Initiative Does Nothing
Standard Initiative rules are the devil.
Your basic combat action is an Attack roll. If you roll Damage at the same time as the attack, then adding another roll for Initiative means every combat takes twice as long. If you just spent 20 minutes on a combat scene that would have been 15 seconds of screen-time in a film, then 10 of those minutes may have been spent on Initiative.
'Surely not', an initiative-apologist may object, due to years of deranged conditioning. 'Combat also has multiple attacks, movement, and many more actions', continues the unintelligible babble.
But that babble would omit another important factor: people can just roll most actions, while initiative prompts the GM to stop, pull out a pencil, and begin jotting numbers down by going round the table clock-wise.
Alice? '12' scribble, okay, Bob? '23' - nice! scribble, Charles? '18'...
Have a look at the GM's notes at this point, and you will find a shit-smear of numbers:
1 B 23
2
3 C 18
4
5 A 12, D 12
6
7
8
9 E 6
Initiative rules are so bad that people have made videos on tools to fix the problems .
If a friend asked you to join their game, with a new RPG, and then plunked an abacus on the table 'because we need it to calculate your Armour Class', you would stop being friends.
The Prize for the Madness
So what is our prize for all the hours of our lives wasted on this nonsense? What have we managed to represent, with this procedure? What decisions do the players make as a result of this system?
What happens when you win initiative against an orc, and then bonk him for 3 Damage?
- If the orc misses you, then winning the initiative made no difference.
- If you miss the orc, then winning the initiative made no difference.
- And the same applies when the orc wins initiative.
- Maybe if you both deal damage it could make a difference?
Finally, with this last case, we have found an actual change in the results, on the sole condition that a character dies - either the player's character, or the orc.
This whole process clearly shows the kind of error that makes people pay extra money to board an aeroplane before other passengers so they can fly faster.
Alternatives
The fundamental problem we're trying to resolve looks like this:
Alice: I'll attack the biggest orc!
GM: The big orc attacks Bob's wizard first.
Bob: Can I cast a spell before that happens?
Double-Reading
Everyone knows what they're doing, so they can just roll to attack and the character with the highest attack-total goes first. If Alice rolls a '25' to hit, while the orc rolls an '18' to hit Bob's wizard, then Alice hits the orc first, and the orc only hits the wizard if it survives.
If people want different bonuses to their Attack and Initiative rolls, the same die can be re-read to generate both results. If Alice has +8 to Attack and +2 to Initiative, then rolling a '12' would mean her character's Attack is '20', while the Initiative is '14'.
Reciprocal Attacks
A system can side-step the entire problem by just making attacks mirror each other; whoever wins deals Damage. End of.
This system wouldn't need any defence score - the Attack is the Defence, and Defence is Attack. We use Alice's Attack score to add to the dice roll, and the orc's Attack can subtract from her roll (or it can add to the number required, same thing).
Now we don't need to know who hits first, because only one will hit. Both Alice and Bob can roll against the orc.
- If Alice hits, then the orc misses, and therefore does not hit Bob's wizard.
- So Bob's wizard succeeds.
- If Alice misses, Bob can still make a roll to cast a spell before the orc attacks him.
- If both players miss, then the orc can deal Damage to whichever it wishes.
This system also removes the need for enemies to roll to hit, so it halves the amount of dice-rolls required for the attacks.