D&D 5E please critique: Chrono Trigger style Initiative mechanic

A couple of concerns:

1) If I'm reading this right, then everyone rolls their own 1d6 on every tick (because Haste and whatnot applies at the individual level), so you're adding somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty extra die rolls per initiative pass (an average of 6d6 per character). I've known groups who skipped out on rolling initiative once, because that was too slow. This process is going to eat a lot of table time, but it may also increase investment by the players, so that could be a fair trade off.

2) Dex is already the best stat in the game, by a significant margin. If the Rogue also gains 25% more actions than the Paladin, then that's a problem, unless you balance it out elsewhere. Any game where you can mess with the action economy is at risk of becoming severely unbalanced.

3) The Active Time Battle system originated with Final Fantasy IV, where it was so successful that it was subsequently used in most of their RPGs thereafter. (Chrono Trigger is a decent game on its own merit, but it wasn't the innovator of this mechanic.) Important to the topic at hand, most of these games feature a strong class system, where the Speed stat is part of the overall character balance. Fast characters can't use good weapons, and any class with access to powerful spells will have a low Speed stat.

I think it's a terrible idea. Just for moving 30ft you are going to have to go through 6 mini turns of movement. It's not clear if attacking and movement eat away at the same time resource and if they do then characters and enemies that don't need to move much get a huge boost. It's going to make turns and combats take forever. It's going to be prone to human error on both the DM and the player side. I pity the DM trying to control more than 3-4 monsters at a time in this initiative system.

I guess it's more realistic if that's what you are after...

OGIHR said:

As I work to get ready to run D&D again after several years away from the game, I find myself wanting to replace the game's entire initiative mechanic, for three reasons:
***1.) In my experience, players have always found it all too easy to get bored when they're waiting around for their next turn, then being distracted and needing the past round recapped for them so they can decide what do when their turn comes around again. This is bad because boredom is the enemy of fun, and recaps create extra boredom for everyone else.
***2.) In D&D's turn-based structure, the fastest fast guy in the fight gets exactly one more turn than the slowest slow guy in the fight, no matter how long the fight goes on, nor how narrow or wide the disparity between their comparative reaction-speeds (separate from running speeds, of course). Which means that in every single fight scene, the most average of the average-speed guys gets exactly as many turns as either the fastest fast guy or the slowest slow guy, with no middle ground possible. Some degree of abstraction is desirable in game mechanics, but when you've deleted the concept of "average", you've gone too far.
***3.) As written, each combatant's movement happens virtually instantaneously during their own turn, with the only possible methods of prevention being status conditions and area denial. Which makes combat insanely boring once one player masters the art of area denial (as I learned with my 4th ed elf fighter with a glaive and the feat to Shift 1 as a minor action after KOing an enemy in melee with a heavy blade like his glaive, allowing him to slingshot off any Minion that got within 10ft of him). This also creates the added problem of actively rewarding cowardice, since move-shoot-move antics involving hard cover are so easily exploited to force the rest of your team to soak up the enemy's offense capabilities while you take pot shots without the prospect of reprisal from most varieties of foes. And cowardice should never be rewarded in a game of heroic action like D&D wants to be.

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Welcome back!

For a totally different take, which I think goes some way to addressing your #1 and #3, see http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...verybody-resolves-WAS-Simultaneous-Initiative

This strikes me as very fiddly, each player having to roll a die and keep track of his initiative score six times a turn (as it stands RAW). This may keep the players attention, but not necessarily on something fun.

Secondly you would have to seriously rebalance DEX based characters. DEX 20, gets 25% more turns than a DEX 10. So something like a rogue, where DEX is already their primary stat are gaining a lot, any character that incorporates DEX as a secondary stat but is otherwise SAD (eg wizards, sorcerers and warlocks) also benefit disproportionally from your system. MAD character, where DEX is not included in their essential abilities (eg Paladins, STR fighters) are going to be at a significant disadvantage. The game isn't really built around fast light attacks vs slow hard hitting attacks, it strikes a happy medium.

You would have to look at a greater than 25% damage increase per hit for STR builds, as they tend to be melee and their secondary ranged attacks are less effective than a DEX melee, to balance this I think.

In almost every system I play, where initiative is rolled at the start of combat and sets the order for duration, I find that the system very easily converts to rolling initiative each round. This does add a little faff between rounds, but the variations in turn order helps keep players attention and offers some tactical variation.
eg:
Frank the fighter with +0 initiative rolls 20 this round, while Rodney the rogue with +5 rolled a 1, for 6 initiative.
Franks goes, knowing that Rodney goes next and will likely go again before Frank. So Frank takes a defensive action hoping to minimise two of Rodney's actions. Rodney is left with the choice of two less effective actions vs Fred or ignoring Fred and doing something else.

I'm not having any luck making sense of the Mention function, so please forgive the no-web-savvy formatting here...

Blue, I have not yet had an opportunity to play any games in 5th edition, while my main experience of 4th edition was thinking (as a big fan of the original DragonLance setting, who'd always wanted a pre-Goldmoon game to be viable) that it was really wonderful that the medicine skill was finally allowed to patch up people who'd been injured by things other than caltrops (and yet I was as frustrated as anyone else by how the hardcover books were released pre-playtest, causing errata files to approach or even exceed the page counts of the books in question). I never enjoyed 3rd edition much, because it rapidly grew to include far too many extra books with extra content to be included at any given player's whim (making it more time spent on sourcebook-studying than on actually playing), although I did run Mike Mearls's "Iron Heroes" for a couple years, ages ago. So my main impression of 5th ed is that it's far more similar to 2nd ed than to either 3rd or 4th, which feels to me like a positive thing. But maybe I'm mistaken.

Fanaelialae (and Saelorn), as I understand it, the reason why Dexterity is an overpowered stat is because the basic structure of the stats was put together piecemeal during the original development by Gygax. And we wound up with "physical power" being divided into two stats for offensive and defensive applications, while "physical finesse" was left as a single stat which thus rapidly became twice as powerful as it should be, once ranged-combat-expertise and evasion became factors in the rules. Similarly, the Wisdom stat has no real definition at all, since it was originally envisioned as "all the brain stuff that isn't raw Intelligence", but then Charisma got thrown on so that telling honeyed lies and threatening to beat a man to death with a chair can be resolved using the same core stat. After which, Wisdom wasn't quite Willpower, or Perception, or Savvy anymore. It was just "the other stuff I guess". Which became a tradition unto itself...

If I were ever to take the time to build a "retro-clone" game from scatch, the fist thing I'd do is make a list of all the (metaphorical) sacred cows inherent to D&D's structure, and look for a more-functional way for the rules to handle each one. Armor class is of course the biggest elephant in that room (since its function was never re-addressed when the game shifted fom the assumption of "one hit equals one wound equals one kill unless his armor gets in the way" to "rolling damage rolls is fun so now every combatant has hit points so that damage rolls are meaningful for handheld weapons as well as siege weapons"; but I would also rework the basic line of stats to be far better balanced: Strength + Durability, Coordination + Reflexes, Intellect + Willpower, Awareness + Equilibrium (the resistance to emotional manipulation). Pairs of active and resistive traits, for physical power, physical finesse, mental power, and mental finesse. Balanced from the ground up. With the added bonus of humans being modeled the same as the other races, with an inherent strong and weak suit, because they tend to be very stubborn (+WIL) but easily goaded (-EQU) into unwise action.

And yes, my list left out Charisma. Because the method of how one approaches their talkmonkeying should be a far more significant factor; Intimidation should be a matter of Willpower (since it comes down to a contest of wills), Persuasion a matter of Intellect (figuring out what approach will appeal to them), and Deceit a matter of Equilibrium (to play on their emotions without letting your own control you).

However, D&D is built on the basic structure of "the traditional tradition of traditional traditionalism says we've always done it this way", rather than on the basic structure of "game balance is a good design principle". So I'm working with the game I've got.

Also to Saelorn, I find it rather amusing that you used the phrase "initiative pass", as the game currently being played by my players-group is Shadowrun 5th ed (I play an ork dog-shaman called Black Lab), and yes it would be a pause for D6 rolls on each tick, but since only hypothetical creatures with a combined DexMod-type and Haste-type bonus of +14 or more would be able to take a tun on evey tick, I see this as a feature rather than a bug, as the per-tick increments of movement (which will vary per-tick based on each D6's result) create a battlefield that shifts and flows in a manner far more similar to a kung fu movie than to a game of Monopoly.

Also, I am aware that Cecil + R(L?)ydia + etc used the ATB subroutine as a behind-the-screen element of the game's progamming, but it was in Chrono Trigger that I was able to see the mechanism being played out in the view of the player-interface, and thus had the chance to truly appreciate its function (as I saw the impact of each SpeedUp pill that I gave to Robo). And I acknowledge that action-speed vs action-impact is a facet of game balance which my structure would DEFINITELY need to address before it would be vible for anything beyond preliminary playtest.

FrogReaver, my system has movement earned on each tick occuring before (and separate from) any actions earned on that tick, so they are factored as separate resources both earned over time. Admittedly, the ability to get more actions does yield the ability to get more movement (by way of the -20 of the Initiative score after each action renewing access to the movement earned in the 10-29 range), and I do have concerns about the game balance consequences of that facet of my structure...

TallIan, I have always felt that the decision made in 3d ed to standardize the ability scores' mechanical impacts down to a single column of data across all six stats created a missed opportunity to individually balance the effectiveness of the stats in comparison to each other. So yes, a lot of good game design does get hamstrung by WotC's decision to pretend that the inherent imbalance (of the traditional traditionalism's traditionally traditional six stats) are best addressed by sweeping them under the rug.

Now, I could be wrong about this, but I think that SAD and MAD refer to dependence on single/multiple ability scores for a character's tactical functionality, and I openly admit that I do not yet have any good answers for those concerns. It is my hope that in the course of playtesting this structure, I'll be able to gain some insight however.

And for the purposes of that preliminary playtest, I think I'll use the suggestion which vincegetorix gave in the original reply, bonus action during the same instant as primary action, reaction being available once after each of your turns, and readying an action putting your own movement on hold until your action is triggered or canceled.

Such is my thinking.

As I work an overnight shift, I had a crazy idea about the issue of Dex-hogs with finesse weapons becoming overpowered by gaining extra actions of nearly equal impact compared to a standard low-Dex swordsman.

Why not just remove the DexMod bonus to damage (but retain bonus to hit)? More actions at objectively lower impact (now that 1HP minions are a thing of the past); shouldn't that balance it out somewhat better?

What you're suggesting sounds like the FFRPG SeeD's tick initiative system. You should take a peek for inspiration.

I like ATB systems, and I've messed around with adapting the concept to the tabletop in a sensible way. Ultimately, while I think it can be done for a more in-depth tactics game or wargame, it's hard to justify in a relatively crunch-light game like D&D. It feels strange to go through all this bookkeeping trouble to simulate the passage of time moment by moment, only to, when somebody actually swings a sword, just deduct a damage roll from a hit point total and call that a good enough model for physical injury. It's a stylistic clash. I think you might find that the players who come to D&D expecting to play out a story in its quick and easy and abstracted style might not appreciate a more hardcore simulationist system strapped on, and the players who appreciate hardcore simulationist systems are playing other games than D&D.

OGIHR said:

Why not just remove the DexMod bonus to damage (but retain bonus to hit)? More actions at objectively lower impact (now that 1HP minions are a thing of the past); shouldn't that balance it out somewhat better?

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It would balance it better, but the basic problem is that getting more actions has a multiplicative effect on your damage while the Dex bonus has an additive effect. There is a threshold, and a pretty low one, where the multiplication outstrips the addition. A rogue who gets 50% more turns than a fighter dealing 50% more sneak attack damage -- that's going to make up for the lost Dex damage pretty fast. And remember, it multiplies everything. +1 flaming sword? In that rogue's hands, it's more like a +1.5 flaming-and-a-half sword. Speed just makes him better across the board. It is a very difficult mechanic to balance.