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.
Fortunately, all three of these problems come from the same source: the fact that the traditional tradition of traditional traditionalism insists that because D&D is intended to be played by a group of people sitting together at a table, it has to function by the basic structure of a boardgame, with each player taking their turn, one at a time, and then just waiting for everyone else 'round the table to have taken their turn, after which it's a new round and thus people can each take their next turn.
But if we delete the underlying assumption of "one combat round is everybody getting to take one turn each", then all of these problems can be done away with.
For an alternative basic structure, I have drawn my inspiration from the classic Super Nintendo game Chrono Trigger. In that digital-RPG, there were no combat rounds; instead battles were resolved in real time, with each character having a Speed stat, so that in each second of battle their "Active Timer Battle" gauge filled by that many pixels. When the gauge was filled, they got to take a turn, after which the gauge emptied again. A nice and simple solution to problem #2.
To address problem #1, I would replace the fixed value of the Speed stat with a 1d6 roll on each "tick of the clock" (with Haste and other magical boosts to Initiative being applicable on each tick), so that players can't afford to just ignore the game until somebody tells them that it's their turn again. Picking arbitrary round numbers that appealed to me, each surprised combatant's Initiative score starts at zero, each other combatant starts at 10 (plus DexMod), and they each get their primary action at 30 (or more). Then after each combatant's primary action, they subtract 20 (minus DexMod) from their Initiative score, and the cycle continues.
Then comes problem #3. Instead of having 100% of each combatant's movement occur within the instant of their own turn, I would spread it out over time, divided as evenly as possible between 20 available Initiative scores (10-29), whether a given game is using "5-foot steps" on a tactical grid, or individual feet of measurement in a less crunchy arrangement.
So on each tick, after each combatant's Initiative score has advanced toward their next action, we go in order from lowest to highest Initiative score (maybe with an option to interrupt for faster monkeys being able to cut off slower monkeys if they want to?), and each combatant gets to take any movement earned during that tick. Only during that tick. If you earn movement and don't use it on that tick, it's lost. Because paying attention should be incentivized. And if you want to move from behind cover, line up a shot, loose an arrow, and duck back behind cover, you can't do it all in one tick. Because everyone who actually tries to participate in a battle should be caught out in the open at some point.
Of course, with difficult terrain and climbing/swimming/crawling increasing the "movement cost" of the distance actually traveled, you'd have to be able to borrow against the movement earned on the next tick(s) to keep those mechanics viable with the tiny allotments of movement in my system.
Effects with a duration measured in rounds would get translated over to ticks at a ratio of 6 ticks : 1 round (maybe 5:1 for simplicity of math?), and I would like to also weave in an element for delay values (added to the normal threshold value of 30) for certain actions less swift than average (be it casting time for a spell, reloading a crossbow, or drawing a weapon before attacking with it), and recovery values (added to the 20 your Initiative score gets reduced by after an action) based on the Speed Factor option in the DMG (so that there's any good reason to consider a primary weapon with a comparatively-smaller damage die). And obviously, I haven't figured out yet how to fit bonus actions, reactions, or readied actions into this architecture...
So, that's the shape I have in mind for a complete rewrite of the Initiative mechanic. What do you all think?
***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.
Fortunately, all three of these problems come from the same source: the fact that the traditional tradition of traditional traditionalism insists that because D&D is intended to be played by a group of people sitting together at a table, it has to function by the basic structure of a boardgame, with each player taking their turn, one at a time, and then just waiting for everyone else 'round the table to have taken their turn, after which it's a new round and thus people can each take their next turn.
But if we delete the underlying assumption of "one combat round is everybody getting to take one turn each", then all of these problems can be done away with.
For an alternative basic structure, I have drawn my inspiration from the classic Super Nintendo game Chrono Trigger. In that digital-RPG, there were no combat rounds; instead battles were resolved in real time, with each character having a Speed stat, so that in each second of battle their "Active Timer Battle" gauge filled by that many pixels. When the gauge was filled, they got to take a turn, after which the gauge emptied again. A nice and simple solution to problem #2.
To address problem #1, I would replace the fixed value of the Speed stat with a 1d6 roll on each "tick of the clock" (with Haste and other magical boosts to Initiative being applicable on each tick), so that players can't afford to just ignore the game until somebody tells them that it's their turn again. Picking arbitrary round numbers that appealed to me, each surprised combatant's Initiative score starts at zero, each other combatant starts at 10 (plus DexMod), and they each get their primary action at 30 (or more). Then after each combatant's primary action, they subtract 20 (minus DexMod) from their Initiative score, and the cycle continues.
Then comes problem #3. Instead of having 100% of each combatant's movement occur within the instant of their own turn, I would spread it out over time, divided as evenly as possible between 20 available Initiative scores (10-29), whether a given game is using "5-foot steps" on a tactical grid, or individual feet of measurement in a less crunchy arrangement.
So on each tick, after each combatant's Initiative score has advanced toward their next action, we go in order from lowest to highest Initiative score (maybe with an option to interrupt for faster monkeys being able to cut off slower monkeys if they want to?), and each combatant gets to take any movement earned during that tick. Only during that tick. If you earn movement and don't use it on that tick, it's lost. Because paying attention should be incentivized. And if you want to move from behind cover, line up a shot, loose an arrow, and duck back behind cover, you can't do it all in one tick. Because everyone who actually tries to participate in a battle should be caught out in the open at some point.
Of course, with difficult terrain and climbing/swimming/crawling increasing the "movement cost" of the distance actually traveled, you'd have to be able to borrow against the movement earned on the next tick(s) to keep those mechanics viable with the tiny allotments of movement in my system.
Effects with a duration measured in rounds would get translated over to ticks at a ratio of 6 ticks : 1 round (maybe 5:1 for simplicity of math?), and I would like to also weave in an element for delay values (added to the normal threshold value of 30) for certain actions less swift than average (be it casting time for a spell, reloading a crossbow, or drawing a weapon before attacking with it), and recovery values (added to the 20 your Initiative score gets reduced by after an action) based on the Speed Factor option in the DMG (so that there's any good reason to consider a primary weapon with a comparatively-smaller damage die). And obviously, I haven't figured out yet how to fit bonus actions, reactions, or readied actions into this architecture...
So, that's the shape I have in mind for a complete rewrite of the Initiative mechanic. What do you all think?
