EVERY Initiative Method??

Not really. But maybe, with your help, we actually can. Let's give this a shot.

Every now and then I've seen a blog post attempting to cover this topic and they always just seem to fall short. "There are two methods: individual and side." Please. Not only are there dozens of ways of doing initiative, but many of them are desperately in need of a proper name at this point.

But exhaustively cataloguing every method is unfeasible. There are so many games that have nearly identical methods but with just a teensy tiny little quirk. "Instead of rolling a d20, you roll a d10." Yeah, whatever. I'm not about to list every single one of those as an individual entry. Some degree of broad categorization is needed.

But you will quickly see that my system of categorization is... feeble. I have unfortunately not been able to divine some grand system of fundamental initiative typology, easily charted along 6 key axes or something like that. You'll come to see why pretty soon, and we'll circle back to that topic in the conclusion. I instead tried to order my categories by vaguely-increasing order of general unfamiliarity / difficulty to explain and understand. We'll see how it goes.

[This post received a major update on June 6, 2025, for future comment-readers. There was also an addendum posted here]

Outline

1) Overview
2) Common Categories

2.1) Turn-Based, Individual

2.2) Turn-Based, Side

2.3) Simultaneous

2.4) Phased Initiative

2.5) No Initiative

3) Weirder Categories

3.1) Composite Speed

3.2) Decision-Based

3.3) Dynamic

3.4) Hybrids

4) Miscellaneous Stuff
5) Concluding Thoughts

Overview

Oh, right, I should introduce the topic. Uh, initiative? Y'know, "turn order." Whatever method you use to determine the order that actions are declared or resolve or whatever in a complicated gameplay scenario with lots of participants. Usually combat. This is an action game thing, okay? It supports tactical integrity, which is relevant to some games but not others. Most story games don't have any system for initiative because most story games aren't about tactical thinking, for example. If those are the kinds of games you play, and not the kind I'm talking about in this post, you have permission to leave and not write an annoying comment about how your favorite system doesn't even have an initiative method and you don't see the need for such a ridiculous, D&D-centric idea anyway.

I will not be talking about how different games handle surprise mechanics, because I see that as a different topic. However, I should note that in the vast majority of systems I researched for this post, the amount of text spent explaining their surprise mechanics would form the bulk of their text describing their initiative method. Kinda wonder why people seem to overthink surprise so much. But hey, that's a post for another day.

This post is also not about different action systems or types of action economy or whatever. However, many of my examples invariably require talking about those things, simply because some initiative methods are intrinsically entangled with the game's general action structure, whereas others are more modular.

A person or group's preference for initiative method is shaped by all kinds of concerns and priorities. Some people want realism, willing to make it complex and detailed if need be. Others want it to be nice and gamified, looking for ways to incorporate variables tying into character traits, meaningful choices, trade offs, etc. And some just want an option that's smooth to play, trying to prevent miscommunication and loss of momentum.

If I know of an actual game where a method is used, I'll list it. Otherwise, an awful lot of these exist only in the blogosphere and twitter threads. A lot of folks took a look at this post before it went live, but I should specifically thank Ian of Benign Brown Beast, Clayton of Explorers Design, and my own D&D group members for their contributions. I don't want to go through the effort of making this a "living post" but if you leave a comment with an addition, I'll try to find the time to add it to the post.

I'll try to keep my opinions out of it. Mostly. Eh, you get what you get. Take it or leave it.

Turn-Based, Individual

Individual initiative is the most intuitive method for most folks. It's how you play most board games and parlor games. One player at a time. That being said, it's also notoriously cumbersome. It's a lot of info to keep track of, it's easy to accidentally skip someone, you spend forever waiting for your turn to come, and yet it's also hard to plan ahead for your turn since the situation is constantly changing.

What kind of game benefits the most from individual turns? In my opinion, it's the kind where every character has a lot of things going on at once during their turn. Multiple actions of multiple types, lots of options to consider, complications like interruptions and conditional effects and whatnot. In those kinds of games, you need the extra breathing room afforded by, "alright, everyone else shut up. It's your turn now. What do you want to do?"

Randomized

This is not the most basic method in this long, long list... but it is by far the most commonly used, by such a staggering margin you probably cannot even imagine. This is the version used in modern D&D, and therefore hundreds of other games I'm not going to bother listing. Every individual participant in the fight rolls a die or draws a card or something, then they each take a turn from best to worst. Have a tiebreaker ready.

It's more common than not for there to be modifiers to the rolls, so it isn't fully randomized. Fast characters add a bonus, slow characters subtract a penalty. Also, because this process is such a pain in the butt, games using randomized individual initiative usually just roll for turn order once and then stick with that order for the rest of the fight.

This system can be messy to resolve. There are all kinds of techniques people use to try and make it more manageable. I really like my own DM's method, which is to call for results in groups of five. "Did anyone get a result of 20 or higher? … Alright, did anyone get from 15-20? … Alright, anyone from 10-15?" and so on. All the players shut the hell up for a moment and wait for their chunk to be called, so that the GM has the time to write things down in the proper order.

Fixed Order

This is used in 1977 "Holmes Basic" D&D, GURPS, Call of Cthulhu, Fate, Beyond the Wall, Five Torches Deep, and Fallout 2d20. What's the fixed order based on? Usually something like a character's "speed value." Maybe their dexterity or agility or whatever. The 5E DMG calls this the "Initiative Score" method since everyone gains a new fixed stat, like their Strength Score or Wisdom Score.

Character with highest speed goes first, second highest goes second, etc. No dice rolling, no variation. The fast character will always be faster than the slow character. The party's order will always be the same. But there almost definitely needs to be a tiebreaking mechanic of some kind.

Subtype: Arbitrary Fixed Order

AKA "clockwise order." This is used in ICRPG, Shadowdark, and, like, most board games. Just go around the table in a circle. If you're playing online, substitute it for something like "alphabetical order" or whatever else works best. It's technically based on a metagame variable and can be manipulated accordingly, but it's mostly just favored for being really, really simple. A lot of people aren't convinced that initiative order is actually very meaningful, tactically-speaking. In a lot of RPGs, getting to go earlier in the round isn't that much of an advantage, especially after the first round of combat. So why not just accept an arbitrary turn order if it makes your life easier?

Phased Action Monsters

This comes from a Patreon post by Mike Mearls, who's still cooking up new design ideas for 5E. The basic idea is that randomization only applies to the players. It's an asymmetric system. Players roll for initiative like normal, but the monster takes their turns at specific initiative spots (e.g. the monster acts on initiative count 20, 15, and 0). Then, you can designate specific actions and moves and whatnot for each of those spots. All of this is written directly into the monster's stat block during your prep, like you're scripting their behavior. This is all essentially a substitute for Legendary Monsters from 5E, but it's a neat way to reduce bookkeeping and add a pinch of structure (that the players can then exploit).

The Daniel Sell Subsection

Because Daniel has a thing for this I guess

Stack Initiative

This comes from Daniel's game Troika!, although you can also read his original blog post describing it right here. It's also used in 17th Century Minimalist. People call it a "chit-extraction" method, where you can use chips or tokens or whatever. Let's go with cards.

Every participant in the fight has some cards that then get shuffled into a deck. Each turn, the GM draws a card from the deck, determining the next person to go. So the order is totally random, but a character with more cards in the deck is more likely to take turns more often. Hypothetically, this should trend towards everyone eventually getting to go as the deck gets lower and lower... however, there's also one "End of the Round" card in the deck. When that card is drawn, the deck is re-set. Remove all the cards of defeated combatants and shuffle everything back together. So there's no guarantee that everyone will get to go at least once in every round. You could get totally bananas luck and draw the End of the Round card after only like 2 or 3 turns have been taken.

Miscellaneous

The rest of these all come from this blog post where Daniel just churns out a ton more methods, arguably pre-empting a number of other innovations described elsewhere in this post. I'll repeat a few unique ones here.

• Euro Game Initiative: Clockwise around the table, except the player who gets the first turn each round is also rotating in clockwise order. So if the first round goes Alice, Bob, Charles, Dana, and Ed, then the second round goes Bob, Charles, Dana, Ed, and Alice, and the third round goes Charles, Dana, Ed, Alice, and Bob, etc.
• Drama Initiative: The player with the least health goes first. Give a small advantage to the most vulnerable character, I guess.
• Auction Initiative: The player willing to take the biggest penalty to all rolls goes first. The GM starts at a number that would make for a very high penalty and begins counting down. Chime in when you're ready to take your turn, subtracting that number from whatever rolls you're about to make.
• Rondel Initiative: It's found in board games a lot, but maybe there are some RPGs that use it which I'm unaware of. Here's an article about the idea, but I'll do my best to explain. In a way, it's sort of a racing minigame. There's a tracker divided into segments that wraps around (traditionally circular in shape). Everyone starts on one position. The first player takes an action, moving up the tracker a number of spaces based on the type of action. Then, whoever is in "last place" gets to always take the next turn, moving slowly up the tracker with each new action. You'll need a tiebreaker of some kind, since characters are frequently occupying the same position. In Daniel's version, once you've reached the end of the tracker, you can't go again until everyone else has reached it and finished the "race." In a lot of board games, though, it's an ongoing race.

Turn-Based, Side

Side initiative is usually considered much faster than individual initiative. It invites more teamwork and emphasizes the party as a collective unit. Plus, you don't have to wait long for your turn, and you're less likely to zone out. However, some groups might fall into the trap of over-analyzing their side's play, bogging the game down with discussion.

What about fights with more than two sides? Some of the following methods are ready to accommodate this, but others aren't. A term I see sometimes is to refer to each grouping as a "pod," which can be helpful.

Most of the time, side initiative methods are only partly turn-based. Actions taken by characters within the same side / pod are usually resolved simultaneously, so all the principles governing simultaneous action still come into play.

However, it's also possible to instead make it fully turn-based, and only partly side-based. That is to say, you could still have each member of a pod take individual turns, rather than acting simultaneously as a side. But they just decide amongst themselves what order they'll go. This might be the right call if the system is still crunchy enough to justify giving each player their own turn, but you don't want to bother with every participant making an individual initiative roll and needing to write down like a dozen results.

Back and Forth

This is used in Into the Odd and Cairn 2E. One side goes first, then the other side goes next, then you just keep repeating until the battle ends. One of the most simple methods possible. Maybe there's some kind of rule to determine which side goes first on the initial turn, but that's a pretty minor advantage if the battle goes on for more than one or two rounds.

Randomized

This is used in AD&D 2E, OSRIC, White Box FMAG, White Star, Marvel Super Heroes (but not FASERIP, for some reason?), Maze Rats, Knave, and MÖRK BORG. At the top of the round, roll initiative to determine which side goes first. But then, re-roll every round. Yes, this means there will be times when one side goes twice in a row. This is a feature, not a bug. Adds a bit of chaos, and can really turn the tide.

Additional note: not just for this category, but plenty of others, there's a bizarrely consistent design choice that I think is mostly just bad. That is, having both sides roll-off, and then needing a tiebreaker ready. The vast, vast majority of these methods are a simple 50/50 odds anyway, literally indistinguishable from a coin flip, and yet nearly all of them say "both sides roll 1d6, higher wins, re-roll in case of a tie." And like... I don't know who needs me to explain this to them but in case you aren't aware: you can simplify this by just having one die roll. GM rolls 1d6, 1-3 the baddies go first, 4-6 the party goes first. Ta-da! Modify to taste, obviously. But I just... find it really, really weird that in all my research I only ever saw that once or twice.

Speed Sandwich

This is used in The Black Hack, Mausritter, the GLOG, Mothership 0E, Grave, Black Sword Hack, The Nightmares Underneath, Cypher System, The Electrum Archive, Trespasser, and Wolves Upon the Coast. At the top of the round, every player character rolls a simple pass-fail initiative check, maybe adding a speed modifier. Those who succeed go in a pod first. Then all the NPCs / monsters go as a pod. Then all the PCs who failed go in a pod last. Thus, nearly all rounds have three phases: Fast / Enemies / Slow.

I like this because I like side initiative and I like a process that's fast, but I also see the value in incorporating character speed as a variable as well as the undesirable swinginess of a full party that always acts together (potentially "ganging up" on your bad guy and curb-stomping him). The GM doesn't have to roll anything or write anything down. The players don't have to note their exact result, only whether they passed or failed (which I also like because that makes it basically the same as every other kind of roll you normally do in an RPG, rather than being a weird exception).

The game Trespasser has a neat variation where you can roll a critical success on your initiative check, allowing you to take a turn during both the fast/opening phase and the slow/closing phase.

Sam of Dreaming Dragonslayer has a cool idea: make your initiative bonus equal to the number of empty item slots you have. Well, sort of. It's like 90% the Speed Sandwich method. We can nudge it there. The point is, it's a cool idea to make the weight of your equipment affect your "speed" without decreasing your movement distance, and gives you a reason to not fully load up like a pack mule all the time.

Wolves Upon the Coast has a variation where the target number is your armor class. The difficulty varies by character, where characters wearing heavy armor are less likely to act in the Fast phase than characters wearing lighter armor. Nifty!

Guerilla Initiative

This comes from a blog post by Homebrew Homunculus. Their main thing is just re-discovering the Speed Sandwich method described above, but they also talk about a very interesting idea they call "guerilla initiative": whichever side has fewer members always goes first.

The players storm the lair of a solitary dragon? The dragon reacts first. The lair has a dozen kobolds in it? The players go first. The rule communicates something about the world: it really emphasizes the stealth in small numbers and the overhead of organizing as a larger group.

I assume this would be re-determined each round. At the beginning of the fight, the party has the initiative. But kill enough kobolds, and eventually the few survivors will take the initiative, gaining a chance to maybe slip through your fingers.

Tank Initiative

Similar to the previous, this comes from a blog post by Alchemist Nocturne. They also have a whole lot of ideas swishing around in that post, but I just have one interesting thing to extract: initiative goes to the side who has the single participant with the highest max HP. This means that having a beefy fighter in the party is an automatic initiative bonus. It also means that there's an advantage to fighting a big group of weak guys rather than a solo tough guy. Most interesting of all, it incentivizes you to take out the biggest adversary first, so that way your side can gain the initiative in each subsequent round.

F(r)ictional Initiative

This comes from a blog post by Was It Likely?, expanded on further in this blog post by Joy of Dice, which is truly wacky. Give yourself a treat and read those two posts yourself some time. I'll summarize the rule:

If in doubt about who goes first, have each side tally up a list of reasons that they other side should fear them. "We have superior numbers." "We have a big scary guy." "My sword is bloody and my eyes are bloodshot and crazed." Whichever side has a longer list gets to decide if they want to go first or last. If the reasons change during the fight, one list eclipsing the other in length, then initiative should change accordingly.

Note the word "should" in that first sentence. These are things you think should make you scary, even if the other side doesn't feel so, yet. Players can use this to establish facts about the fiction and the GM can use it to telegraph some tactical information about the party's adversary.

Joy also recommends using this for establishing turn order in other contexts, and simply changing the relevant fictional factor. In social fraternizing, tally reasons you revere the other side, with the more revered side winning the initiative. In bargaining, tally reasons the other should want to bargain with you, with the less-desperate side winning the initiative. Etc.

Take note that this is meant for us in a system called "sloppy drippy combat." In practice, fights using these rules don't cleanly break down into a binary "one side goes, then the other side goes." There's actually a back-and-forth of participants acting and reacting from both sides of the fight, but players citing their "list of reasons they should fear us" is the main way they justify interrupting fast foes and getting to act first. Each round might be a delicious triple-decker speed sandwich, with each slice of bread a different reason to be afraid.

The Patrick Stuart Subsection

Because Patrick has a thing for this I guess

Lamp Initiative

This comes from Patrick Stuart's Veins of the Earth, and is thus very tied to dungeoncrawling / exploration in the Underdark. In this method, every light source in the battlefield is an initiative pod. Each pod includes the person holding the lamp (who makes the initiative roll with their own bonus) plus everyone within the lamp's range of light. Patrick says that the lamp-holder chooses the order that their pod's members take their turns, but they're going to talk it over anyway so it may as well be one turn.

Any character that has no light source automatically loses initiative and has to take their turn after every light pod has finished going. This puts Underdark creatures with darkvision at a weird disadvantage, but that just means they'll work that much harder on trying to secure a surprise round.

Lamp initiative could end up just being simple side initiative if the party all clusters together around one lamp and the baddies all cluster around their own lamp. But why not split the party into multiple groups that each have their own lamp?

Physical Initiative

Comes from this blog post. "The Initiative" is a literal physical object somewhere on the battlefield, obvious to everyone. Whichever side currently possesses that object wins initiative each round, up until they lose it. An actual tangible MacGuffin. I assume this was inspired by watching sports, since this sounds to me like it's basically soccer or basketball or something.

Patrick offers a list of weird initiative objects, and even suggests an even more bonkers idea: if the initiative is broken / killed / destroyed (likely accidentally. Be careful with those attacks!) then you switch to not using any initiative method instead, like you're playing a PbtA game I guess.

Query Initiative

Comes from the same blog post as the previous. This method gives the players a tradeoff, where the chance to go first is exchanged for having more information at the start of the fight. This makes the most sense in the context of an ambush or a surprise run-in in the darkness of a dungeon corridor, where you don't have full knowledge of the situation and may not even realize who you're fighting initially.

The enemy has an initiative number. The players can start the fight by asking questions. "What type is it?" "How many are there?" "Are they armed?" "Where are they?" Etc. If they ask a number of questions less than the enemy's initiative number, then the party retains the initiative and will get to take the first turn. But if they go over the enemy's initiative number, then they spend too long sizing up the situation and lose the chance to go first.

It sounds to me like a lot of these questions would inevitably be answered after the first round of the fight anyway, but I can imagine that could make the difference between victory and defeat. It's a half-baked method with some interesting potential, at least. I think this could make an excellent method for submarine combat (or something comparable. Submarine-like spaceship combat, maybe).

Davide of Daimon Games elaborates on these previous two methods and incorporates item slots. Each player has an initiative number equal to their empty item slots. They can go first if this number is greater than the enemy's initiative number, but the player can first spend empty item slots to ask questions. So your speed is a triple tradeoff of how fast the enemy is, how weighed down you are, and how much time you spend analyzing things. ¡Ay, caramba!

Light-based Initiative

Related to the idea from Veins in the Earth, Rook of the Beneath Foreign Planets blog offers their own method here. Here's the gist:

Roll initiative once at the beginning of combat, higher roll goes first each round. Monsters / NPCs / baddies roll 1d6. The PCs roll either 1d4 if they have no light, 1d6 if they have one light source, and 1d8 if they have multiple light sources.

On a tie, the players win but their light source goes out. GM, improvise some way in which it gets squandered. If they only had one light source, they're suddenly trapped in the dark and will want to spend the first round firing up another lantern. If they had a backup already, then they're still good to go! 

This means that combat also threatens to deplete your light resources faster than they otherwise would have gone, and some fights start off with a big tactical disadvantage. Like the darkness itself seizes on the moment of violence and chooses to assert itself.

Simultaneous

This is often mistakenly referred to as "no initiative system" but that's actually something different. Simultaneous resolution is very much its own family of distinct procedural methods, and it tends to really freak people out who've never encountered it before. Folks like having a firm, authoritative order of operations to rely on. Simultaneous resolution introduces ambiguity, requires GM discretion. Scary stuff! But proponents of simultaneous methods often praise it for being more, well, realistic. Real-life combat isn't turn-based, after all. It also adds a bit of fog of war to your tactics, since you have to pick your actions without knowing exactly what the situation will be when those actions play out.

Written Orders

This is the original standard found in old-school wargaming. Here's a blog post describing it. The basic method goes like this: each round, every participant writes down their actions. They pass their actions over to the referee, who then decides their results. All actions execute simultaneously. The referee might have some rules or even loose guidelines for figuring out how actions should resolve, especially if they conflict with one another. But they might just have to use their best judgment instead.

This is the most straightforward form of simultaneous resolution, but writing down your actions can be a bit of a pain. Everyone needs paper, everyone needs to pause to write, lots of scrap is going to get thrown out. A digital setup makes this easier, as everyone can just type their actions. Works well for play-by-post games.

Turn-Based Declaration

Because writing down actions is cumbersome, maybe just verbally declare them. But because you can't declare simultaneously (no sense in everyone talking over one another), you'll have to take turns declaring, which itself can be gamed. There's an inherent advantage in declaring later, because you can base your answer on what other people said previously. It's like turn-based Rock, Paper, Scissors. Wouldn't be very fair, would it? Thus, there are different ways to account for that.

One approach I've seen is to simply grant the turn-based advantage to the GM. Players declare first, then the GM reacts to this and decides what the NPCs / monsters do, and then it all resolves simultaneously. The GM always has the "advantage," and they're just trusted not to abuse it. Which, I mean, is true of literally everything else the GM does so it's probably fine.

A different approach is to grant the players a slight advantage. In the above Spells and Steel blog post, Charles recommends that the GM give a hint at the monster's actions before the players declare. So not quite the full benefit of getting to pick last, but also not totally blind. Robert Fisher does the same thing.

And of course, a third answer is to embrace the tactical potential here and directly make the "declaration advantage" a point of contest. Participants / sides may not be rolling initiative to determine the order that their actions resolve, but they could still roll for the chance to win the declaration initiative. Have each side roll each round, and whoever wins gets to declare their actions last.

Some folks mix this with other methods in this post. I haven't seen this idea explored much but I'd be very interested.

WEG Action Segments

This is used in the D6 system by West End Games. The generic rules don't really dig into this in much detail, but their Star Wars RPG from the 80s lays it all out.

First, the GM decides what the NPCs will be doing while the players declare what they'll be doing. Everyone must describe their actions in detail. In fact, they can declare multiple actions. "I want to run to cover, draw my blaster, and fire at the stormtrooper" is 3 actions. "The stormtrooper is going to shoot at you three times and then reload" is 4 actions.

Then, the round is split into segments for each action. In the first action segment, everyone's first declared action executes simultaneously. In the second action segment, everyone's second declared action executes simultaneously. Continue with as many action segments as needed until everyone has performed all of their declared actions.

What's to stop you from just declaring 50 actions and running around like the Flash? Well, the D6 system uses dice pools for every roll you make. And for every additional action you declare beyond the first, every single action suffers a penalty. So if you would normally roll 4 dice for a single blaster shot, then attempting two shots in one round will force you to roll both with only 3 dice. And if you attempt three shots in one round? All three are rolled with 2 dice. So the more stuff you try to squeeze into one round, the less effective everything will be. Your effort gets spread thin, dividing your attention between a bunch of tasks.

A very similar system is used in the 1st edition of the End All Be All system, although they still use dice rolls to decide the order of actions taken within the same segment (despite having been declared simultaneously).

Burning Wheel

Luke Crane's Burning Wheel RPG uses a "written orders" method, but with some specific constraints.

Each round ("exchange") is split into three chunks ("volleys"). Everyone writes down their actions for the whole exchange ahead of time, split across the three volleys. But you only reveal and resolve each volley one at a time. All the actions in the first volley execute simultaneously, then the second volley, then the third. It just provides a wee bit more structure than the basic method, but is still ultimately a pretty freeform, writing-heavy method.

Interestingly, the game still finds a way to incorporate "character speed" as a factor. Your character's Reflexes value determines how many actions you can perform per volley. A character with Reflexes 3 can do 1 action per volley, Reflexes 6 gets 2 actions per volley, Reflexes 4 gets 2 actions in one volley but only 1 action in the other two, etc.

I see this as almost the inverse as the WEG Action Segments method. With that system, the same amount of stuff takes place during each chunk of time, but the amount of time chunks can vary. But with this system, there's always exactly 3 time chunks, but the amount of stuff that takes place during each chunk can vary.

Phased Initiative

By now you've noticed the conspicuous absence of what was possibly the most common initiative method historically. Including in, like, most versions of D&D. How do you write three and a half thousand words listing different initiative methods before finally getting to this one? I dunno, man. I warned you that I'm bad at categorization. I wasn't sure where to place it. Some versions of this method incorporate side-based turns, others do staggered sides, others do simultaneous, etc. So I figured I should explain all of those ideas first.

The best way I can describe this method in general is thusly: the round is divided into set phases that correspond to different types of action. All action within a phase is resolved simultaneously, but the order of phases is fixed. Every game or GM who uses this method has their own specific list of phases in their own order, with their own rules for a gazillion other questions that'll come up.

A classic example is the one found in B/X D&D and BECMI D&D.

1. Each side rolls off to determine who wins initiative. Ties are either rerolled or, if the DM is feeling spicy, they can try some of that unpredictable simultaneous resolution stuff.
2. The winning side resolves their actions in this order:
1. Morale rolls
2. Movement
3. Missile fire
4. Magical spells
5. Melee attacks
3. The losing side then resolves their actions in the same order
4. Go back to step 1, re-rolling each new round.

So it's kind of like randomized side-initiative, but each side has a strict order of operations they'll have to follow.

There's an optional rule for "Pair Combat" where combatants can pair off in a fight and then simply roll initiative against one another. Old School Essentials helpfully provides some extra details, including 1) intentions to either cast magic spells or to attempt a retreat must be declared before initiative is rolled, since those are highly telegraphed to your opponent and could potentially be disrupted, and 2) Characters attacking with slow weapons (two-handed melee or some missile weapons) always act last, as if they lost initiative. See how many little details we can add into this stuff?

Compare this with the method found in Swords & Wizardry:

1. Spellcasters declare spells
2. Roll for initiative, side-based
3. Members of the winning side may either move or fire missiles
4. Members of the losing side may either move or fire missiles
5. Members of the winning side may either make a melee attack or cast a spell
6. Members of the losing side may either make a melee attack or cast a spell
7. Go back to step 1, re-rolling each new round.

Notice that this has two major differences: 1) this method isn't fully side-based, but instead staggers each side's actions back and forth across the phases, and 2) it has blended phases, where you can choose one of several comparable actions. You can imagine creating a wholly new method of phase initiative with whatever combination of these traits you prefer.

When examining these methods, the order of the phases may have some logic to it ("arrows are fast! sword swings are slow!") but it's ultimately pretty arbitrary and contrived. In a 6-second span, a character can move and then swing an axe... but they can't swing an axe and then move? Even if they managed to kill their foe? Would using a big polearm be a bonus or a penalty? According to OSE, they're so unwieldy that they break the phase order entirely and force you to act last, even if you had won initiative. But in Basic Fantasy RPG. they have such long reach that they break the phase order entirely and allow you to attack anyone approaching you before they can close the distance, even if you had lost initiative. Classic Traveller essentially has three phases: 1) movement, 2) attacks, 3) morale. Yup, morale comes last. Why? Because it's all arbitrary.

Since I did the research and took all these notes anyway, I may as well offer a few more examples.

• Runequest keeps it simple. 1) Declare actions, 2) Movement, 3) Everything else. Uh oh, that third one could get messy. Melee, missiles, and spells are resolved in order of "strike rank," a number modified by the character's dexterity, size, weapon length, etc. Sounds like more composite speed design (see below).
• Pendragon is likewise easy. 1) Declare actions, 2) Attacks, 3) Movement. Here's the catch: you can either attack or move, but not both. But attacks are always contests anyway, so you still may win an attack initiated by the other guy.
• Under Hill, By Water has four phases. 1) Missile attacks, 2) Catch-all category for "monstrous creatures doing monstrous things," 3) miscellaneous (all non-missile, non-monster, non-melee actions and maneuvers), and 4) melee attacks.
• Forlorn Encystment wrote a blog post where he came up with a Phased Initiative method for 5E D&D. It is one of the most excruciatingly detailed systems I've ever seen. He includes fucking everything. It's really impressive.
• I think there's like a gazillion blog posts lost to the ages where each grognard lays out their own personal variation on Phased Initiative. Here's a neat one someone on Reddit once shared with me, which I saved the link to. I really like the gimmick with spell levels.
• Doctor Who Roleplaying Game by Cubicle 7 is pretty neat. 1) Declare actions, 2) Talking, 3) Movement, 4) "Doing" (miscellaneous actions), 5) Fighting. If two characters are trying to do the same thing at the same time, you can break the tie by comparing the stats they're using. I think this is a nice example of the granularity being applied to something other than different types of attack. Talking is not only its own action phase, but it comes before any actual fighting.
• The game Advanced Fantasy Dungeons (by the ever-charming Nova / Idle Cartulary of Playful Void fame) cleverly disguises its phases, but they're there. All non-attack actions are resolved first (ties broken by Dexterity), then all attacks are resolved in order of "speed," which is just their damage die. Low to high, 1d4 then 1d6 then 1d8 and so on. E.g. daggers, then short swords, then long swords, then great swords.
• One person responding to this post described phases based on character roles, rather than actions taken. I've seen that sort of thing in board games plenty of times, but does anyone have an example from RPGs that I can cite? Would it be, like, "first all rogues go, then all fighters go, then all wizards"? Or maybe "first the party's scout goes, then the party's leader goes, then the party's mapper, etc."

No Initiative

This is a whole new section I realized I needed to add. Not every game has a specific method for deciding the order of turns or actions or whatever, and that itself is often a deliberate design choice that ought to be highlighted and explained.

How these kinds of complex activities look without the structure of an initiative method can vary a lot.

First, you have games where the blow-by-blow of the activity is just handwaved entirely.

In Tunnels & Trolls, each side tallies up all their tactical advantages and bonuses and weapons and whatnot, then makes a single big roll with all those factors included. This represents all of those factors interacting to resolve the battle, but there's no order to how each factor is impacting the situation. We skip to the results. Nobody ever makes a decision during the battle, except perhaps the decision to flee after the dice have been resolved. It usually takes multiple rounds of dice rolls to complete a battle, but each segment is still totally abstracted.

Others have designed similar systems whereby no "turn order" is needed. Meg and Vince Baker have "Otherkind Dice," which was developed further by the blog Fallen Constellation. An even simpler system can be found in Hearts of Wulin, a PbtA wuxia game where every fight is reduced to a single 2d6 roll that decides the outcome. Any details about the content of that fight are purely flavor you should feel free to narrate afterwards.

But second, you have games which do expect you to play out the moment-to-moment back and forth of combat (and similar intensive activities), but the GM simply "plays it by ear."

This is the standard answer found in most PbtA games, but I don't consider it a "method," exactly. I've heard some folks try to dub this "Spotlight Initiative," but I reject that name. All initiative methods are forms of spotlight management. That's what initiative is. What these gamers are instead describing is an approach to spotlight management where the GM just tries to rely on their own intuition, which is inconsistent and somewhat-arbitrary. That and/or the players act based on whatever order they speak up (perhaps punishing some less-vocal players, according to many comments I've seen online).

"Well, Alice just attacked Bob, so I think I'll tell Bob to go next. After that, I'll check in on Charles, since it's been awhile since he's done anything. … Oh wait, no, Dana just said he's attacking Alice, and it seems like it makes more sense for Alice to respond..."

When they do try to claim there's a method to the madness, they often end up inadvertently describing one of the other methods found in this post! It's not uncommon for groups to independently reinvent / rediscover Popcorn Initiative, Bowling Initiative, Miss-Initiative, etc. on their own, in the absence of an "official" method provided by the text of the game. But if you've come up with such a method, then what you've done is hacked an initiative system into a game that, rules-as-written, doesn't have one.

So yes, I'm going to continue claiming that these games have "no initiative." I'm not going to cite your houserules when I'm trying to describe how a game is written. Developing your own techniques to run a game is a form of homebrew. Just because it's invisible doesn't mean you aren't writing your own rulebook. Meanwhile, the rulebooks I'm writing about are pretty unambiguous:

There are no turns or rounds in Dungeon World, no rules to say whose turn it is to talk. Instead players take turns in the natural flow of the conversation, which always has some back-and-forth.

Dungeon World, page 17 

And to reiterate: I don't think this is a bad thing! Trusting the GM to simply follow their (perhaps arbitrary) intuition is a great answer for many groups, who will gladly attest that their games feel more cinematic and narratively satisfying than when they strictly conform to a written, codified mechanic. Most games don't expect you to use an initiative method during normal gameplay, after all. The GM manages the spotlight using their intuition all the time. That's, like, the default. 

Like everything, it just depends on what you want out your play experience.

Intermission

Those are what I consider to be the most common and "normal" categories of initiative method. Every category that follows is weirder. While many of them should "technically" fall within one of the previous categories, they feel distinct enough that they warrant separate discussion.

Composite Speed

These are all variants on the basic modern D&D method of turn-based, individual, randomized initiative incorporating speed modifiers of some kind. The reason it bears an entire category is because complicating that basic method creates lots of possibilities very fast. The main distinction is that these methods all incorporate a variety of modifiers in any given roll, usually situational ones that change from round to round.

(The 5E DMG calls this method "Speed Factor" but that's also the name of an unrelated mechanic from 1E AD&D. That one is used for breaking initiative ties and sometimes granting bonus attacks. Not well remembered by most, and not really an actual initiative method for the purposes of this blog post.)

A simple way to do this is by treating each "speed factor" as an arithmetical modifier. Roll 1d20, then add or subtract as necessary. Here's some examples:

Example from the 5E DMG, page 271

Another, more elaborate example from the 2E AD&D PHB, page 125

Thus, everyone has to decide what they're going to spend their turn doing before rolling initiative. This has the advantage of avoiding the dreaded "oh shit it's my turn uhhhh what do I wanna do?" thing, but it has the disadvantage of making you commit to an action which might be obsolete by the time your turn arrives.

Additionally, you now have to reroll your initiative every round, since you probably take different actions each round, after all. In order to spare the GM from the burden of bookkeeping, they forgo writing down initiative order and instead begin each round simply counting up from 1, with each player speaking up when their number is reached (or counting down from a high number, ascending vs descending, whatever).

All in all, this method is kind of like if you took phased initiative and just added a lot of wiggle room. Missiles will usually be shot before melee attacks are made... but not always. Your choice of action will affect how quickly you can act, but it's not set in stone.

Most other composite speed methods instead change the die size itself based on your chosen action. The most famous example is Greyhawk Initiative, based on a house rule that Mike Mearls once shared online which later got released as a full Unearthed Arcana for 5E D&D. It's got plenty of crunchy details and answers for all your edge case situations.

About four years before this, my cunning and crafty friend Nick over at Papers and Pencils came up with the same basic idea. However, he still retains a way for a character's personal speed to be a factor: you roll your initiative die a number of times equal to your Dexterity and then take the best one (or, if you have negative DEX, take the worst one). Interestingly, this predates the popularization of advantage / disadvantage from 5E D&D!

Sam from Dreaming Dragonslayer iterated on the Greyhawk variant. 1) He makes your initiative roll also your damage roll for that round, so that at least if you roll slow then you also hit hard, and 2) he offers two types of retreat options, one fast but unreliable and the other slow but sure.

Notorious bird Prismatic Wasteland seems to have independently come up with nearly the same idea. I always thought he and Mike Mearls were much alike. Some differences from the Greyhawk version:

• If you're doing multiple actions in one turn, Mr. Wasteland has you roll all dice and simply take the highest result, rather than having you add them together. Not quite as punishing against multitaskers.
• If you're casting a spell, then you add the spell level to the result. The more powerful the spell, the slower it will (probably) be.
• He has a rule allowing you to make a change of plans mid-round, which I'm surprised I don't see more often. It's slightly punishing, but at least you won't be screwed over if your declared action becomes irrelevant by the time your turn arrives.

And you know what? Just because I'm so gosh darn thorough when I research these posts, I'll throw in a bonus thing I found. Dungeon Crawl Classics incorporates the most minor version of composite speed dice I have yet encountered. While the main initiative method is the mainstream modern D&D option (turn-based, individual, randomized), it has one exception: whereas almost everyone rolls a d20 for initiative, anyone using a two-handed weapon rolls a d16 instead. That's literally the only example in the game, I believe.

Decision-Based

These are all methods where turn order is rooted in decisions rather than randomness or strict procedure or whatever else. While many methods involve some amount of decision-making, this category represents methods where the choice is front and center. They prioritize player agency not merely by giving players more control over when they act, but by capitalizing on the tactical potential of making turn order a decision point. They complicate that decision by incorporating different consequences, tradeoffs, and interactions for the players to weigh carefully.

These methods are harder to bolt onto D&D as a simple houserule, often being tightly integrated into a game's design. However, I think they have the most potential for tactical depth out of any category in this post.

Popcorn

Also sometimes called "Elective Initiative." This is used in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, Death in Space, and (I think) Fate Condensed, but it's also a houserule that's been frequently recommended on the internet since maybe forever? Lancer claims to use this but it is mistaken; see "Bowling initiative" below. Characters take individual turns, and at the end of their turn decide who gets to take the next turn. Bob takes his actions, then when he's done, he says, "alright uhhh Alice, how about you go next?" This nearly always includes the extra restriction of giving every participant at least one turn before anyone can take their next turn.

A bit chaotic, gives players more control, rewards them for planning, but also burdens everyone with remembering everyone who's already gone in the current round. Plus, you don't know when to expect your turn, and it might come before you're ready. It's also pretty much inevitable that the players will simply keep picking each other until they can't anymore, functionally making this option almost identical to regular side initiative. How often will a player say, "actually, I think I'll pass the ball over to the bad guys first"? Still, no bookkeeping and no rolling dice.

EDIT: It was pointed out to me by Lysus and PTroilus on the NSR Cauldron server that, in practice, players will usually save one of their turns for the very end of the round, since the last person to take their turn in a round will get to choose who starts the next round. Smart stuff.

Volleyball Initiative

This is a variant created by Jake Eldritch for a game jam, which adds a little bit more complexity. It uses volleyball terminology, but the gist is that 1) if you use your turn to attack a foe, then that automatically passes the initiative to the foe for the next turn, and 2) you can spend your action to simply set up an ally, giving them an immediate free attack (I believe separate from their action on their own turn).

NOT SO FAST!

[That's the name of the method. I'm not yelling at you]

This method was innovated by Street Fighter: the Storytelling Game. There's also a slight variant found in Zzarchov Kowolski Neoclassical Geek Revival as well as in Spacemaster 2E. I'll explain the original first.

Everyone has a hand of cards representing their fight maneuvers. At the start of a round, everyone secretly selects a card. Then, everyone declares what the speed on their card is. The person with the slowest speed goes first, getting to move and then use their maneuver. Sounds backwards, right? But at any time during that person's movement, any other player with a faster maneuver can interrupt and take their own turn. Moving, then maneuvering, then returning to the interrupted player to finish their turn. But interrupters can be interrupted by players with faster maneuvers, who themselves can be interrupted by even faster maneuvers. You resolve all of them in order of fastest to slowest.

So having a slower speed means you "go first," but really just means you declare yourself first, and therefore will likely be interrupted several times before you get to resolve your turn. Once the slowest character has completed their turn, go to the next slowest (assuming they didn't interrupt).

Neither NGR nor Spacemaster have cards for fighting maneuvers. Instead, your speed is simply randomized. Still, go ahead and interrupt slowpokes to your heart's content.

Haste Makes Waste

Some games allow the players to simply choose when they get to act, but then give that choice a straightforward tradeoff. In the most cases, characters trade speed for effectiveness. The more you rush, the more likely you are to fail.

For example, let's take Shinobigami, the "modern ninja battle RPG" from Japan. At the top of the round, everyone secretly chooses a number from 1 to 6 (likely by using a d6, covered up). Then, turns are taken going from high to low. However, your turn order number is also your fumble number. The higher it is, the more likely you are to fail at stuff.

Or take the End All Be All v2 system. All combatants secretly choose a number as their initiative for the round. They then act in descending order, but your number is also applied as a penalty to all actions for the round. Ties are resolved simultaneously.

Individual turn-based, but with some hidden choice and a built-in juicy tradeoff. Taking your time is rewarded. Mmmmmm risk and reward.

His Majesty the Worm

The Tarot-based RPG by Josh of Rise up Comus fame. Similar to the previous, but with slightly less control for the players and, more importantly, a different variable in the tradeoff. Josh explains the initiative rules himself here, but for my readers who practice strict Twitter abstinence, here you go:

At the start of combat, you draw 4 cards. You choose 1 to be your Initiative. Your Initiative determines when you take your turn AND it determines the target number to hit you. Low cards act first but you're easier to hit.

Hampering player effectiveness usually just leads to more failed actions, and therefore less forward momentum. Instead, why not penalize their safety? Slow and steady is also sturdy, while leaping into action means throwing caution to the wind. In fact, by making you more likely to be hit, that means this method accelerates the progress of a fight rather than slowing it down. Every time someone loses HP, we're closer to wrapping this up, and that only happens when combatants land their hits.

Tortoise and Hare

This is used in Shadow of the Demon Lord, Errant, Wandering Blades, and Block, Dodge, Parry. At the top of the round, everyone chooses to either act quickly or act slowly. Anyone who chooses to act quickly will only get to do 1 action, but it will come before everyone who chose to act slowly. Anyone who chooses to act slowly will get to do 2 actions, but they risk getting stabbed in the face first.

These chunks are staggered by side / pod. In SotDL and Wandering Blades, the players' side always wins initiative. In Errant, each side rolls. In either case, resolve the four chunks like so:

1. Characters on the winning side act quickly
2. Characters on the losing side act quickly
3. Characters on the winning side act slowly
4. Characters on the losing side act slowly

There's an additional rule in Errant only allowing you to make either one attack or cast one spell per round, even if you're acting slowly. Balance reasons, you know how it is.

Most of the time, it's probably better for you to act slowly by default, since it's better to do 2 things instead of just 1. But if you're in a situation where it's really really important for you to act before your opponent, you have the option to sacrifice your second action if you want to guarantee that.

Risk-Taking

Prismatic Wasteland (again) came up with another method inspired by the two previous, but using standard playing cards. The main distinguishing feature is a sort of push-your-luck choice each player makes. Everyone plays a card from their hand, and then take turns counting down from highest card to lowest card.

However, the number of actions you get to take on your turn is based on a d10 Risk Die the GM rolls after the cards are played but before the turns are taken. If the number of your card is lower than the Risk Die, your character takes 2 actions on your turn that round. If your card is higher than the Risk Die, your character only takes 1 action that round. If your card is equal to the Risk Die, your character takes 3 actions. Thus, the higher the card you play, the earlier you get to go, BUT the more likely you'll only get to take 1 action. Play a lower card, you're likely to be rewarded with 2 actions. Yet it's not guaranteed!

A separate nifty feature of this method is a bit of flexibility for the NPC enemies. The GM plays one card for the baddies' turn. But if any player plays a card that matches the suit of the GM's card, then the GM can instead allow an enemy to take their turn right before that player. Opportunistic little fuckers.

The name is partly a play on "trick-taking," as trick-taking games were an inspiration for this method (although nobody "takes the trick" exactly).

Buying the Initiative

I know of a few systems that frame "going first" as something you buy by spending something, usually actions. If a player is willing to pay, let them cut in line. That's how it works at Disney Land, right?

You could also think of Tortoise and Hare in this way, but that one is a bit more complicated. This is essentially just another tradeoff choice, but "going first" is just one of the things you can choose to "buy."

Shadow of the Weird Wizard has a small variation on Back and Forth side initiative. The enemy side always goes first each round, unless a player spends their reaction to "seize the initiative." So the strict back-and-forth may be broken sometimes, if a player feels it's worth spending their reaction to go first.

Likewise, CINCO! Table-Talk Odyssey by Traverse Fantasy does a similar variation on Back and Forth side. Bad guys always go first by default. But every round of combat, each player gets two actions to spend, and one of the things you can spend an action on is the chance to go before the bad guys. It's kind of like Speed Sandwich, except you pay to act during the first phase rather than roll dice for it.

Another recent example comes from Zak of the Bommyknocker Press blog. In their system, combatants each get a pool of dice, which they decide to spend on offense, defense, or initiative. They divide these up secretly. Then, at the top of the round, everyone shows how many initiative dice they bid. Go in order from most dice to fewest dice. If there's a tie, roll the dice!

There's a lot more to the combat system which I won't get into, but the main consequence is that initiative has a tradeoff with both how many attacks you make and how well you can defend against attacks. A triple-tradeoff, if you will!

Dynamic Yet Narrative Action Melee Order (DYNAMO)

This comes from the 2017 game Paranoia: Red Clearance Edition by Mongoose, which I've heard is pretty different from all older versions of the game. This is the one I have access to and it has a unique initiative system, so that's what you get to hear about.

Every player starts the session with a handful of Action Cards given by the GM, and can earn more throughout their adventure. Cards have written on them an "Action Order" number, a Reaction symbol, or both. If it has an Action Order number, then you can play it on your turn during combat when the number indicates. If it has a Reaction symbol, you play it when the card's trigger happens.

During each round of combat, follow these steps:

1. Everyone picks one card and puts it face-down. You have 5 real-time seconds to do this, or else you don't get a turn this round.
2. The GM counts down the Action Order numbers from 10 to 0. When they reach your number, interrupt and claim your turn.
3. Before you take your turn, other players can accuse you of lying about your number.
4. Resolve turn.
5. Return to step 2. GM resumes counting down until they reach 0.

The key is that players can and should lie about their Action Order number. When the GM starts counting down from 10, you can interrupt and take your turn when they reach 8 even though your card says 2. Hell, your card might be a Reaction card with no number on it at all, but you can still lie!

After you interrupt the GM to claim your turn, but before revealing your card, any other player can call you a liar. Each player can do this once per round. If the challenger is wrong, they lose a card. But if they're right, then they immediately get to take a bonus turn (in addition to their normal turn they get this round!), while the exposed liar has to discard their card and instead take a boring standard action at the end of the round.

If two players have the same Action Order number, the first one to say the name of the other player’s character in full goes first. If neither can say the other character’s name, neither act this round.

This system fucking rules.

Dynamic

I know that's a meaningless name, and a lot of these would probably fit into a previous category (they're basically always "individual, turn-based"), but I found a lot of these "tactically wacky" options share a common characteristic: the order of operations itself is almost always in flux. While many previous methods incorporate multiple variables (Composite Speed, for example), the stochastic processes in them are still fairly predictable and, more importantly, finalized. But in this next category of methods, "turn order" is absolute chaos, in the mathematical sense. While some of them grant the player the agency to choose when their next turn will be, so many other factors can change by the time that moment arrives that it's almost impossible to meaningfully "plan ahead."

Hero System

In games using the Hero System, like Champions, a character's speed doesn't just determine how early they can act in a round, but moreso how often.

Every round is split into 12 segments. A character can act during a number of segments equal to their speed score, and which segments they act during is decided by a chart.

For example: a character with a speed of 3 takes their actions during segments 4, 8, and 12. A character with a speed of 5 takes their actions during segments 3, 5, 8, 10, and 12. Sometimes you avoid overlap, but usually there's going to be some. Segment 12 is especially messy. Those ties are broken by comparing character dexterity.

This method is one of the few that actually interprets the meaning of speed a little more realistically: being fast doesn't mean that you go first, but rather that you go more times in a given time interval.

Active-Time Battle

Very similar to the previous method, but inspired from different sources. This comes from a blog post by Pink Space where Lino speculates about a possible method inspired by the active-time battle (ATB) system found in Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger. This is more of a theory post, which ends with a spitballed idea rather than a rigorously-tested houserule, but we can definitely include it.

On the table in front of you there is a gauge with ten or so segments. Each character has a token starting at one end of the gauge. 

In this model, each character has their speed reflected with a single die; its size varies depending on the character speed, with a larger die size for speedier characters. Each turn, all characters simultaneously roll their speed dice and move that number of spaces along the gauge. 

When a character’s token reaches the end of the gauge, they act. After their turn, they reset their place on the gauge.

So, much like the previous method, being "faster" improves your rate of activity. But in this case, turn order is constantly changing. A high-speed character will likely get more turns overall, but at a fairly unpredictable rate.

Warhammer 40K: Inquisitor

Last-minute suggestion by Ram. I haven't checked out anything else Warhammer-related yet, so for now you get this.

Similar to the previous two, Speed is interpreted as rate of actions in addition to the timing of actions. Specifically, characters have a Speed score, and take turns going from high to low (although you're allowed to delay if you want to). But on your turn, you also get to attempt a number of actions equal to your Speed (maximum 6). Go earlier and do more.

However, for each action you're planning to attempt, you first roll a d6, with a 50% chance of not being able to do it. So if you attempt 5 actions but only succeed on 2 rolls, then you only perform the first 2 actions you had planned. Thus, you can expect to only ever accomplish about half of what you're planning to try on your turn.

Shot Clock

This is used in Feng Shui, 7th Sea 2E, Hollowpoint, Exalted 2E, Arcanis, Hackmaster 5E, Aces & Eights, sometimes Shadowrun, and the Japanese game Nechronica. This is also sometimes called "Tick-based Initiative." They all use different terminology, and use slightly different processes, but it's the same idea.

Roll for initiative. This value is called your "shot." The GM starts the round by counting down shots from the highest result. When the GM reaches your shot, you get to take an action. Every action has a cost, reducing your shot by that amount.

For example, let's say you roll 1d20 and get 16 as your shot. The GM starts counting down: 20, 19, 18, 17, 16. Now it's your turn, and you choose to attack. That costs 3 shots, so your number is reduced to 13. Once your turn is over, the GM resumes counting down. 15, 14, 13. Now you get another turn. Maybe this time you go rummaging around a dead enemy's body to find their MacGuffin, and the GM decides this costs 6 shots. Your shot goes down to 7. Meanwhile, there are other characters taking actions during some of those other shots in between.

Like ATB, this method creates a totally chaotic turn order, and allows some characters to take more actions in a given round than other characters. But instead of the unpredictability coming from the randomization of dice rolls, it comes from regular fog of war: if you get less turns than your foe, it's because you chose to take more costly actions. Rolling initiative is like generating your "action budget" for the round.

I think the "countdown clock" is kind of unintuitive. Feng Shui wants you to track it on an actual numbered counter displayed somewhere on the table. Seems a bit much to me. Another, simpler way this can be done is by having everyone get piles of tokens. Actions cost tokens, and whoever currently has the most tokens takes the next action. So if Alice has 15, Bob has 13, and Charles has 11, then Alice goes first. She spends 3 tokens, meaning that Bob now has the most. Bob spends 3, so now Alice once again has the most. But after her next action, Charles will finally have the most. And so on. No counting down, no keeping track of everyone's place on a tracker. Just compare the size of everyone's pile after each turn.

Like I said, every game has slightly different processes and terminology. For example, in Hackmaster, you're counting up instead of down, and each shot is 1 second. So the cost of every action is expressed as a "number of seconds" it takes to perform. It's exactly the same in the rootin' tootin' gunslinging game Aces & Eights, except that shots are called "counts" and each count represents 1/10 of a second. Which definitely sounds more intense, but remember: it's just framing. You could call it whatever you want, but the actual process is identical.

Earlier editions of Shadowrun use something I think would count as a Shot Clock method, too. Quoting a description I was provided by LaVentNoir on Reddit:

Everyone rolls their initiative, then highest acts. Then subtracts 10. then repeats. So if you have initiative 32, you are going twice before someone with initiative 17 gets to act once. Once everyone reaches <0, reroll.

So your initiative is still a kind of "action budget," but the cost of every action is always 10.

Shadowrun 5E changed to a more consistent "round the table" method, while still incorporating the "action budget" idea. Everyone rolls a big initiative number, which you'll deduct from whenever you take an action. But the order of actions is still in a regular order going around the table. Everyone will complete their first turn before anyone can do their second turn. But as soon as your initiative number reaches 0, you've run out of turns and won't get to act in the next go-around. Thus, a character with a huge initiative number will indeed get to take more turns than the other characters, but only after the other characters have run out of turns. Something else I find really interesting about this system is that your initiative amount is also reduced when you suffer damage. So in addition to harm bringing you closer to defeat, it also means your less-damaged foe might get an extra turn or two over you this round. Speaking of which...

Initiative as HP (sorta)

In Exalted 3E, the actual initiative method used is individual, turn-based, derived from each character's current "initiative rating." So far, nothing revolutionary. But you also spend your initiative to perform actions, decreasing your rating after doing attacks. Okay, so it's a Shot Clock system? Not quite.

First of all, everyone only gets one turn per round (not unlike Shadowrun 5E). But more importantly, your initiative rating is also a HP bar that gets damaged by some attacks (referred to as "withering" attacks). If you knock an enemy's initiative rating to 0 or lower, you gain 5 initiative. This is important because the only way to attempt a "decisive" attack, which damages an opponent's real HP instead of their initiative rating, is by spending lots of initiative.

Which is to say: you have an action budget, spending few points to reduce other characters' action budgets and spending many points to defeat other characters. This creates a basic pattern to fights where you want to start by doing enough withering attacks to knock your foe's initiative down to 0, and in doing so you get rewarded with enough initiative to now be able to afford the decisive attack needed to actually hurt them. It's a neat two-step process where you can't just go straight for the killing blow.

Momentum

This comes from a blog post by One Zero where V.V. shares their homebrew method, which is like popcorn initiative but with a twist.

Enemies have a metacurrency called "momentum" they can spend to interrupt the popcorn-passing, to take extra turns at the end of the round, or to do other bad stuff. Each enemy starts with some momentum points, and there are a few triggers which allow them to gain more. The most important one: whenever an enemy is attacked by multiple PCs in succession.

Basically, the players are passing the ball around to each other like you would expect from popcorn initiative, but it might get intercepted by the bad guys at any moment. They can only do this a few times total, but if you commit the grave sin of "ganging up" then they'll get to do it even more times. This incentivizes the players to divide their attention as much as possible.

And of course, they add in lots of other bits and bobs on top. Spend momentum to do special actions, gain momentum by getting criticals or killing PCs, etc. It's an involved enough system that I imagine basically all major decisions in combat must revolve around it.

Hazard Die Stuff

You all love the Hazard Die, so it's no surprise that some folks have tried making an initiative method out of it somehow.

We'll first look at Brendan's method, since he did invent the Hazard Die after all. As with all applications of the Hazard Die, the idea is to fold in lots of procedural variables and bookkeeping items into one die roll that you simply make at the beginning of each turn. So for this "Tactical Hazard Die," you would roll a d6 once at the beginning of each combat round, consulting these results:

1. Setback: opponents act first or reinforcements arrive
2. Fatigue: combatants engaged in melee suffer 1 point of damage
3. Expiration: some or all ongoing effects end (such as burning oil)
4. Locality: the battlefield changes in some way
5. Percept: players gain some clue to opponent strategy
6. Advantage: players choose extra action or forced morale check

Presumably, this implies that the players get to act first each round by default.

Michael of Sheep and Sorcery takes it further, committing fully half the results to some kind of initiative effect. His version instead goes (paraphrased):

1. All PCs act first, then all enemies act last
2. Staggered into "fast" turns first (first all fast PCs, then all fast enemies) then "slow" turns last (first all slow PCs, then all slow enemies). "Slow" here is flexible. Heavy armor, over-encumbered, wielding big heavy weapons, being short, etc.
3. All enemies act first, then all PCs act last.
4. Ongoing effects end or allow for a Save.
5. Enemies call for back up!
6. Environmental effect!

I'm not sure what the "default" turn order would be on any given turn when you don't roll a 1-3. Do you just re-use the same initiative as you did on the previous turn? Roll a 3 once and now the enemies always get to act first each round until you roll a 1 or 2?

Full Metal Bones

Full Metal Bones is a mecha RPG being developed by Serket of the Fluorite Guillotine blog. She posted about its unique and complex initiative method here, which I'll summarize below. It's basically a Shot Clock method, but with some twists.

A round of combat is a 20-second beat. Each weapon is assigned a die size. That tells you how many attacks you can fit into the beat using that weapon. For example:

At the start of the beat, you roll dice until you “fill up” the 20 seconds. Each roll determines on what second you get a target lock with a given weapon. For example:

Let's say you use a rifle with a d6 die. 6 + 6 + 6 = 18, meaning you have a guaranteed 3 target locks with your rifle in the beat. There's also an extra 2 seconds at the end you might be able to squeeze another target lock into. You roll 4, 2, 6, and 5. The last one will be wasted.

When the beat begins, the GM starts counting up the seconds, one at a time. When they reach the number of your first target lock, your first attack becomes available. You can perform your attack on that very second, or on any subsequent second until the "end of the die." Continuing that example:

The GM counts: 1... 2... 3... 4! — first target lock is available for your rifle. Because your rifle has a d6 die, you can now attack on any second from 4, 5, or 6.

If you don't make the attack by the final second of your weapon's die size, you lose the window of opportunity. After the last second of your first attack window, your next target lock is available however many seconds later that you had rolled.

Your next target lock is a 2. So 2 seconds after the first window, on second 8 of the beat, your next target lock is available. You can now make another attack on any second between 8 and 12.

After that, your last target lock is a 6. So 6 seconds after the previous window ends would be on second 18 of the beat. That's also the last second of that "d6" window, so you have to do it at that exact moment!

Thus, once you acquire a target lock, you can usually hold onto your attack for a few seconds to line up the perfect shot. The smaller your roll, the bigger the window of opportunity.

If multiple actions are declared during the same second, then they're resolved simultaneously. There's also rules for movement and reactions and whatnot, but this covers the main initiative part.

Hybrids

AKA I couldn't figure out which of the previous categories to put these into, but I also don't think any of them constitute a new category?

Primordial weirdness

Something I've found in my research is that a lot of oooold RPGs will have a method I can only place into the Hybrid category. For whatever reason, the earliest games often just had weirdly complicated methods. It feels like over the last 20-ish years, games have been "refining" initiative, taking those old convoluted systems and pulling out just one or two key ingredients from them. That would betray a very modern bias, of course, but I think you'll see where I'm coming from in a moment.

For example, let's talk about Chainmail. The 1971 medieval fantasy wargame by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren, and one of the key predecessors to D&D, offers not one, but two different initiative methods for you to pick from. One of them is a hybrid of phased initiative + randomized side initiative, whereas the other is a hybrid of phased initiative + simultaneous initiative. Here's the basics (according to my best interpretation. You know how Gygaxian rules are):

1. The Move / Countermove System: Both opponents roll a die; the side with the higher score has the choice of electing to move first (Move) or last (Counter-move). First side moves and does missile fire, second side moves and does missile fire, then both sides suffer the effects of any artillery fire, then both sides suffer the effects of missile fire, then all melee is resolved. Notice that 1) it's only side-based for the first phase, but then becomes simultaneous for the rest of the phases and 2) there's a substantial delay between the moment when arrows are shot and the moment when arrows land.
2. The Simultaneous Movement System: Both sides write down orders for each of their units, including direction of movement and facing. Then, both sides move according to their written orders. At halfway through each movement, check for passing melee attacks. Then, take artillery fire, then take missile fire, then resolve melee.

In both cases, morale rolls can happen at any point.

As another example, let's now look at Boot Hill. The 1975 wild west game by Gary Gygax and Brian Blume has a similarly hard-to-describe method of determining the order of events during an action situation. 

Everyone rolls percentile dice at the top of the round to determine their number. Then, the Turn Sequence is split into three phases: movement first, then shooting second, and then brawling third. Within each phase, each side declares actions all at once. But then, actions are resolved individually, determined by the order of your number you rolled at the top of the round. Movement goes from low to high, but then shooting and brawling is resolved high to low. But also, there's a million little factors that could modify your number for any given phase. -5 for being surprised, -10 for being on horseback, +5 for shooting from the hip, etc.

Thus, we could call it a hybrid of side-based phased + individual turns, randomized order + composite speed factors. And yet, from what I hear, in practice it mostly just plays like simultaneous initiative!

I probably won't make the effort to catalogue every old game displaying primordial weirdness, but I hope those two give you a good idea of what I mean by "hybrid methods."

Bowling Initiative

This is used in Lancer, Star Trek Adventures, Fabula Ultima, and Four Crystals. Initiative is rolled off between each side, but characters take individual turns. It's just that those individual turns alternate back and forth between each side.

For example, let's say the party wins initiative against the goblins. Therefore, the party gets to have one of their members go first. They pick the wizard to take a turn. Then, the goblins get to choose one of their own to go. Now the party again, who picks the rogue. Then the goblins, who pick a new guy. Then the party, fighter goes. Etc.

In most games, the players get to decide who they're sending up next. But in some games, the order is locked in by another initiative method, like a dice roll. This can be called Zipper Initiative, since the teeth of a zipper never change their order.

What happens if one side has more members than the other? Common solution is that the side with greater numbers just has all their leftover members take their turns all in a row at the end of the round. So if, for example, it's a fight between 5 guys and 8 guys, then you only alternate for the first 5 guys on each side. The last 3 guys on the bigger side just take the last 3 turns.

Alternatively, in Spencer Campbell's game LOOT, those extra people just don't get turns! The advantage of having more members on your side is, well, y'know, more bodies have to drop before you're defeated. But action economy is always equal between sides.

Miss-Initiative

I don't think this is used in any published games. The earliest description of it I'm aware of is this blog post by Justin Alexander (from which I'm taking the name), but there was also recently a Twitter thread by M.T. Black where they described the exact same method and called it "Failure Switching."

Here's the idea: turn-based, with individual turns for each participant. The party decides their own turn order, the GM decides a turn order for the baddies. When a battle begins, the players start taking their turns one at a time, in the order they decided. BUT the moment someone fails a big action (e.g. an attack roll, ability check, saving throw), the other side seizes the initiative and gets to start taking their turns instead. They keep taking turns for as long as they can until one of their members misses an attack or check or whatever, at which point the players seize the initiative back and resume where they left off. Continue acting turn-by-turn until either everyone on your side has taken their turns or you lose the initiative again.

Of course, if your side manages to go through all their turns without anyone missing at anything, then your side is done for the round and now the other side can just take their turns without fear of interruptions. But if your side managed to pull that off, that probably means they just whupped a whole lotta ass.

Daggerheart and Duality Dice

There's finally a game that incorporates a sort of variant on Miss-Initiative: Daggerheart! The text incorrectly claims that "there is no explicit initiative mechanic" bizarrely. There very clearly is, described in detail. I assuming that must have been an editing mistake, some piece of a previous draft that wasn't caught before publishing. Here's how it goes:

Whenever a player takes an action, they roll 2d12s called the "Duality Dice." The sum result determines if they're successful at their action, but separately from that they also check to see which die rolled higher. If the "Fear" die is higher than the "Hope" die, then the GM gains a Fear token.

Whenever a player fails their action roll, the initiative passes to the GM. The GM then spends any Fear tokens they've accumulated to take actions for the baddies.

Thus, the result is a sort of "miss-initiative" method because the initiative passes to the GM when a player fails an action. But it's asymmetric, with the GM only retaining the initiative for as long as they have the Fear tokens to sustain it.

That said, the text also instructs the GM to seize the spotlight just, like, when they feel like it makes sense.

Proactive-Reactive

This is used in Ironsworn (and by extension, Starforged), World Wide Wrestling, and The Seven Part Pact. One participant / side "possesses the initiative," giving them narrative control. Their opponent(s) can, at best, react to whatever actions the current initiative-holder takes. But it's possible to lose the initiative, allowing the other side to claim it and take control. Thus, you probably want to hold onto it for as long as you can.

This one is really fascinating to me. It's one of the main reasons I have trouble constructing any kind of objective typology for describing different initiative methods. It breaks a few fundamental assumptions. There's a couple different ways you could frame what's happening here.

One way is to say that turns are "asymmetric." One side is playing offense and the other is playing defense. If you have the initiative, you can only take offensive actions. If you lack the initiative, you can only take defensive actions.

But another way is to say that it's currently the "turn" of whichever side holds the initiative, but also that turns get frequently interrupted by reactions. Turns don't end unless certain conditions are met, meaning that your turn could hypothetically go on forever. But even if it's currently "your" turn, it still involves other people.

Really, it's a question of language and terminology. What constitutes someone's "turn" versus other forms of participating (e.g. reactions) in a game? The former framing is closer to the language used when describing side-based initiative methods, whereas the latter framing is closer to the language used when describing individual-based initiative methods. Yet they're both accurate descriptions of the same process, right?

Prismatic Warren pointed out to me the similarity with trick-taking card games (and games with trick-taking mechanics, like the board game Arcs). One person makes the first move, and how their opponent(s) respond is restricted based on that first move. Thus, getting to make the first move ("possessing the initiative") is a major advantage that can be contested.

Another example I want to add in this method is the Riddle of Steel RPG, a sword and sorcery game from the early 2000's. Claiming to have a combat system that is "closer to representing real fighting than any RPG combat system ever written," there's quite a bit of crunch to be expected. I'll simplify, though.

Fights are broken up into exchanges. During an exchange, one combatant possesses the initiative, making them the aggressor, while their opponent is the defender. They each have a pool of combat dice to spend on attacking, defending, and other things. The exchange starts with the aggressor declaring their attack, including how many combat dice they're spending. The defender then chooses how many dice they'll be spending in response. They roll off: if the aggressor wins, they do their damage, but if the defender wins, they steal the initiative for the next exchange. Alternatively, if a fight opens with two characters attacking simultaneously, then the loser of that initial contest can buy the initiative outright by spending a couple combat dice.

Put another way: it's functionally almost identical to World Wide Wrestling, but with a bit more dice rolling and actions being resource-based. As long as you keep landing attacks, you get to keep making attacks. Miss once and you lose the initiative!

One Roll Engine

In Greg Stolze's One-Roll Engine, if turn order becomes important, you go through a procedure that combines a few methods I've mentioned up to now.

First, everyone has a fixed Initiative Score derived from their stats. You can strictly rank characters by their speed. But this only describes their character speed.

Next, everyone declares all of their intended actions in reverse-character speed order. Slowest character has to declare first, fastest character gets to declare last.

Then, everyone rolls dice for each of their actions declared. This is to determine the speed of their actions, independent of their character speed. Actions resolve in order from fastest to slowest.

So there's some elements you'll recognize from the Fixed Order method, a bit of the various Simultaneous methods that gamify the "order of declaration," and lastly something kind of like the Composite Speed methods where your actions themselves are randomized.

Rolemaster

Ah, in the golden age of ridiculous crunch, Rolemaster was among the crunchiest and most ridiculous. Thank Phil of The Dice Mechanic for pushing me to include this one. Its initiative method frames actions in terms of percentages, which makes it seem a lot more arcane and daunting than it actually is.

Each round is split into three phases: Snap actions, Normal actions, and Deliberate actions. All Snap actions are resolved first, but are made at a penalty. Then all Normal actions are resolved. Then all Deliberate actions are resolved, with a bonus. Within each phase, actions are resolved in order of an initiative roll, not simultaneous.

Here's the twist: every action takes up a percentage of the overall round. The three actions you declare have to add up to no more than 100%. For example: a regular attack might take 80% of the round. So if you want to swing your sword during one of the three phases, you only have 20% leftover for the other two phases. Which phase do you assign the attack to? What minor things can you pull off in the other phases?

You can reduce the percentage of an action by also taking a penalty to it. The percentage cost of movement also depends on which phase you're moving during. Moving during the Snap phase costs 20%, during the Normal phase costs 50%, and during the Deliberate phase costs 80%.

So we have something that reminds me of the Burning Wheel "three-action round" idea, but with some tradeoffs in the action economy like the Decision-Based methods (although much more granular), and the question of which phase you decide to take actions is itself a variable that affects the tradeoff.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess

Roll for which side goes first. Then, separately, every member of that side rolls to determine their individual turn order. Then, if there's a tie, they resolve simultaneously. Thus, combining the first three categories of this post all into one method, forcing you to contend with all of their various issues.

No, I don't really get why you would go for this option, either.

Miscellaneous Stuff

There's a lot of stuff I found in my research that isn't exactly a whole new method, but it was worth including anyway. Weird variables to account for, or just totally different approaches.

The Talking & Analysis Phase from Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades

This is technically separate from the initiative rules but I think it's really cool and worth including. RBRB is a gritty wuxia action game with lots of bloody kung fu goodness. During each round, before re-rolling turn order, all characters get to act in the talking & analysis phase. During these breaks from the action, characters trade words and study their opponents. Mockery, threats, jokes, interrogation, flirtation, admiration, whatever. You could use this time to attempt to psych out the enemy, or to read their body language and gain a bonus, or even to gain new details about their signature kung fu moves.

Most RPGs allow characters to speak freely during combat scenarios, but it's still very uncommon for players to take advantage of this. For most groups, the beginning of combat is the end of roleplay. So I think it's a clever idea to set aside a moment during combat specifically designated for the purpose of roleplay, prompting PCs to say something when they otherwise probably wouldn't have. Even better, it's both thematic for the genre and it's incorporated into the mechanical design of the combat rules.

Approach-based initiative modifiers from Pathfinder 2E

Pathfinder obviously does turn-based, individual, randomized initiative, just like modern D&D. But instead of just having a Dexterity-based initiative bonus, you actually roll a skill check, using whatever skill is most appropriate for that moment. Perception is the default initiative skill, but it could just as easily be a Stealth check, Deception check, Diplomacy check, Survival check, whatever.

Flexible turn slots from FFG Star Wars

In the Star Wars RPG by Fantasy Flight Games, the party can sort of "trade" their initiative numbers as much as they want. It uses turn-based, individual, randomized initiative like in modern D&D (albeit much more difficult to explain the exact rules, since it uses those funky story dice. There's lots and lots of threads on the subreddit of people asking for initiative explanations). But whatever results everyone rolls, that just buys those slots for the party as a team. The party chooses who to assign each slot to on a round-to-round basis.

For example, let's say that there are 3 PCs and 5 bad guys. That means there'll be a total of 8 turns each round. Everyone rolls, and the players got the 1st turn, 4th turn, and 5th turn out of the total 8. But the PC who got the 1st turn on their roll doesn't have to be the one to take the 1st turn, and the PC who got the 4th turn doesn't have to be the one to take the 4th turn. They could swap if they want to.

Stop showing up late you fuckers

In Robin Laws' Og: Unearthed Edition, the initiative tiebreaker rule is to go in the order that each player arrived at the session, which I think is a pretty funny idea.

Chō-Han in Errant

In addition to the Tortoise and Hare method for ordering actions, Errant also has a unique method for determining the winner of initiative: the GM rolls a d6; the player also rolls a d6, but before they do, they announce whether the sum of the results will be odds or even. If they call it right, they win initiative; if they call it wrong, they lose initiative.

This is mathematically identical to a coin flip. Why make it so elaborate? Well, as Ava explains:

For anyone even vaguely familiar, they'll realise this is a variation on side initiative inspired by the popular Japanese street gambling game Chō-Han. I don't have much to say about this except for the fact that, despite being mathematically equivalent to regular side initiative, this feels so much better because players are invested in the outcome of the die because they made a decision. Victory is so much sweeter and defeat extra bitter; a player who makes an incorrect call is lambasted, while the player who calls it correctly is a hero. I also love the weird superstitions players develop around it: "always odds/evens" or "keep calling odds/evens until it happens."

That's not what "balanced" means

A recurring theme on this blog. In the time since I first published this post, a number of people have suggested various games / houserules where action declaration happens in reverse initiative order. It comes up in a few of the methods in this post, and it's also notably how the Old World of Darkness games worked. For example: Alice declares her action first, Bob declares second, and Charles declares third. Then, Charles's action occurs first, then Bob's action second, then Alice's action last. You follow so far?

But then they bizarrely call this a way of "balancing" things. "Sure, your turn to go comes last. But at least you get to declare first, so it all evens out!"

Yeah uh no. Declaring earlier isn't really an advantage, except insofar as you can maybe set the tempo for the round. In almost all circumstances, getting to declare later is better, because you can base your decision off of what you already know others are going to be doing. We covered this in the section on simultaneous methods, for Pete's sake.

So a rule like this is not less punishing for the person who loses the initiative. On the contrary, it's extremely punishing! It's doubling down the suckitude for that guy!

Daylight Initiative

From this post by Ian. I'll quote directly, emphasis mine:

Suppose a game meets in-person regularly. Let’s also say that it’s an evening game, usually 4-8:00.

In combat, we use side initiative, randomized. Which is to say, each round, each side rolls 1d6 and high roll goes first. In the event of a tie, we look out the window. If the sun has set, the players lose the tie. Otherwise, they win it.

Bloggers will just come up with anything, huh?

Concluding Thoughts

Something I find interesting is how different games try to capture the idea of "speed" and what it means in conversation-based action gameplay. Going earlier in a round vs going more times within a round, being able to interrupt, having more actions, having greater movement distance. And a lot of games will include multiple of these! Marcia once toyed with the idea of making one's movement speed and initiative bonus derive from the armor you wear. Why not?

And if you can somehow determine how to simulate speed, you still must then decide what variables affect speed. The intrinsic speed of an action vs the intrinsic speed of the person attempting the action. Personal size versus the team's size. An attack's reach versus its unwieldiness. Heaviness of armor, heaviness of other gear, heaviness of heart. Personal confidence, recklessness, leadership ability. Luck. Some of these methods try to incorporate as many of those as possible. Others incorporate none of them.

When it comes to categorization, my colleague Ian offers some insights (which I've polished up below).

First, two big questions:

1. Structure. On a "continuum" from synchronous to phased to alternating.
2. Who. On a "continuum" from individual to pod to full side.

For non-synchronous methods, three more questions: 

1. Random or arbitrary. A spectrum from pure dice-rolling to pure reproducibility. This point is unconcerned with "meaning" or "interpretation," that's point 3.
2. Fixed or fluid. The more these numbers change the more fluid it is, from between rounds to between combats to between players or characters (completely fixed).
3. Diegetic or metagame. "Diegetic" is influenced by character or game concerns, while metagame is influenced by players. Most will fall between the two, if there are strategic concerns, for example, "popcorn" is more metagame. "Clockwise" is pure metagame.

I think that's a pretty dynamite attempt, but there are always weird edge cases. If you've somehow gotten this far, I hope you can now understand why I struggled a bit with this post.

Since I published this post, blogger Holothuroid has offered their own attempt at breaking down initiative at the atomic level. I really like a lot of their observations, and recommend you go read their post.

I don't normally do "call to action" stuff at the end of my blog posts but I sincerely would love to hear people's thoughts, preferences, suggestions, etc. As you can imagine, after going through all this work I now have some very developed opinions on what makes for a good or bad initiative method. But that's a conversation for comment sections and maybe future posts. I hope this post stands for quite some time as the semi-definitive catalogue of most noteworthy initiative methods used in TTRPGs.

-Dwiz