D&D General Rerolling Initiative each Round

[Shiroiken]

Thank you for pointing this out. It makes me consider how durations could be adjusted. Environmental effects could be changed to last until the end of the round, not particular turns, making it part of the round phase. Buffs and Debuffs would instead end at the end of the target's turn, so it affects them once for 1 round buffs.

I've considered this quite a bit over the years, and I've come to the conclusion that you set the duration of everything to the End of the Next Round. While this makes lasting effects overall longer, it gives every effect a minimum of 1 full round of effect and encourages the benefit of high initiative.

 

[Shiroiken]

I reroll initiative every round, but because I play through Roll20 I just have a simple macro in place to automatically reroll initiative for all combatants at the start of each round.

As someone who also uses Roll20, could you share that macro?

 

[abirdcall]

Can you elaborate on that rule to have players talk plan? How do you enforce that, and what did it result in?

We enforce it by having everyone declare what they are doing at the beginning.

And being on the honour system.

It made the game much quicker for the group we had. At the time we had a couple players who had analysis paralysis so that each turn took 1-2 minutes and so add that all up and that is 5-10 minutes of player turns per round.

Instead have 2 minutes of talking and then everyone resolve things.

 

[Clint_L]

In my last 2 campaigns we did it.

It actually sped things up because we also implemented a rule to have the players deliberate on their plan at the beginning of the round.

So re-rolling initiative didn’t speed up the game, having players plan their turn before it comes did. That would be true in any system: “be ready when your turn comes.” That’s standard practice for us. I end player’s turns if they dither too long.

 

[abirdcall]

So re-rolling initiative didn’t speed up the game, having players plan their turn before it comes did. That would be true in any system: “be ready when your turn comes.” That’s standard practice for us. I end player’s turns if they dither too long.

Yep, it is dynamic specific.

It allowed them to have the same feeling of planning together as a team with much less time spent.

So, since that is the kind of game they wanted it worked for us.

I didn't want to tell someone they have 2 minutes to plan their turn but then the next player doesn't.

This dynamic is not ideal for me but I've got a lot of neuroatypical friends and I will accommodate where I can.

 

[cbwjm]

I like rolling each round, it's what we use in OSE but that is side initiative so we can decide who goes first on our side, changing how things play out (we only declared our actions if casting a spell so that there was a chance for disruption). Haven't used weapon speeds since 2e and not sure I'd go back, would probably just use basic initiative. I think I prefer it over cyclical initiative.

Acrually, I'd also be tempted to bring in savage worlds initiative and see how that runs in dnd.

 

[Audiomancer]

I joined a Roll20 group that was already re-rolling initiative each round.

As others have noted, it can have funky effects on abilities that have durations linked to the start/end of your next turn. In practice, though, they didn’t come up very often.

It did take some extra time to roll and re-sort the turn order, but that was offset (IMO) by the drama/tension that cam from not knowing exactly when your next turn would be.

But I guess the DM eventually decided it was too much hassle, because he quietly dropped it a year or so back.

 

[jmartkdr2]

(snip)

Ah, that does require a change and additional tracking: the ability should last for a round regardless of turn sequence, meaning if it resolves on init 5 this round it expires on 5 next round.

Or just accept that an ability that's supposed to last one round now lasts 0-2 rounds. If you like more chaos in your battles this is a good thing.

And yes this means sometimes you'll get double benefit out of it and other times you'll get nothing. So be it.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Hi everybody!

I've been reading some OSR stuff, really enamored by the turn structure for exploration and gearing up to do a hexcrawl and dungeon crawl game. But it's got me thinking about other old rules.

Who has played with rerolling Initiative each round and weapon speeds? It seems like it will drastically slow down games, but it may also feel more tactical. How does it end up changing the way the game is played? How do the players change their play?

Having played lots and lots of 2e back in college, this is how it was done (and with spell speeds as well, which really ratcheted up the tension if you were a spellcaster!). It definitely made the game a lot more interesting. The problem with doing it with 5e is that 2e didn't have anywhere near as many options for characters, so players were able to decide upon their actions much more quickly, so re-rolling initiative and adding weapon/spell speeds didn't slow the game down as much as it would now. Also, the groups I played in were pretty veteran - as they would be since the various friend groups I was in had like a half-dozen campaigns going on at any given time (it was the late '80s/early '90s, so no cellphones and very rudimentary internet that was hard to access and slow; so alcohol, relationships, and D&D were the main ways to fill up the time lol), so we all had the rhythm of combat down to an art. In a way, I do kind of miss it, but, thinking it over, again, it just wouldn't work very well these days.

 

[Lanefan]

Having played lots and lots of 2e back in college, this is how it was done (and with spell speeds as well, which really ratcheted up the tension if you were a spellcaster!). It definitely made the game a lot more interesting. The problem with doing it with 5e is that 2e didn't have anywhere near as many options for characters, so players were able to decide upon their actions much more quickly, so re-rolling initiative and adding weapon/spell speeds didn't slow the game down as much as it would now. Also, the groups I played in were pretty veteran - as they would be since the various friend groups I was in had like a half-dozen campaigns going on at any given time (it was the late '80s/early '90s, so no cellphones and very rudimentary internet that was hard to access and slow; so alcohol, relationships, and D&D were the main ways to fill up the time lol), so we all had the rhythm of combat down to an art. In a way, I do kind of miss it, but, thinking it over, again, it just wouldn't work very well these days.

The other big difference with 1e-2e and now is the older editions only had 6 segments in a round, making things much easier to track by segment than the 20-segment* rounds in current use and also making rerolling initiative much simpler.

And it becomes simpler yet if you scrap the most common initiative modifiers, Dexterity being the biggest offender here. Pleasant side effect is that this de-powers Dex a bit as a stat, which it needs.

* - yes, semantics-lovers, I know 5e doesn't use "segments" as such, but let's face it - for these purposes each pip on the d20 represents a 1/20 segment of a round.