most damage and that offers the best chance of taking your foe out of the fight.”

3. Delaying an action.

In third and fourth edition, players could delay their actions to later in the initiative count. This helped players coordinate actions with other players using an advanced strategy called you set ’em up and I’ll knock ’em down. Players who remember the flexibility of delaying still ask for it.

Why the rules don’t include delaying. The fifth-edition designers chose to eliminate delaying to simplify the rules and speed play.

Many spell durations and combat effects last until the beginnings and endings of turns. An option to delay complicates the rules for such effects and the bookkeeping needed to track them. “Simply by changing when your turn happens, you could change the length of certain spells,” explains the Sage Advice Compendium. “The way to guard against such abuse would be to create a set of additional rules that would limit your ability to change durations. The net effect? More complexity would be added to the game, and with more complexity, there is greater potential for slower play.”

An option to delay encourages players to analyze and discuss the optimal order for their turns during every round. “Multiply that extra analysis by the number of characters and monsters in a combat, and you have the potential for many slow-downs in play.”

What a DM should say. “Everyone in a fight acts at once. We just have turns to make some sense of that activity. If you delay, you do nothing while everyone else acts. At best, you can start an action and attempt to time it so that it finishes right after something else happens. That’s called readying an action.”

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

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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

For 10 Years D&D Suffered From an Unplayable Initiative System. Blame the Game’s Wargaming Roots

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While every version of Dungeons & Dragons has a rule for who goes first in a fight, no other rule shows as much of the game’s evolution from what the original books call rules for “wargames campaigns” into what the latest Player’s Handbook calls a roleplaying game about storytelling.

Before you old grognards rush to the comments to correct my opening line, technically the original books lacked any way to decide who goes first. For that rule, co-creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson supposed gamers would refer to Gary’s earlier Chainmail miniatures rules. In practice, players rarely saw those old rules. The way to play D&D spread gamer-to-gamer from Dave and Gary’s local groups and from the conventions they attended. D&D campaigns originally ran by word-of-mouth and house rules.

Gygax waited five years to present an initiative system in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide (1979). Two things made those official rules terrible.

  • Nobody understood the system.

  • Any reasonable interpretation of the system proved too slow and complicated for play.

Some grognards insist they played the first-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons initiative system by the book. No you didn’t. Read this 20-page consolidation of the initiative rules as written, and then try to make that claim. Grognardia blogger James Maliszewski writes, “Initiative in AD&D, particularly when combined with the equally obscure rules regarding surprise, was one of those areas where, in my experience, most players back in the day simply ignored the official rules and adopted a variety of house rules. I know I did.”

Not even Gygax played with all his exceptions and complications. “We used only initiative [rolls] and casting times for determination of who went first in a round. The rest was generally ignored. We played to have fun, and in the throws of a hot melee, rules were mostly forgotten.”

With Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the D&D story grows complicated, because original or basic D&D soldiered on with workable initiative systems. My next tale will circle back to D&D, but this one focuses on first-edition AD&D, the game Gygax treated as his own. (See Basic and Advanced—the time Dungeons & Dragons split into two games.)

Some of the blame for AD&D’s terrible initiative system falls back on Chainmail and Gygax’s love for its wargaming legacy.

Chainmail lets players enact battles with toy soldiers typically representing 20 fighters. The rules suggest playing on a tabletop covered in sand sculpted into hills and valleys. In Chainmail each turn represents about a minute, long enough for infantry to charge through a volley of arrows and cut down a group of archers. A clash of arms might start and resolve in the same turn. At that scale, who strikes first typically amounts to who strikes from farthest away, so archers attack, then soldiers with polearms, and finally sword swingers. Beyond that, a high roll on a die settled who moved first.

In Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the 1-minute turns from Chainmail became 1-minute melee rounds. Such long turns made sense for a wargame that filled one turn with a decisive clash of arms between groups of 20 soldiers, but less sense for single characters trading blows.

Even though most D&D players imagined brief turns with just enough time to attack and dodge, Gygax stayed loyal to Chainmail’s long turns. In the Dungeon Master’s Guide (1979), Gygax defended the time scale. “The system assumes much activity during the course of each round. During a one-minute melee round many attacks are made, but some are mere feints, while some are blocked or parried.” Gygax cited the epic sword duel that ended The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) as his model for AD&D’s lengthy rounds. He never explained why archers only managed a shot or two per minute.

Broadly, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons held to Chainmail’s system for deciding who goes first. Gygax also chose an option from the old wargame where players declared their actions before a round, and then had to stick to plan as best they could. “If you are a stickler, you may require all participants to write their actions on paper.”

Why would Gygax insist on such cumbersome declarations?

In a D&D round, every character and creature acts in the same few seconds, but to resolve the actions we divide that mayhem into turns. This compromise knots time in ridiculous ways. For example, with fifth edition’s 6-second rounds, one character can end their 6-second turn next to a character about to start their turn and therefor 6 seconds in the past. If they pass a relay baton, the baton jumps 6 seconds back in time. If enough characters share the same 6 seconds running with the baton, the object outraces a jet. Now expand that absurdity across AD&D’s 1-minute round.

Years before D&D, wargamers like Gygax had wrestled with such problems. They couldn’t resolve all actions simultaneously, but players could choose actions at once. Declaring plans in advance, and then letting a referee sort out the chaos yielded some of the real uncertainty of an actual battle. Wargamers loved that. Plus, no referee would let players declare that they would start their turn by taking a relay baton from someone currently across the room.

Especially when players chose to pretend that a turn took about 10 seconds, the Chainmail system for initiative worked well enough. In basic D&D, turns really lasted 10 seconds, so no one needed to pretend. Many tables kept that system for AD&D.

But nobody played the advanced system as written. Blame that on a wargamer’s urge for precision. Despite spending paragraphs arguing for 1-minute rounds, Gygax seemed to realize that a minute represented a lot of fighting. So he split a round into 10 segments lasting as long as modern D&D’s 6-second rounds. Then he piled on intricate—sometimes contradictory—rules that determined when you acted based on weapon weights and lengths, spell casting times, surprise rolls, and so on. In an interview, Wizards of the Coast founder Peter Adkison observed, “The initiative and surprise rules with the weapon speed factors was incomprehensible.”

In a minute-long turn filled with feints, parries, and maneuvering, none of that precision made sense. On page 61, Gygax seemed to say as much. “Because of the relatively long period of time, weapon length and relative speed factors are not usually a consideration.” Then he wrote a system that considered everything.

Some of the blame for this baroque system may rest on the wargaming hobby’s spirit of collaboration.

Even before D&D, Gygax had proved a zealous collaborator on wargames. Aside from teaming with other designers, he wrote a flood of articles proposing variants and additions to existing games. In the early years of D&D, Gygax brought the same spirit. He published rules and ideas from the gamers in his circle, and figured that players could use what suited their game. In the Blackmoor supplement, he wrote, “All of it is, of course, optional, for the premise of the whole game system is flexibility and personalization within the broad framework of the rules.”

I doubt all the rules filigree in AD&D came from Gygax. At his table, he ignored rules for things like weapon speed factors. Still, Gygax published such ideas from friends and fellow gamers. For example, he disliked psionics, but he bowed to his friends and included the system in AD&D. (See Gary Gygax Loved Science Fantasy, So Why Did He Want Psionics Out of D&D?.)

Weapon speed factors fit AD&D as badly as anything. In theory, a fighter could swing a lighter weapon like a dagger more quickly. Did this speed enable extra attacks? Not usually. Instead, light weapons could strike first. But that contradicted Chainmail’s observation that a fighter with a spear had to miss before an attacker with a dagger could come close enough to attack. Gygax patched that by telling players to skip the usual initiative rules after a charge.

AD&D’s initiative system resembles a jumble of ideas cobbled together in a rush to get a long-delayed Dungeon Master’s Guide to press. The system piled complexities, and then exceptions, and still failed to add realism. In the end, AD&D owed some success to the way D&D’s haphazard rules trained players to ignore any text that missed the mark.

In creating D&D, Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax faced a unique challenge because no one had designed a roleplaying game before. The designers of every roleplaying game to follow D&D copied much of the original’s work. Without another model, Gygax relied on the design tools from wargames. His initiative system may be gone, but ultimately Gary’s finest and most lasting contribution to D&D came from the lore he created for spells, monsters, and especially adventures.

Next: Part 2: “It’s probably so different that even if it’s better, people would not like it.”