Initiative house rule.

This seems a bit similar to the initiative system for Shadowrun.
In that system, initiative was rolled.

Then everyone acted in turn order of what they rolled.
Then you subtract 10 from everyone's initiative.
Everyone who still has a number above 0 gets to act again in new count order.
Repeat this until no one has anymore actions.

Roll initiative again, getting new counts.
Repeat the process until combat is over.

This type of system seems like a good compromise between only rolling initiative once and rolling initiative every round. It also has a chance to change the combat significantly from one initiative roll to the next because you may get a good roll the first time, but not so good the next time.

Of course that system had a bunch of effects and dice pools that refreshed when initiative was rolled, so there were a lot of things built into that system. As far as 5e goes I can think of only a few things that happen upon initiative roll, like Battle Master refresh and Monk 20th level ability, and several other things like Assassin abilities that could get really overpowered or underpowered depending on rolls and builds.

phantomK9 said:

Then everyone acted in turn order of what they rolled.
Then you subtract 10 from everyone's initiative.
Everyone who still has a number above 0 gets to act again in new count order.
Repeat this until no one has anymore actions.

Click to expand...

And while that does greatly incentivize any sort of initiative-boosters you can get your hands on, those were at least available to everyone and suitably expensive. This version of the system was also significantly more balanced than earlier versions:

Initiative was rolled.
Then the person with the highest initiative went.
Then subtract 10 from that character's initiative.
Then the person with the highest initiative went.
And so on, until everyone had an initiative below zero.

It basically meant that the street samurai, instead of going first and last and most-often, would get four entire turns before any of the mooks got to take a shot.

My 8 dex goliath EK hates this houserule.

But my alert half-elf monk loves it!

Thanks for the replies everyone​- especially [MENTION=20564]Blue[/MENTION] for bringing up all the various things that might interact with this, some of which I hadn't considered.

I don't know if I'll be using it or not yet. I'll have to think about it some more and possibly make some adjustments (and obviously discuss it with my players).

Sent from my XT1080 using EN World mobile app

Edit: [MENTION=6790724]phantomK9[/MENTION] that sounds interesting. I might try to somehow incorporate something like that in instead.

BTW, I have a habit of trying to work out all the fiddly bits. Don't let any if it get in the way of having fun. Because really, 5e is a robust and fairly forgiving system and if you and your table enjoy it, don't worry about anything else.