Tag Archives: Shadowdark

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

How Shadowdark Delivers Old-School D&D Intensity With Modern Game Mechanics

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The Shadowdark game by Kelsey Dionne of The Arcane Library bills itself as delivering old school gaming with modernized mechanics. Shadowdark hardly rates as the first game with this approach. Into the Unknown (2019) boasts 5E compatibility combined with old-school mechanisms such as “morale, reaction rolls, random encounters, gold for XP, and henchmen.” Still, with a Kickstarter closing in on a million dollars, Shadowdark stands as an unprecedented success.

I played Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur, an adventure from the Shadowdark free quickstart set, and marveled at how well the game duplicated so much of the charm of D&D in 1974—except with zero confusion over inches, initiative, and what Gary Gygax meant by writing that elves could “freely switch class whenever they choose.” Make that year 1975; Shadowdark has thieves.How does Shadowdark create the experience of early fantasy gaming with rules that echo fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, from the ability score bonuses, to advantage, disadvantage, and inspiration?

Death always seems near

In my Shadowdark party, two characters started with 1 hp and one had 2. Sixty percent of the group would likely drop from a single hit! Those rock bottom numbers come from the game’s randomly rolled hit points and from the lowly stats that result from rolling 3d6 in order. My character suffered a -2 Constitution adjustment. To be fair, Shadowdark offers PCs one advantage over brown box D&D. Characters who drop to 0 can be revived. But stabilizing a character takes a DC 15 check and spells often fail, so forget the popular fifth-edition strategy of just letting characters drop to 0 before healing because damage beyond 0 heals for free.

This risk of sudden death gives Shadowdark a sense of peril that I’ve never felt in a fifth-edition game. That makes for a tense, exciting game.

Treasure is the goal

Shadowdark awards experience points for treasure gained and not for monsters slain. This mirrors the original D&D game, which awarded characters much more experience for winning gold than for killing monsters.

D&D players could take their characters anyplace they chose, but the XP-for-gold mechanic rewarded them for risking the dungeon crawls that made the original game irresistible fun. The lure of gold joined priests and rogues, law and chaos, together with a common goal. Plus the quest for treasure resonated with players. Gary wrote, “If you, the real you, were an adventurer, what would motivate you more than the lure of riches?” (See The fun and realism of unrealistically awarding experience points for gold.

Battle becomes a last resort

In addition to rewarding players for seeking fun, the XP-for-gold system offers another benefit: It creates a simple way to award experience points for succeeding at non-combat challenges. As a new character, potentially with 1 hit point, you stand little chance of leveling through combat. Players joke that D&D is about killing things and taking their stuff, but in the original game and in Shadowdark, you are better off using your wits to take stuff. So long as your cunning leads to gold, you get experience.

In modern D&D games, fights routinely drag on until one side is wiped out, often because monsters that surrender or run can spoil the fun unless dungeon masters cope with the hassles of broken morale. To most D&D players, an escape feels like a loss, and nobody likes to lose. But when battle is a dangerous setback in a quest for treasure, monsters who break and run give players a quick and welcome victory. Shadowdark offers morale rolls that make fights quick and unpredictable.

Wandering monsters quicken the pace

Wandering monsters can improve D&D play, mainly by giving players a sense of urgency. Gary recommended “frequent checking for wandering monsters” as a method to speed play. In a perilous game like Shadowdark, players can slow the game with meticulous play, searching everything, checking everything, accomplishing nothing. But the game’s wandering monsters turn time into danger. Every passing minute gives foes more chances to find the party. Wandering monsters rarely carry loot and the XP reward that it brings, so idle characters just face danger with scant reward. Players keep moving, risking the next room in search for treasure.

Players choose their difficulty

In the early D&D game, players chose the amount of difficulty they wanted. Every level of the dungeon corresponded to a level of character, so the first level offered challenges suitable for first-level characters. Players could seek greater challenges—and greater rewards—as they went deeper. This system gives players a choice they rarely get in today’s D&D, and it adds a element of strategy. To lure characters to danger, the 1974 game doubled the number of experience points needed to advance to each level, then matched the increase with similar increases in treasure. (See The Story of the Impossible Luck that Leads D&D Parties to Keep Facing Threats They Can Beat.)

The Shadowdark quick start game doesn’t explain this approach, but the structure is there. Treasure and XP rewards escalate as characters rise in level, coaxing players to delve as far down as they dare.

This design frees DMs from the burden of designing encounters that make players feel challenged without killing characters. Instead, players decide on the risks they dare to face, and if an encounter proves unbeatable, players can run. After all, skilled players avoid fights.

Success requires conserving resources and planning for escape

In the 1975 Greyhawk supplement to D&D, the 6th-level cleric spell find the path focused on escaping dungeons. “By means of this spell the fastest and safest way out of a trap, maze, or wilderness can be found.” In the original books, the sample tricks and traps aimed to get PCs lost in the dungeon where wandering monsters and dwindling resources might finish a party. When Gary’s shifting rooms and unnoticed slopes made the PCs hopelessly lost, find the path offered a way out. (See Spells that let players skip the dungeons in Dungeons & Dragons.)

Shadowdark includes rules that make dungeons as risky as the underworlds that made find the path merit a 6th-level spell. All characters need light to see, so the guide explains, “In this game, a torch only holds back the pressing darkness for one hour of real-world time. There isn’t a moment to waste when the flames are burning low.” In darkness, the characters suffer disadvantage and wandering monsters rush to prey on the vulnerable.

A supply of torches and other light sources become essential, and the tracking the supply becomes more than bookkeeping. The game boasts a simple encumbrance system that matches the one Runequest offered as an old-school innovation in 1978. Characters can carry one item per point of strength. Torches and other light sources fill those precious inventory slots.

Shadowdark also lifts the burden of totaling time in the dungeon by dropping 10-minute turns in favor of the simple method of making 1 hour of play equal 1 hour in the dungeon. This speeds play by spurring players to act with the same urgency as their characters.

In the game I played, as we lit our last torches, we knew we only had an hour to escape the dungeon with our loot. And the wandering monsters made that escape no sure thing. This made our run to the exit as tense as our descent into the underworld.

Ability checks become unusual

Some gamers say that ability checks make modern D&D less fun. These fans of an older style prefer a game where instead of rolling perception to spot a trap door, characters tap the floor with their 10-foot pole.

Shadowdark includes D&D’s modern rules for d20 ability checks, but the game favors an old-school reluctance to make checks. The Game Master Guide recommends “giving players the opportunity to make decisions that rely on their creativity and wits, not on their dice rolls or stat bonuses.”

Faced with a challenge, players must observe and interact with the game world. Instead of scanning their character sheet for solutions, players rely on their wits and ingenuity. Ideally, the game tests player skill more than character stats.

Characters develop through play.

Before starting my Shadowdark game with my 1 hp character, I joked that I’d just finished writing his 8-page backstory. For modern D&D games, I appreciate players who invest in backstories; for a 1 hp character, such a document is pure folly. Instead, the story of a Shadowdark character evolves from playing the game and from the random luck of the die. Starting with characters rolled using 3d6 in order, Shadowdark asks players and GMs alike to surrender control to the dice. Forget planning a story and nudging characters along. Things like wandering monsters and morale rolls take the game into into an unknowable future. Even when characters advance, they roll their hit points and new talents. This trades the fun of building characters in favor of the challenge of playing a character that fate and the dice delivered. Characters stories begin and end as part in the shared story everyone experienced at the game table. (See D&D and the Role of the Die Roll, a Love Letter.)

Modern mechanics

With so many nods to the D&D of 1975, why play Shadowdark instead? The game gains from a foundation built on the fifth edition rules and the nearly 50 years of innovation in the modern game.

So Shadowdark includes cyclical initiative instead of a reference to a system that only appeared in the Chainmail rules.

In the original D&D game, ability scores hardly mattered. Characters with a high score in the most important ability for their class might get at 10% bonus to XP, but otherwise the scores meant little more than a +1 on certain attacks.

In the Blackmoor campaign that led to D&D, Dave Arneson used ability scores as the basis of tests that resemble modern saving throws or ability checks. “Players would roll against a trait, Strength for example, to see if they were successful at an attempt,” writes Blackmoor scholar D. H. Boggs. However, when Gary penned the D&D rules, he lost that effect. Gary favored estimating the odds and improvising a roll to fit. Now, GMs and player alike prefer a clearer system for deciding whether a character succeeds. The d20 mechanic delivers that transparency. (See How Dungeons & Dragons Got Its Ability Scores and Ability Checks—From the Worst Mechanic in Role-Playing Game History to a Foundation Of D&D.)

Rather than the system of ranges and movement in inches that made sense to a tiny audience of miniature wargamers fluent in inches on a sand table, Shadowdark puts distances into close (5 feet), near (up to 30 feet), and far (within sight during an encounter or scene). You can still play on a grid, but narrative battles play fine too.

Gary’s early games would sometimes put as many as 20 players into a party. The 1975 D&D tournament at Origins gathered parties of 12 for a trip into the Tomb of Horrors. Such large parties designated a caller to speak for the group. Nowadays, gamers speak for themselves. In Shadowdark, everyone takes turns, even outside of combat. No one feels like a spectator. Disciplined parties avoid scattering and becoming easy prey for wandering monsters.

As for elves switching classes, Shadowdark opts for the the 1979 innovation of separating race and class, and the 2020-something innovation of calling “race” something else (ancestry).

As a mix of old and new, Shadowdark lands in a good place.