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 doesn’t have explicitly player driven turn order like you describe. The GM is directing the action. If a particular player wants to go first, they can go first, but the GM shares control of the spotlight, and managing the spotlight to keep the fight moving quickly is a key GM skill.
When it comes to player character movement, you are never more than one Agility action roll away from anywhere on the battlefield. When I GM, if I spotlight a player character and they roll a success with hope on their Agility roll, then I will keep the spotlight on them as we flow into their next action.
I’m curious what wording in the rules says this about the GM always having the spotlight and choosing to share it?
I didn’t say that the GM always has control of the spotlight and chooses when to share it.
I said that the GM shares control of the spotlight with the players.
“Since Daggerheart is a collaborative and conversational storytelling experience between the GM and players, combat
has no initiative order, no rounds, and no distinct number of actions you can take while in the spotlight. Instead, fights play out narratively from moment to moment, just like noncombat scenes.”
Daggerheart describes the flow of play thusly:
STEP 1:
THE GM NARRATES DETAILS
STEP 2:
THE PLAYERS AND GM ASK QUESTIONS
STEP 3:
THE PLAYERS AND GM ANSWER QUESTIONS
STEP 4:
CHOOSE AND RESOLVE ACTIONS
STEP 5:
REPEAT THE CYCLE
Step 1 is described: “The GM lays out a scene, describing the surroundings,
dangers, NPCs, and any important elements the characters would notice immediately.”
In describing the spotlight Daggerheart says, “Any time a character becomes the focus of a scene, they’re
in the spotlight.”
In Step 1 of this cycle of play, the GM narrates details and has the power as narrator to spotlight individual players by describing them as the focus of that scene.
Now let’s look at Step 4:
“As the GM describes the scene and provides information, they
lead the players to opportunities to take action—problems
to solve, obstacles to overcome, mysteries to investigate,
and so on. As the players pursue these opportunities, the GM
helps facilitate their characters’ actions, and everyone works together to move the fiction forward based on the outcome. If the players aren’t compelled into action right away, the GM
continues to provide more details, conflict, or consequences
until they are.”
So in Step 4, the GM is leading “the players to opportunities to take action,” which again, allows you to focus the scene on particular player characters by highlighting opportunities or obstacles to that character thereby focusing the scene on that character, spotlighting them.
If the players aren’t compelled into action “right away” by the GM’s description of the scene, the GM is supposed to provide more details, consequences, conflict, or consequences (further opportunities to spotlight PCs). The rules don’t say, if the players aren’t compelled into action right away they should hold a committee meeting to discuss which of them should act.
The players have the power in Step 4 to seize the spotlight themselves and the game encourages players to pass the spotlight to another player, but once the players drop the ball, the flow of play reverts to the GM to “provide more details, conflict, or consequences” or hop back to Step 1.
When I played AD&D in the 80’s, we would reroll initiative after every round. I think about bringing this back to 2024 as it mixes up the action and it keeps players more engaged, as they may have gone 3rd last round, but 1st in the new round. It’s too easy for players to take their turn and then find themselves on their phone, chatting with another player who also won’t go again for a while, etc. It could also help with the metagaming of knowing the enemy won’t have another turn right away after they went, so the party can plan together, despite being yards away from each other on the board.
I played three “4X” space boardgames at a CON two weeks ago: Andromeda’s Edge, Beyond the Event Horizon, and Xia: Legends of a Drift System. Why do you care? Well… Andromeda’s Edge is “worker placement” with spaceships, so we all took turns placing single ships on the map. NPC ships had planned/programmed responses to player placement (like “end of the round, move 1 towards a player ship”, or “teleport to a player on a Government Sector”). Players were involved “only” on their turn, but turns were fast – place one ship, take the action there. If there was resolution to be done, it could be done while the next player was taking his turn (usually). Beyond/Horizon was more of a skirmish game, but every Round was split into Build, Place, Move, Fight phases, and every player was involved in each phase, generally quickly (battles took longer, but at least involved 2 players). Xia, on the other hand, had 5-12 minute player turns that generally had NOTHING to do with the other players. As player #5, I didn’t get to actually play the game on Round 1 until 50 minutes had passed! [Otherwise, I’d say Xia is hands-down the better game… because of this, though, “3/5” stars at best.]
So yeah, I agree, I don’t want D&D players to experience that. There shouldn’t be “DM takes 20 actions, players sit around” turns, nor “I moved, nothing’s in range, I’m gonna run down the street and buy some snacks before it’s my turn again” player turns. Random initiative doesn’t fix the issue in any given round, though, only the moment of the new rolls. And for the player who went first and is now going last… ouch.
It’s almost like the D&D game was excellent way back in 1E…
Hi Eric,
Thanks for commenting. While working on this post, I asked for folks experience with the Savage Worlds system, where everyone on a fight draws a card at the start of a round and turns go by card rank. The system literally shuffles the turn order every round. Obviously, some gamers enjoy the free for all. Others commented that they prefer to be able to anticipate when they go from round to round. Tastes vary.
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Dave
The “time knots” you highlighted are the biggest issue I’ve had with D&D initiative for literally decades. The meme “Peasant Railgun” is the iconic worst case representation of this – although no GM would actually allow it. I agree that 4e’s “delay” plus “ready” was the best feel; 5e dispensed with “delay”, leading to some awkward “rules penalty” feelings in situations where you just want to for a friend – you lose Extra Attacks or have to pre-cast your spells, etc.
HERO system’s phases, or Hackmaster’s initiative (or heck, original Car Wars!!) are the best at making things actually feel simultaneous. Every segment, every creature on the board is taking a micromovement (5′-ish), with faster (than “30’/round”) creatures either moving more than 5′ or moving a few extra times. So a chase is a *chase* – I move 5′ and you move 5′ after me and the space between us doesn’t change, vs. “I run 60′” then “you run 60” and there’s an awkward Opportunity attack between turns. Same with Car Wars, with faster cars going father per Impulse. One “action moment” during the full Round, when you want to pull the trigger (so to speak), and you act based on where everyone is at that moment, not where they were 3 seconds ago, or 3 seconds from now.
But this style of initiative can really slow things down. I recall Champions (HERO) battles lasting only 2 or 3 “rounds” that took 4+ hours to resolve. (Might just have been us, though!)
I like some realism peanut butter in my initiative chocolate. I want the spear to hit before the dagger – but with the dagger-wielder having a chance to use skill and choice to get inside the spear’s reach. I want the complicated Wall of Fire spell to take longer to cast than the simple Magic Missile – or the shot arrow! I want the heroes to see the villain begin casting, and have a chance to get to him and interrupt it — and move tactically to prevent the henchlings from doing the same to the party’s wizard! But at the end of the day, speed-of-play generally needs must dispense with simulation…
Hi Frederick,
Thanks for weighing in! I think you cite the most realistic way to make combat turns behave as simultaneous, namely to make them snapshots of just a moment of game time. GURPS followed the this approach with its 1-second turns. Nowadays, I think most gamers would rather finish combats more quickly.
–
Dave
Sorry, one other thought. Initiative is a “game system”. There are – in D&D – feats, spells, and racial/class abilities that interact with this system, based on the Edition. Such as the Alertness feat you called out, to Assassin’s first-strike, to just having a high/low DEX attribute. When you change the Initiative system – especially when dice rolling is removed and/or “player-driven” is used – the impact (or REMOVAL) of these interactions has to be considered. When the players choose who goes next, and the monsters always go first… the 18 DEX rogue with Alertness has lost something that used to be an advantage — and the Assassin now *never* goes first, and never gets to us his class ability!
Good point. Gamers who try to swap out D&D’s initiative system in favor of a house-ruled alternative may not realize how much of the game assumes and initiative roll followed by cyclic turn order. Just by including a delay rule, 4E needed a half page of 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.”
–
Dave
Daggerheart has a funny “feature” where, so long as you don’t roll, you don’t give up turn order. This means a party can in theory have everyone move a single time any number of times, so long as the character changes each time. Everyone get into position, now make actual rolls! In your example where you were off map, other PCs could have moved and then you move, repeated until you were back next to a foe. Arguably, you could even take your turn just to move, end your turn, take a turn to move, repeat. Of course, the GM can spend fear to interrupt, but they will burn a lot of fear to do that often and characters may still be better off.
Hi Teos,
Thanks for commenting! I wonder how much the Daggerheart design team grappled with this loophole. Did they decide that based on their goal of emphasizing collaborative storytelling, they could assume that players wouldn’t abuse the rules?
–
Dave
Thinking on 4E, the problem with Delay and Ready was the impact on tracking initiative, making it really hard to keep track of who had gone or had yet to go. I’m fifth in initiative, but now I’ll delay and become 8th for future turns. And, the duration of spells and effects. I am dazed until the end of the monster’s turn, so I’ll delay until they have gone. Errata fixed most of that, but it was still work dealing with all those durations being tracked.
Hi Teos,
Reflecting back, I remember how heavily my 4E D&D Championship teams used Delay to optimize turn order. I loved working those tactics. Unlike in Draw Steel or Daggerheart, we could arrange turns without worrying that the GM would take an action in the middle that thwarted our plans. Delay brings a lot of flexibility, but it adds rules and memory load too. Just by including a delay rule, 4E needed a half page of 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.” Delay also ruins your preferred method of tracking initiative.
–
Dave
From the article: “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.” That’s clearly an absurd scenario.
On a concrete level, if each character’s turn happens at roughly the same time, two or more characters cannot activate and then pass the same magic item down the line for further activations. More generally, building your character’s actions entirely around the order of initiative is metagaming, as the initiative order does not appear written in the air above the field of battle. And on the most concrete level, one character can simply use all of the charges of a wand of magic missiles on that character’s turn. There is no need to shoot just one missile and pass the wand.
The problems that the author is discussing are similar to the problems with trying to understand our world in terms of basic arithmetic and geometry when calculus (and other, even more sophisticated methods) are actually more suitable but too complex for most of us to use in daily life.
Whether you solve the outcome of a chase scene through the yo-yo effect of a string of discreet moves (I run, you chase, I run…) or through a seamless modeling using calculus (I run while you chase), isn’t the outcome much the same?
The outcomes likely do work out sufficiently alike to satisfice (not necessarily satisfy), but the yo-yo positioning effect is vulnerable to proximity manipulation when we’re dealing with range-limited spells and effects. Imagine a 5e cleric having to burn 30′ of movement to catch up for *Burning Hands*, but dragging their protective aura ahead with them and off of the rest of the party. Now imagine that cleric and the lead-opponent both had the same Initiative roll, and the PC party now has to wait and get clobbered by the other team until they can act. Maybe that lead-opponent has some objective value and it is very important not to let them escape.
The example is highly situational, but so is tactical combat. It is likely that everything works out roughly the same, but the scale of the quanta can become problematic at low resolutions.
Hi Chris,
Thanks for adding your perspective! I’ve played D&D chases where the pursuers close the gap during their turns and then get opportunity attacks when the fleeing characters have to provoke to dash away. That’s part of the reason running from a fight in 5E proves nearly impossible.
–
Dave
Hi aloysius180,
Thanks for commenting! If you have a wand of magic missiles with 7 charges and a DM willing to let you exploit it by passing it from character to character, then you can fire 21 missiles in a round. If you just fire once and use all the charges, then you only get 9 missiles. Not game breaking, but the rules as written allow it.
–
Dave
To add another to the pile of examples: *Star Trek Adventures* employs a variant of Side Initiative that trades the “right to act” after one member of each side acts. A side can Take the Initiative by spending one of their narrative tokens (Momentum or Threat), which allows their side to act again, but one side can only get two consecutive turns that way. The wrinkle there is that it assumes roughly equal numbers per side and introduces an economy unit to have to track. It also negates any “build” features that could accelerate a PC’s right to act, putting it at odds with mechanical aspects of many systems.
This is a topic I’ve been wrestling with as well, so I really appreciate you digging into it. At my own table (5e), I’ve been doing Initiative pre-rolls and having all the players engage in the turn-sorting at the onset of combat. Monsters of the same type usually act as a unit with consecutive turns, and I’ll roll enough numbers for the maximum (or most likely) number of units. This does require us all to write down our rolled scores, but at least it gives everyone something to do during the accounting phase (I’m not going to suffer alone!). As we sort, we claim and trade ordinal tents (index cards folded in half) for our position in the stack. It… works, mostly.
AD&D combat is neither slow nor unintelligible. You’re just making it too hard:
https://bxblackrazor.blogspot.com/2024/04/making-things-too-hard.html
It’s certainly possible to run the system without house rules in a fashion that is both quick and smooth, certainly compared to later systems (I can get through three-to-five combat encounters in the same length of time it takes 5E to get through one-two). I was running 1E combats by-the-book by age 13 withOUT the aid of of an adult mentor…just following the instructions.
Abstract, side-based initiative is the closest we can come to modeling the chaos of free-for-all combat while still providing a procedure for determining ‘what happens.’ It is not cinematic…the game is inspired by fantasy literature which rarely zooms in on specific, individual combat maneuvers (such things being of little overall pertinence to the “adventure story” being told).
A one minute length of time accounts for a LOT of stuff going on as two people struggle to kill each other, but it is all abstracted and boiled down to only the most important part(s) of what happens in that minute of time. IN PRACTICE, all that abstracted stuff (people slipping in blood, regaining their feet, taking a blow on the shield, being parried, trying to feint, having the feint discovered, recovering from a riposte, throwing a nearby candlestick at the opponent’s eyes) DOES NOT MATTER to the players at the table. The “narrative” of the combat does not matter, only the combat’s resolution. Because, in the end, we want to get back to the “adventure story” we are experiencing in play.
At least, that’s the AD&D (1E) way. I understand that 5E is interested in different things.
I’m sure that if you are playing with weapon lengths and rounds divided into segments and all that for 30, 40 combats with the same players, eventually players adapt to it and it adds little delay to proceedings.
…but every group I’ve ever played with has become frustrated with the complexity long before the end of that period of adaptation, and reverted to something closer to B/X or BECMI.
That said, even in Basic D&D players declare all actions in advance, and I have never found that to be an issue in practice. That does tend to speed up combat quite a bit, at least, if you also don’t have the complexity of all the 5e D&D mechanics that trigger on the start or end specific player turns.
I do agree with DM David that this can be very deadly for player characters when they lose the initiative at low levels.
Other than my “home group” (with my kids and their friends), I’m mostly running AD&D at gaming cons (most recently Cauldron in Germany) with a huge variety of players who are generally on the “little-to-zero experience with 1E” spectrum, usually for 7-9 players at a time. It runs as quickly and smoothly with any of them…you just have to be on the money with your own knowledge base.
There’s a reason that most of the specific combat info is in the DMG.
The quote from Jonathan Tweet is an example of misunderstanding game procedure; see the DMG notes on p. 71: “The activity of player characters and player character-directed creatures must be states precisely and without delay at the start of each melee round…Delay in deciding what is to be done should be noted as such hesitation wil basically mean that the individual is not doing anything whatsoever during the period, but he or she is simply standing by and dithering…” Combat should be kept SNAPPY. You lay out the situation, you go around the table asking each person what they’re going to do. Then you have someone roll initiative and you adjudicate the actions. People who “don’t know” what they’re going to do are assumed to be defending themselves but are otherwise overwhelmed in the moment…as they are.
“Weapon length” only comes into play during a charge or when space might be restricted (fighting in tunnels or such). “Speed factor” only comes into play when initiative rolls are tied AND the opponents involved are using hand-held weapons. “Casting time” is pretty easy as most combat spells have a segment equal to their level (the few that don’t are generally remembered) and you’re just subtracting the low initiative roll from the high to determine how many segments they have. Likewise with movement…you lay out the distance at the beginning of the encounter and you can pretty much tell how long it’s going to take to move before the opponents get “stuck in.”
There’s not much for PLAYERS to get frustrated with, so long as the DM is prepared (I have a cheat sheet that tells me the use time for things like potions and wands)…all THEY have to do is tell me what action they want to take. *I* tell them when it happens, depending on the initiative rolled.
The AD&D combat system is a bit more complex than the B/X “fire-everything-on-your-go” way of doing things, but that depth helps make combat INTERESTING over the long haul, and doesn’t require you to know spot rules for 20 different character types with a plethora of feats and special abilities.
Just sayin’.
; )
Yeah, so if I have some Orcs win initiative against my 8 or 9 player characters, and the Orcs charge into the fight, I need to subtract the player initiative from the Orc Initiative, then divide the distance charged by the Orcs’ movement speed (or movement speed times 2), and then multiply the resulting fraction by 10 to see how many segments it takes for the Orcs to reach the front line, and compare that number with the difference between the initiative scores to determine if the ranged attackers are able to get off their shots before the Orcs reach the front line defenders. And then I need to look at the three different spells or magical devices my spellcasters are using and reference or have memorized all their casting times, and add those to the difference between the two initiative scores, and compare each of those three numbers to the number of segments it takes for the Orcs to charge (as calculated earlier) to determine if the spells go off first or not, and compare the casting times of the spells to determine what order the spells go off in.
And I also need to verify what weapons the three fighters in the first rank are wielding, and reference or memorize the weapon lengths of the three different weapons, and compare those three different numbers to the lengths of the Orcs’ weapons to see if the Orcs hit first or not.
I mean maybe with 40 or 50 reps, and time spent designing and revising multiple cheat/reference sheets, I could get that routine down to two minutes. Or, as an average person who knows what day of the week today is only 70-80% of the time, maybe I can’t? It does seem like a lot of effort to make something that seems pretty cumbersome work for the average person. Maybe some atypical people can work up a set of reference sheets in an afternoon and master all this with minimal effort, but I am confident that the average person cannot.
I know for a fact most 5e D&D DMs won’t even read the DMG. Way back in the day, the DMG didn’t even release till 14 months after the PHB. Most GMs didn’t read all the initiative rules or glanced over them and dismissed them as overly complex and settled for what amounted to B/X initiative (which hadn’t even released yet, but is simple and obvious) or Holmes Basic (which is actually closer to AD&D initiative, despite coming out before the AD&D DMG). It’s been reported that Gygax himself didn’t even use the AD&D initiative rules as written.
This isn’t to say that the AD&D Initiative rules aren’t the best rules for you and your table(s), but I really doubt they’re a good fit for most tables.
There are a gazillion different hypothetical combat situations one can devise. In the end, it generally comes down to a small handful of choices that need to be adjudicated.
Your example, for instance. I tell the players, “the orcs look like they’re going to charge…what are you doing?” Because the orcs are charging, the normal initiative rolls don’t even apply:
– archers who want to shoot can loose before the orcs close the distance.
– melee dudes can charge themselves OR sit tight to take the charge, setting spears if they have them.
– spell casters announce what spells they are casting; the casting time determines whether or not the spell goes off before the orcs arrive (i.e. cover the distance)
– when melee is finally resolved, the side with the longer weapons strike before the shorter weapons…some orcs might go first, or some players, or all orcs, or all players, but this is pretty easy especially as the orcs tend to all be armed the same (especially if charging…it only makes sense for group-think tactics when armed similarly).
So…four different things to keep track of? If one player decides to drink a potion instead of engaging with orcs that would be a 5th, I suppose…but WHEN the potion went off (in relation to the charge) would be down to movement. Initiative dice wouldn’t be rolled in this circumstance because charging circumvents the normal “roll d6” process.
This is not a matter of 40-50 reps; it is a matter of reading, digesting, and integrating the rules, reading the examples (in both the PHB and DMG), and…perhaps…running a combat or two to get the feel of things.
But, as you say, most 5E DMs won’t even read their own DMG…putting them in much the same category as most 5E players. Of course, even those that DO read have a tendency to “cut” or ignore rules. Are you suggesting that we dumb things down even MORE for these folks? I mean, don’t they already simply discard anything they find “too hard?”
As for Gygax: I’ve heard interview with people who played with him that reported he made use of the AD&D rules in the heyday of 1E…in later life, at conventions, he definitely went back to a simpler, OD&D-style of play. However, the idea that “speed factor, weapon length, etc.” got thrown out during hot & heavy melees? Of course! Because none of those things apply once PCs are engaged in melee and you’re just dicing for hits and damage every round. Even weapon vs. AC adjustments…something that came from the “man-to-man” dueling rules in Chainmail…only apply BTB when facing an opponent wearing an actual armor type…which is less than 1% of all the creatures in the Monster Manual. As an argument against using the AD&D system, it just doesn’t wash.
AD&D is not rocket science, and this has almost nothing to do with players. The system being used and run always comes down to the choice of the DM and the DM’s willingness to learn and own the system. Many, many DMs (and would-be DMs) are lazy, misguided, and/or ignorant. THAT’s the real deal. My kid could run AD&D’s combat system well enough at the age of 13 (he’s almost 15 now). You think a college graduate in their 20s or 30s can’t? Do people need a college degree (or even a high school diploma) to use google sheets?
I agree with DM David that there are a ton of problems with individual initiative, especially the way it makes 5E combat even slower and clunkier than it already is. But that’s about the only thing in the post that I agree with.
You should really look at Dragonbane (or other Free League systems such as Forbidden Lands) where cards are used for initiative, drawn at the top of each round. Simple and quick yet dynamic and allows for synergy around the table.
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