Lanefan
Victoria Rules
And this was really all that was ever needed. And the move-out-of-combat free shot only applied of you (or your foe) turned tail and ran; if you backed up in a "fighting retreat" and kept your defenses up there was no free shot.Historically, in the early versions of D&D, when you moved out of combat, the opponent got a free swing at you. In addition, if you lost initiative (alternatively some arcane system involving weapon speeds and casting time) and got hit, you lost the spell you were casting. Ranged weapons just couldn't be used once you were in melee.
Truth be told, I thought cyclical initiative was a child of 2e.Once 3E came along, with cyclical initiative, .....
Either way, it is evil. It's really very simple to re-roll initiative each round (but use a smaller die than d20 - I've used both d6 and d10 and those work fine) and if two or more rolls are the same then those actions happen simultaneously. But, a caveat: initiative bonuses of any kind are *much* more powerful in this system; on a roll-each-round system I'd scale any init. bonus back very sharply if not eliminate such things altogether.
And to get away from the all-attacks-at-once nonsense for those with multiple attacks, each attack gets its own initiative. If the two (or more) attacks are coming from the same weapon their init's cannot be the same; but when fighting with two weapons they can strike simultaneously.
Lan-"taking the initiative, one round at a time"-efan