EVERY Initiative Method, Addendum

This is a follow-up to that one previous post. I'm glad to see it's been received pretty positively, and that I've gotten lots of suggestions for additions. One year on, I've finally updated that post with edits, but I'd rather save my own responses for a separate post so that it can still stand on its own without all this baggage.

All told, about 20 new methods have been added (depending on how you count them), plus quite a few more games acknowledged and, most interesting to me, some reorganization of categories. To put it another way, a post that was about 10,600 words long is now about 15,000 words long.

Now let me address some other things.

Firstly, the suggestions I'm rejecting usually have the same problems: they're too specific and/or I already included them! I tried to explain this in the original post, but I'll elaborate here. I'm interested in cataloguing categories of initiative. The specifics of how a game implements it are probably not worth mentioning. d20, d10, d6, ascending, descending, whatever. If those are the only feature that distinguishes a game's initiative from one of the methods I describe, then it's not actually distinct. You're thinking too small.

Savage Worlds is sort of my benchmark here. Just because it uses cards rather than dice doesn't mean it's a meaningfully different method from modern D&D. Yes, the probability math is a little different between cards and dice. But for my purposes, that's minor. Here's what I care about: it's turn-based, with individual participants each getting a turn, and the turn order is randomized (with modifiers). Therefore, the same method as D&D. End of story.

So no, I would not consider the method used by the Year Zero Engine to be closer to Troika than D&D simply because it uses cards. You gotta stop focusing on surface-level differences and actually think about the underlying process itself.

Secondly, I will concede that there are suggestions I've been unsure of, but I can't give a rock-solid reason why they deserve rejection.

For example, some of the replies I've received have simply proposed an entirely new method, right then and there, birthed in the comment section itself. If it's not found in a published RPG system, could you at least describe it, I dunno, in a blog post or something? I'd like something I can cite, y'know?

And then there are the suggestions which are, like, clunky hybrids of existing methods that look utterly miserable to use. Do I reject something merely for being ridiculous? I mean, I didn't include the AD&D 1E method, because it's famously one of the most hilariously convoluted "systems" in RPG history. Yet that wasn't uncommon in those days! You'll find a comment on the post left by Travis Casey that talks about lots of games with convoluted methods, and most of them are pretty old. I end up being biased towards more modern games simply because their initiative methods aren't absurd and inscrutable to me. Convoluted design just isn't as popular as it once was.

But that doesn't mean it's gone entirely. It's weird how many people have recommended their crazy hybrid homebrew methods. To the person who claimed that your home group both requires a spreadsheet formula to determine turn order each round, and that it's "cinematic" and engaging... I hope you all keep having fun together. But I just don't feel like that's fit for my list.

But that's according to me and my subjective judgment. Which brings me to...

Thirdly, quite a few folks don't like that I allowed my bias to show. Sometimes I let an opinion slip through. To be fair, I held back from revealing which ones I really dislike. But I understand. I'm more inclined to remove my disclaimer and just cop to the bias rather than attempt to scrub the post. I'm only human, so the list itself is inherently colored by my personal vision of things, anyway.

And if you're one of the folks who truly feels that my opinions warp the informational content of my post so badly that you're incapable of learning anything from it... I can hardly believe I'm actually saying this, but for once my answer is "that sounds like your problem."

That said, if there actually is a demand for it, I might make another post where I review different initiative methods. As you can imagine, I have a lot of opinions on them at this point.

Fourthly, some folks wanted me to include war games. I did include Chainmail, after all. But that's an entirely separate hobby I've not really touched and I find it way too daunting. Outside of the immediately RPG-adjacent ones, I'm not sure where I'd start. You folks like Warhammer, right?

For the people asking me to include board games, you are out of your god damned mind.

Lastly, I wish I had maintained a list of all the different games I checked. It was somewhere around 150, I think. Now it's well past 200. I mean, I did write down every single game that didn't use "turn-based, individual turns, randomized order." You'll find them mentioned throughout the post, whenever I give examples! But I really can't emphasize enough just how many games use that one method. Easily over half of all the systems I checked just use the same basic method as modern D&D, so I didn't bother writing them down. Oh well.

-Dwiz