D&D 5E Fast Initiative ideas?

[S'mon]

I'm about to start a new 5e campaign in an old-school style. I'm a bit worried that the
initiative rolling & tracking may be a major time sink and slow down combat & thus the game -
for this game it will be important that the PCs can complete a delve/expedition and get back to base at the end of a ca 4-hour game session.

What are good ways to speed up initiative/combat sequence that work well with 5e?

 

[Horwath]

you can line up round order by dexterity score always.

It may get boring for the party, but maybe they will develop certain strategies around pre set order.

 

[Ath-kethin]

How big is your party? In my games we roll initiative every round (we also use a variation on the weapon speed modifiers in the the DMG), with all DM-controlled characters going on the same roll. It works great to keep things dynamic and can add some real tension to combat, and it's pretty fast.

But I also like to play with a 3 PC group, and I can see how it could get bogged down with more players.

 

[Li Shenron]

What are good ways to speed up initiative/combat sequence that work well with 5e?

I don't think it's easy to speed it up by changing how initiative works, it's already fast. Variants won't really make it significantly faster, because the standard initiative is just one d20 roll per PC once per battle.

If you want to speed up combat in general, you can try running it with TotM instead of using a battlemat, but it's not guaranteed and you may even get the opposite effect, because it depends on your players! If your players normally spend a lot of time to optimize their actions and movements on the battlemat, then in TotM everything might go faster as you can't keep track of exact positions and distances; but at the same time, your players might decide not to be on board with TotM inherent vagueness and to start asking lots of questions, essentially to be able to still make tactical decisions, and TotM may end up being even slower for your group.

If you think TotM doesn't work, you have other (drastic) options:

- use all the default average rolls instead of real dice rolls

- just have less combat encounters in the adventure

 

[jasper]

Easy. D6 1-4 monsters go first. 5-6 PCs go first. Clockwise around the table is the init order.

 

[Icarus Dreams]

I've never understood people's insistence that initiative is this large time sink. Everyone makes one roll at the beginning of combat, you jot down the numbers, then if your jotting method doesn't account for order you rewrite the list in number order. 30 seconds max, start to finish. Then tracking initiative is literally just part of your job. A little scene-setting transition pointing out a relevant detail to a player, and you're good. You should be doing this anyway, so just glance at the order to see who's next and then scene-set.

"Alice, the ogre is standing over you, lifting his club for another brutal swing."

"Bob, you see three goblins dancing over Carol's limp form."

"Carol, make a death save."

"Dave, you can see Alice struggling with the ogre, but the archer that took down Carol is readying another shot, this one aimed at you."

Once you get it down it takes basically no time past the initial rolling phase. Don't make it complicated, and it won't be. It's one of the easiest systems in the game, but people love to overcomplicate it for some unfathomable reason.

 

[S'mon]

How big is your party? In my games we roll initiative every round (we also use a variation on the weapon speed modifiers in the the DMG), with all DM-controlled characters going on the same roll. It works great to keep things dynamic and can add some real tension to combat, and it's pretty fast.

But I also like to play with a 3 PC group, and I can see how it could get bogged down with more players.

Planning on 6-8 players.

 

[S'mon]

I generally find the system works great for big set piece battles a la 4e encounters, but for "one orc" type encounters the init rolls can take longer than the actual fight, & half the PCs never get to act. It's particularly a problem when the PCs are in a 10' corridor, very common in old-school dungeons.

I'm thinking of something like "roll init vs DC set by target init, those who win go first in order of closeness to target".

But "d6, 4-6 your side goes first" also sounds good.

 

[Li Shenron]

I generally find the system works great for big set piece battles a la 4e encounters, but for "one orc" type encounters the init rolls can take longer than the actual fight, & half the PCs never get to act.

Then you shouldn't even run that encounter... maybe just roll 1 attack for the orc to see if it deals some damage to whoever is in the front, and consider it killed in the first round. IOW, treat the "one orc" as a trap.

 

[S'mon]

Then you shouldn't even run that encounter... maybe just roll 1 attack for the orc to see if it deals some damage to whoever is in the front, and consider it killed in the first round. IOW, treat the "one orc" as a trap.

No, I'm not interested in running this campaign like a 4e campaign. This game is specifically going to have an old-school feel.