Brian Haag was recently looking for some initiative house rules on Google+. I recently had a similar discussion with Gavin Norman, also on Google+. Here’s what I said.
I think initiative rules are overrated, particularly in D&D variants where combat lasts multiple rounds. The critical issue is that everybody acts exactly once per round. If everybody survives the round, then it didn’t matter in which order people attacked. So, initiative is only important in the round when somebody is about to die.
initiative rules are overrated
Magic only changes this in so far as a fireball spell makes it more likely that people are about to die (the same is true for other deadly spells, of course). In D&D variants where it is possible to disrupt a spell by damaging a caster in the same round, initiative is also important for all those involved in this action. But B/X doesn’t have that rule, and in games that do, I always wonder about attacking casters after they have cast their spell. Shouldn’t this disrupt their next spell?
The only real difference I can see is when the initiative rules allow more attacks for quicker characters or lighter weapons. Counting up ticks, for example. Daggers go every second tick, short swords every third tick, long swords every fourth, two handed swords every fifth, halberd a every sixth. It would be very different from D&D and require bigger differences in damage, perhaps? Also, when do monsters go?
All in all, I’ve decided that initiative rules are overrated and I’m using the simplest rule that involves a little dice rolling and leads to occasionally having to suffer two attacks in a row. Group initiative. It’s the standard! 😄
So what about combat in D&D? Isn’t D&D essentially about tactical combat? I don’t think so.
When combat is not the essence of the game, it’s not hard to do without the tactical elements. I run big parties – ten to twenty characters, five or six players at the table – and the interesting stuff is whether we’ll fight, how to ambush our enemies. Combat itself is basically just the test of our preparations. No miniatures, no battle map, no “I hit the guy that took 4 damage last round” or anything like that. The upside is, however, that I’m not afraid to field twenty or thirty enemies. Or 160 plus a red dragon (against a mid-level party).
How does that work? Easy: I’m not too interested in the details of combat. The key is that it should be *dangerous*. I like *save vs. poison*, *level drain*, *dragon breath*, *petrification gaze* and all that, because that keeps combat short even at higher levels.
Combat, like all challenges in my game, are there to test player skill: can you think of a way out of this? If it’s just rolling dice and counting down hit-points, that’s a fail in my book. So, I encourage setting up ambushes, bottle-necks, the using of traps against monsters, setting up of monsters to fight monsters, the scaring of monsters, the challenging of enemy leaders to single combat.
I also push for time. Roll all the dice. I don’t care whose turn it is. Instead, I keep asking: “Are you all done? Can I go? Is it my turn, yet?” I don’t like players taking forever. I encourage them to roll their to-hit roll together with their damage spell. I groan and moan and sigh when players start reading spell descriptions when their turn comes up. Next!! And then, when everybody has gone, and slow players are still wringing their hands, I threaten to have their characters skip or suggest a simple action like a melee attack instead of whatever else they wanted to do. It’s a thin line to walk, sadly. I sometimes have a slow player at one of my tables. I encourage them to play simple classes like fighters.
#RPG #Old School