After collecting as many initiative methods into one post as I possibly could, I offered to write a review of them. A few people were interested, and I like having an excuse to exorcise my blog demons. I'm not going to touch on every single method in that list, and I'm not going to give numerical ratings or thumbs up/down or anything like that. I'll tell you what I see as the pros and cons of each major category and whether I personally find them to be worth it. I'll also single out a few particular methods if I have a noteworthy point to make about them. Heads up if you want to follow along with the big list post: I'm not going to review the categories in the same order. You'll see why soon.
Before diving in, I also want to state up front: I frequently see people heaping praise upon an initiative method, calling it revolutionary and preaching to anyone who will listen to adopt it... but they mostly cite pretty unremarkable advantages. Things like, "the GM doesn't have to write anything down" or "there's no dice rolling needed." Uhhhh yeah?
I suspect that those people are probably just describing the first method they've ever encountered that wasn't the "default" option they know from modern D&D (i.e. turn-based, individual, randomized). This is a common phenomenon I've seen my whole life: an RPG hobbyist who's only ever played WotC D&D makes first contact with literally any other game and is immediately convinced it's the greatest game of all time.*
*For me, it was Fantasy Craft.
What I'm saying is, Popcorn Initiative really isn't that special, y'all. It's merely better than one of the worst options.
Turn-Based, Individual
As mentioned, there's a lot of disadvantages to this category. 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. The fact that the majority of all RPGs use a method from this category has nothing to do with any strengths it has. They're just copying modern D&D, usually because they don't know any better. And that's not good enough.
I could of course trash this category til the cows come home. But I'll play devil's advocate for a moment. The main advantage it has is clarity, which is way more valuable than most people realize.
A big gaming event with 4-7 people crowded around a single table is already chaos, and game designers love to create systems and rules that only worsen the chaos. The simplest way to cut through that chaos is by clearly and definitively saying, "'It's Alice's turn. Everyone else shut up unless you have something to say relevant to Alice's turn. We're not moving on until Alice is done."
Thus, I think that there are many games where turn-based, individual is actually the best option. For example, D&D switched to this category during 3rd Edition, and I think it was genuinely the right call. By making both characters and the combat procedure so much crunchier than they had ever been previously, clarity became that much more valuable.
But that's kind of the problem, isn't it? The fact that so many other game design factors made this change necessary is, to me, a bad sign. It's like the rulebook came packaged with a bottle of aspirin. I appreciate its inclusion, but why did you design a game that would be so headache-inducing?
So if turn-based, individual initiative is truly the best option for your game, that's all well and good. But it's an early sign that your game might not be for me.
[Unfortunately, I must admit that Rivers & Lakes is one of those games. Sometimes, you just gotta take the aspirin and do some high-flying kung fu.]
As for specific methods within this category: while I admire the efforts to make it more interesting, I think it's rarely worth it.
Like, I don't understand the appeal of Troika's stack initiative whatsoever. Whenever I hear people praise it, they do the thing where they just list advantages that most methods have over the default D&D method. But what does your experience gain by having no idea who's going to go next, or if you'll even be lucky enough to get a turn at all this round? "We get to be surprised by the results!" is the standard answer I receive. That feels... thin to me. Is that really such a valuable part of the experience to you? Talk about a cheap thrill.
If I have to use an individual turn-based method, the dead-simple board game classic of "clockwise around the table" is by far the best choice. I'd even go so far as to call it a quite good initiative method.
Simultaneous
There's a lot about simultaneous initiative that appeals to me.
For one thing, most implementations of it are faster than nearly any other method, which I highly value in high-intensity action scenes.
For another thing, it's also probably the most realistic method. It's funny how many initiative method go to such great pains to account for a hundred different variables affecting the speed of any given action or actor, but they'll still never be as realistic as just having multiple things happen at the same time.
And maybe best of all: it fosters teamwork! We're all searching for that special sauce to make tabletop combat fun fun fun. But it turns out that the secret ingredient all along was the same thing that makes the rest of tabletop adventuring fun: you're sharing an activity with your friends. Lean into that! Coordinate your actions together! Do fun combos that would normally be impossible if you were taking individual turns!
However, it definitely has issues. You see simultaneous initiative in board games more often than in RPGs because most board games are closed games. There's a finite number of actions you can take, and therefore a finite number of interactions that the method has to account for. Take Diplomacy, for example. It's able to use a "simultaneous turn order" because there's only 4 actions a unit can take (one of which is "do nothing"). You can apply a strictly algorithmic order of operations to resolve those actions.
RPGs are usually open games, where players come up with their own creative ideas for what to do. Tactical infinity requires an infinitely flexible order of operations. Where does "pantsing your opponent" fall in turn order? Can you pull it off before the opponent casts a spell? Before they swing their sword? Before they pants you back?
Of course, one of the main reasons we even have a GM at all is because we trust one participant to make ad-hoc judgments about these kinds of ambiguities. But this method demands the GM be making some pretty arbitrary judgments constantly. Simultaneous methods require a very high-trust table where almost everyone shares the same judgment of the situation at almost all times. That's a pretty rare thing.
Which brings us to...
Turn-Based, Side
I really feel like this category is the best of both worlds. It has nearly all the advantages of simultaneous initiative while cleanly sidestepping its main problem. It's still super fast, still pretty realistic, still fosters teamwork.
But the kinds of ambiguous order-of-operations problems you'd run into are almost never going to happen now. Why? Because those are nearly always conflicts between opposing characters. If two characters on the same side declare conflicting actions, they can say "oh wait, you're also going for that? Never mind then, you can handle it. I'll do something else." Ta-da! Contradiction avoided.
Within this category, I'm happy to provide some opinions on individual methods.
I think simple back-and-forth is really underrated. Doing the dice roll at the top of each round is fun and all, but I've never regretted choosing to say "fuck the die roll, let's just alternate sides until the battle is over."
Speed sandwich is really popular these days, for reasons I noted in my post. We used an "individual turns" variant of it for Rivers & Lakes which has definitely added some spice to the fights. But that's a pretty crunchy game to begin with, and normally I would prioritize play being speedy and smooth.
I'm considering using guerilla initiative in a project I'm tinkering with, just because I enjoy it but it hasn't been used in any published game yet. Similarly, I like the ones that choose an interesting and evocative factor for deciding which side goes first. Daylight, reasons to fear the enemy, size, light vs darkness, etc. Keep 'em coming.
No Initiative
Despite being Mr. Initiative Guy these days, I actually think this option is totally fine. My biggest problems with it I described here. But in most of the games that have no initiative method, it's because these kinds of concerns aren't as significant anyway. In a well-designed PbtA game, many moves will already prompt you to shift the spotlight onto a specific participant anyway. The most important parts of the game to get the order of operations correct already have that written in at the micro level.
Still, I'm the kind of guy who likes having a reliable method at the macro level as well. Remember, I'm a proceduralist. I like when the session itself has a structure. So I still prefer having some kind of method over none, however arbitrary.
Composite Speed
These methods don't really interest me at all. A lot of extra steps and variables for little-to-nothing gained. The end result is still just going to be individual, turn-based anyway. This is the kind of thing that tickles a game designer's brain, but which doesn't translate to a better or more interesting experience in play. My decision of what to spend my turn doing still isn't going to be influenced very much by the relative speeds of each action or factor I'm deciding between. I'm going to take whatever actions make the most sense for what I'm trying to achieve tactically and what I'm equipped to do, just like I always do when playing an individual, turn-based system.
Dynamic
These methods are hard for me to judge. I've never played a game using one. My instinct is that it's another approach that adds a lot of crunch and processing time with not enough gained. But if you've had a ton of fun playing a game that uses Shot Clock initiative, I'd be curious to join in. I just worry that it could be agonizingly slow and granular, simply based on how these methods look when you read them.
Decision-Based
This is maaaybe my favorite category overall. Tied with turn-based, side? But you can totally combine both categories, there's nothing intrinsically contradictory about them.
I think this category has a lot of untapped potential. Randomness is overrated. The most interesting part of gaming is, to me, making decisions. Of the simple tradeoff ones, my favorite is His Majesty the Worm. Losing defense to gain speed is, I think, a very sensible tradeoff.
Meanwhile, I'm not as crazy about Tortoise and Hare using actions as the tradeoff. Action economy is such a sensitive variable, I'm reluctant to fuck with it too much. In most games, going from 1 action to 2 is absolutely monumental. I mean, that's all a surprise round is, and in many games a single surprise round can firmly lock in victory.
I'll be keeping an eye out for any new decision-based methods that come up with a novel variable to tradeoff or some other way to complicate your choice.
Hybrid
These methods generally don't appeal to me, but that's because they usually combine the previous categories I already didn't like.
The main exception I'll single out is proactive-reactive, which I think is pretty spectacular. That said, I've only ever seen it used (basically) one-on-one, and am unsure how it holds up with group fights. But while I have you here, I want to share an interesting difference I noticed between World Wide Wrestling's version of proactive-reactive and Seven-Part Pact's version.
In WWW, when you obtain "narrative control," you can use nearly any move and still retain control. The main way you lose it is by rolling low on the wrestling move, this game's equivalent of a "basic attack." And you can see the logic there, right? You keep going and going and going until you miss, not unlike miss-initiative. Then, your foe seizes the opportunity and takes control.
But in 7PP, it's the opposite. When you have control, almost every action you take also forfeits the initiative as a result. The one exception is when you attempt to attack your foe but they successfully block it. Instead of wasting your turn, you can just try something else. Initiative doesn't pass to your foe until you've accomplished something tangible, however minor.
WWW is a game all about building and keeping momentum. Not merely the in-game metacurrency called "momentum points," either. You start a hot streak and you keep it going and going and going. But 7PP instead prioritizes almost constant back-and-forth. Jay pointed out to me that this is also reminiscent of the classic transformation chase game, which is pretty brilliant.
I think that's neat.
Phased Initiative
Phased initiative blows. This entire post only exists so I could get this off my chest.
Every time I've used phased initiative, it results in frustration every single round. It's a relic of wargames that makes no sense in a traditional RPG. All of the reasons it's advantageous in its original context are completely irrelevant here.
See, it makes sense in a war game because each player has dozens of guys to track. It's not used for its tactical value. It's purely a logistical tool. With so many actions to perform each turn, it's way easier to just do all actions of a like kind at once. That's pretty smart! But in D&D, every player has only one or two guys to keep track of. We don't really have a logistical problem to deal with. so... why bother with phases?
Meanwhile, the downsides are numerous. The phases and their order is always arbitrary, no matter how much thought you put into it. If I can move and then attack in 6 seconds, then why can't I attack and then move in the same 6 seconds? The constraints of the phases don't enrich tactical decision-making in my experience. All they serve to do is invalidate perfectly reasonable ideas.
I especially am ashamed of the OSR for pushing this method so hard. I get that, by definition, they're the "nostalgia" movement in gaming. Always the first to defend antiquated rules. But at the same time, aren't you old fuckers also supposed to be all about player agency, rewarding creative thinking, and not letting the mechanics get in the way of common sense?
Let's pick on the B/X + OSE method as an example:
- Declare intent to cast spells or retreat
- Each side rolls off to determine who wins initiative.
- The winning side resolves their actions in this order:
- Morale rolls
- Movement
- Missile fire
- Magical spells
- Melee attacks
- The losing side then resolves their actions in the same order
- Go back to step 1, re-rolling each new round.
Probably about half the actions I take in any given combat don't match up with any phases in this list. If, like some phased initiative methods, you add in a phase for "miscellaneous actions," then I'd use that one more than the rest of them combined. Almost everyone would be, in fact. And if everyone is taking their actions during the same phase, then we're functionally back to using simultaneous / simple side-based initiative anyway!
Let me tell you a story. I'm going to share with you a blow-by-blow of the first round of a combat encounter my group had not too long ago. Here's the situation:
We're here to rescue a couple damsels who had been kidnapped. They're being held in this fort. We did some scouting to learn the layout, determined that they were in that tent near the center. So to get them out, I (the bard) snuck in while invisible, got into the tent, cut the ropes, and then readied to give the signal. Follow me so far?
Round 1:
- Bard uses their action to send up a magic flare in the sky, letting the rest know.
- Monk hops the fence in the back, then uses his action to release the gate holding in the horses, launching a stampede to create chaos.
- Meanwhile, Artificer and our NPC ally (I don't remember his class) simultaneously hop the main entrance, then use their actions to lift and release the bar holding it shut.
- Fighter then runs in through the open gates, heads over to the watchtower, and uses his action to knock it over to fuck up the bad guy standing guard.
- Then, Bard uses her movement to run towards the open gate, bringing the damsels along with. They won't get there in one turn, but they're halfway home.
I think that was an awesome first round. But it would be impossible in nearly any phased initiative method. Too much flexibility, too much creativity, too smart.
Magic flare would have to come last, because it's a spell. Oops, sorry, nevermind. What phase does releasing the horse gate happen? Or the main entrance gate? Oops, sorry, nevermind. What phase does knocking over the watchtower happen? Oops, sorry, nevermind. Trying to move only after your exit has been made available? Oops, sorry, nevermind.
Even worse, I worry that players using a phased initiative method wouldn't even come up with a plan like this. A first-time player may read through the phases and think that these are all the actions they can perform, preventing them from having more interesting ideas. By codifying the list of actions you can take in a set order, you stifle creativity. It makes combat just as board game-y as the crunchy tactical games that the OSR was originally trying to escape to begin with.
I think some people get really excited by the idea of "long weapons go before medium weapons, which go before short weapons," and they want to capitalize on that somehow. If that's the main appeal to you, I recommend checking out the counter + priority system in Rivers & Lakes as an alternative way to incorporate that idea.
Otherwise, I just... I don't see the strengths, y'all. Even a relatively "good" phased initiative method still can't do what even the simplest side-based initiative method can.
-Dwiz
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