D&D 5E Why use initiative?

[Nebulous]

Some years back there was a thread about card based initiative that I ran with for quite a long time. Basically, PCs had initiative cards, and the higher your Dex the more cards you get,. When a fight started, you shuffled monster and PCs cards together and the DM pulls them one at time. The more cards in the deck, the higher your odds of going first. End of the round the deck is reshuffled and the count starts over. Pros: it was a minigame every round. The only slow part was putting the deck together, but once we got the hang of it, it was fast. I loved the drama of not knowing who was going to go next. Players loved it when they went last in a round and then got to go immediately first the next round. Cons: Players hated it when a monster went last and then first. (I didn't mind that one bit). Spells that last "until your next turn" could get cut off quickly. Oh, and I had to make and laminate all the cards. It was very time intensive, but I still have a fat deck of hundreds of permanent cards with color pictures.

 

[Nebulous]

How do things that improve your initiative work? Like Alertness. Do you just reduce your total value by 5?

Or advantage for the low roll.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

Second question. As a dm, How do you roll for multiple mobs? I mean, you have to decide if each one is 1) moving; 2) using melee or ranged or spellcasting.

that’s lots of individual decisions and rolling. Whereas, with traditional initiative, you could roll one d20 for the whole side, if you wanted to be quick.

 

[Scruffy nerf herder]

Or advantage for the low roll.

Advantage makes more mechanical sense as -5 to your result would be way too much, it would even trivialize the system. On a D20 rolling with advantage is the mathematical equivalent of +5, but +/- 25% success chance isn't something you could represent with a +/- 5 modifier.

Advantage on the other hand normally gives you the rough equivalent of 25%.

 

[DND_Reborn]

I never tried it but it has always bothered me that ranged actions had the lowest modifier. That makes no sense to me, you need time to aim with a ranged attack that you don't with melee and it takes longer to get to its target! I would do like:

d6 melee
d8 ranged
d10 magic

and maybe +d4 if you include movement.

Not to mention the time (however brief) it takes to pull ammunition, load it, aim, fire, and the ammunition has to travel to the target.

Also, when we tried this, we did variable for magic:

Cantrip: d4 - 1
Level 1-4: d4
Level 5-6: d6
Level 7-8: d8
Level 9: d10

Also, one component = -1, three components = +1

Minimum is 0.

 

[Laurefindel]

I never tried it but it has always bothered me that ranged actions had the lowest modifier. That makes no sense to me, you need time to aim with a ranged attack that you don't with melee and it takes longer to get to its target! I would do like:

d6 melee
d8 ranged
d10 magic

and maybe +d4 if you include movement.

Yes, me too, at least in systems like this one that considers movement as its own action.

The main advantage of range attack is - well - range, so your initiative advantage resides in the fact that enemies have to add +d6 movement to their initiative just to get to you.

If movement does not modify initiative however, I tend to agree with a range = quicker attacks because historically, range weapons supplanted melee because you could kill or disable your opponent before they could get to you.

In the same mindset, you could turn the "reach" property of weapon not in distance so much as in an initiative bonus of some sort. Actually, this would work best for theatre-of-the-mind combats where distances are a bit fuzzier in the first place.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

Advantage makes more mechanical sense as -5 to your result would be way too much, it would even trivialize the system.

A player in one of my games has multiple bonuses to initiative from class features and feats. I guess he’d get double or triple advantage?

or maybe just -1 on each dice for each ability that grants him a boost?

 

[Scruffy nerf herder]

Not to mention the time (however brief) it takes to pull ammunition, load it, aim, fire, and the ammunition has to travel to the target.

Also, when we tried this, we did variable for magic:

Cantrip: d4 - 1
Level 1-4: d4
Level 5-6: d6
Level 7-8: d8
Level 9: d10

Also, one component = -1, three components = +1

Minimum is 0.

I've really been tempted by trying different variables and making ranged combat different, but my main roadblock has been my reticence to add a bunch more variables to the system.

It has worked so well for us in part because you don't have to remember so many different categories of things in order to determine your initiative.

 

[Laurefindel]

Some years back there was a thread about card based initiative that I ran with for quite a long time. Basically, PCs had initiative cards, and the higher your Dex the more cards you get,. When a fight started, you shuffled monster and PCs cards together and the DM pulls them one at time. The more cards in the deck, the higher your odds of going first. End of the round the deck is reshuffled and the count starts over. Pros: it was a minigame every round. The only slow part was putting the deck together, but once we got the hang of it, it was fast. I loved the drama of not knowing who was going to go next. Players loved it when they went last in a round and then got to go immediately first the next round. Cons: Players hated it when a monster went last and then first. (I didn't mind that one bit). Spells that last "until your next turn" could get cut off quickly. Oh, and I had to make and laminate all the cards. It was very time intensive, but I still have a fat deck of hundreds of permanent cards with color pictures.

I don't remember participating in this thread, but one advantage that comes immediately to my mind is that it would be an easy way to randomize combat advantages and opportunities provided by terrain (or just providence), which otherwise tends to be ignored in D&D and RPG in general, simply by adding text or icon to the card.

 

[Scruffy nerf herder]

A player in one of my games has multiple bonuses to initiative from class features and feats. I guess he’d get double or triple advantage?

or maybe just -1 on each dice for each ability that grants him a boost?

I suppose that entirely depends on whether you want those feats to mean he is getting as much as a 50% or even 75% bonus to his success.

The -1 for each doesn't sound too bad but then again three feats would instantly guarantee a 1 every time that player rolls a D4.