I'm probably thinking too deep, but it does sort of harken the faux Wild West/Settler nature of D&D. Either the fast draw at high noon or whoever pulls their weapon out and dashes in first does the most damage before the enemy can react to the hero's whirlwind of death. Both images are sort of antithetical to the plodding nature of wargame on the table, though.
Dragonbane general thread
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I'm probably thinking too deep, but it does sort of harken the faux Wild West/Settler nature of D&D. Either the fast draw at high noon or whoever pulls their weapon out and dashes in first does the most damage before the enemy can react to the hero's whirlwind of death. Both images are sort of antithetical to the plodding nature of wargame on the table, though.
Savage Worlds also uses card-based initiative, although using a regular deck. It has two Edges (the equivalent of Heroic Abilities) that improve your initiative, but do so in different ways. Well, three, but one of those is just an upgrade to another one.
One is Quick, which requires a good Agility. The effect is that any draw of 5 or less is discarded – so that's 4 out of 13 results (not counting Jokers). Adapting this to Dragonbane could be that you discard and redraw any 8. 9, or 10.
The other one is Level Headed which requires both a good Smarts and some previous experience, and gives you two cards (this is the one with the upgrade, which of course goes to three cards).
So neither Agility nor Smarts improve your initiative on its own, but they do open paths to doing so.
One is Quick, which requires a good Agility. The effect is that any draw of 5 or less is discarded – so that's 4 out of 13 results (not counting Jokers). Adapting this to Dragonbane could be that you discard and redraw any 8. 9, or 10.
The other one is Level Headed which requires both a good Smarts and some previous experience, and gives you two cards (this is the one with the upgrade, which of course goes to three cards).
So neither Agility nor Smarts improve your initiative on its own, but they do open paths to doing so.
Aldarc
Legend
That may also reflect experience even if it looks more like speed.
Either way, it seems like there are already ways via Heroic Abilities to manipulate initiative.
overgeeked
Open-World Sandbox
It’s not a problem. It’s a D&D-ism. It’s one reason DEX is a problem. No stat should objectively be the best, most useful stat. AGI already gives a damage bonus (only other one is STR), a movement bonus (no other stat does anything like that), and it is the base chance for 12 of the game’s 30 skills (next closest is INT with 8 skills). AGI is already too useful. You could also make a case for INT being the initiative stat. Relegating it to a HA is fine.
Bill Zebub
“It’s probably Matt Mercer’s fault.”
...and those skills include Evade, which is maybe the one(?) skill that everybody needs.
Small digression about the Dragonbane Community discord.
It has slowed down but for a long time on a weekly basis, we would a new member state DB felt "weird" because it lacked X.
X equaled some D&D-ism of some sort, be it a lack of clearly defined clerics, kin with darkvision, etc.
Some of them got a bit huffy when reminded DB was not D&D and didn't have to follow in those same footsteps.
Wolfpack48
Hero
I wasn’t coming to it from a D&D standpoint. We’ve been playing some variant of BRP for the last 20 years.
Strike Ranks and such.
Bill Zebub
“It’s probably Matt Mercer’s fault.”
This happened a LOT in the Shadowdark Discord. Some feature would be different from D&D, and new people would say (in effect) "I haven't actually tried it yet but clearly this won't work so I'm going to change it..."
Which is both super annoying AND...in retrospect...the right reaction is probably, "Ok. Let us know how that goes for you." Because it literally never works to argue when somebody is already in that mindset.
Wolfpack48
Hero
The only reason it might be worthwhile discussing is that some folk are actually looking to migrate from D&D. Now if they are just there to trash the game because it isn’t D&D, well that’s another thing.
overgeeked
Open-World Sandbox
Sort of. Maybe.
I think it always deserves at least a bit of push back simply because it should be made clear the game works fine without the proposed change and that it's a bad idea to make that change. If for no other reason than to hopefully minimize the risk of them bad mouthing the game after the fact. I know it's tilting at windmills, but it seems like a worthwhile endeavor. I don't care if someone doesn't like a game. Not every game is meant for every person. But it really bugs me when people make a slough of house rules without knowing what they're doing and then complain about the game sucking as a result. But it's never the house rules that suck, it's always the game itself. Just drives me up the wall.
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