No Initiative Order: How Do You Do It?

definiteFreakyFishGuy said:

I appreciate the responses.

The idea that there are situations where the "order of actions" doesn't matter is interesting.

Why doesn't the order matter? Is it because...

• likelihood of creating inconsistencies is low? (And if there are inconsistencies, it can be easily ret-conned?)
• it has no impact on the "game"? (But if it has no impact on the story, why do we play it out?)

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Consider a mundane, low risk example. My wife and I are cleaning the house. She's sweeping the floors downstairs, and I'm scrubbing the upstairs bathroom. Both have to happen, but does it really matter which one complete first? No. They are largely independent.

As opposed to in-combat, where the order of a mage casting lightning bolt, and my fighter running the mage through with a spear, can matter a great deal, as one or the other may end up dead.

Timescale and immediate criticality also enter into this. The world will not end if my wife has to wait a couple of minutes for me to finish before I hand off a bottle of cleanser. In combat, the differences are often in seconds, and life-and-death stakes.

definiteFreakyFishGuy said:

What you are saying makes sense to me. But at the same time, I have a small doubt.

Maybe things are happening fast for the characters, but aren't we the players always playing leisurely at our tables? Can't we, the players, always say, "Wait! Hold on a minute," no matter what is going on in-game?

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Well, the point is that out of combat, critical things often aren't happening fast for the characters. In D&D, there usually isn't a need to break non-combat activities down to six-second rounds.

Umbran said:

Well, the point is that out of combat, critical things often aren't happening fast for the characters. In D&D, there usually isn't a need to break non-combat activities down to six-second rounds.

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Umbran said:

Consider a mundane, low risk example. My wife and I are cleaning the house. She's sweeping the floors downstairs, and I'm scrubbing the upstairs bathroom. Both have to happen, but does it really matter which one complete first? No. They are largely independent.

As opposed to in-combat, where the order of a mage casting lightning bolt, and my fighter running the mage through with a spear, can matter a great deal, as one or the other may end up dead.

Timescale and immediate criticality also enter into this. The world will not end if my wife has to wait a couple of minutes for me to finish before I hand off a bottle of cleanser. In combat, the differences are often in seconds, and life-and-death stakes.

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I think that I am mostly in agreement.

The only thing I don't really see is the importance of the in-game timescale.

I added this update to a post I already made, which is that the need for order comes in when both conditions are met:
1. There are stakes.
2. Fixing an inconsistency from not having a strict ordering is mechanically difficult.

Consider, in the example of cleaning the house. It would still matter who finishes first, if the one who finishes first is getting the groceries. The timescale isn't tight like a DND combat, but the order still matters because there are stakes. (And there is no way to change the fact that one of you went to get groceries.)

DND Combat doesn't necessarily have to be high stakes. It could be a tavern brawl that is not necessarily narratively significant, with no perma deaths. But it does involve expenditure of resources (HP, spell slots, etc), which is difficult to adjust and retcon. (And we want to track these carefully, because if we don't, there might a deadly combat later where it could matter).

I'm mostly happy with my conclusion. But I am happy to listen and learn if you'd like to discuss further.

Umbran said:

Consider a mundane, low risk example. My wife and I are cleaning the house. She's sweeping the floors downstairs, and I'm scrubbing the upstairs bathroom. Both have to happen, but does it really matter which one complete first? No. They are largely independent.

As opposed to in-combat, where the order of a mage casting lightning bolt, and my fighter running the mage through with a spear, can matter a great deal, as one or the other may end up dead.

Timescale and immediate criticality also enter into this. The world will not end if my wife has to wait a couple of minutes for me to finish before I hand off a bottle of cleanser. In combat, the differences are often in seconds, and life-and-death stakes.

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Most games that include the idea of "combat" but have no set initiative, also don't lock you into combat; you instead are in a scene which may evolve into direct conflict, or not. Daggerheart is a little interesting because it's trying to do the "you don't have to solve scenes with combats" but also has the idea of planned encounters and balance and such; whereas something like Dungeon World has none of that.

There's a number of ways to run initiative-less combat systems; what I've come around to is something not all that dissimilar to a fiction-first version of side-based initiative. Essentially, as the scene evolves somebody will generally naturally have the lead to "take the next step" and I'll spotlight them off a provocative Move ("the skull-gem glows red again and you hear a firm knocking sound, and you can just tell the road's protection is about to shatter") and ask what they do. Once I get that fictional description + intent, I may pivot with a "Naren, you see Zel charging forward behind his shield, bronze mace held out in a cross guard ready to deliver a blow, what do you do?" and they can either say they do something there, or wait, etc.

Once we build a good picture of what's happening or set up in teh fiction, I'll start asking for rolls and evolving the fiction based on that.

In a PF1 game, for many non combat situations, we don't use initiative. If someone is doing something, often the rest of us just observe and see how it plays out. If we see an opportunity to do something, we jump in, even if that interrupts the current focus action. That's kinda how it works in real life. Last game one character spotted a pickpocket doing his thing on the far side of the town square. While he confronted the PP, the rest of us(2 chars) just slowly moved that way and observed. At some point after char 1 had started interacting with the PP, my character saw an opportunity to pickpocket the pickpocket(successfully as it turned out). No need for initiative, since neither the PP or char 1 noticed the attempt and kept doing what they were doing. Sometime later, a brief combat started and at that point, we generated an initiative order. Up to that point, char 3 stayed in observation mode. Even in combat initiative, we often make use of the delay/defer action if we want to wait for some reason.

A lot depends on player dynamics. If all the players are comfortable with their actions being interrupted by someone deciding that now is a good time to do something, free form works fairly well. If a player has issues when their carefully crafted action gets interrupted by someone jumping in, it may be better to have some kind of defined action order.

definiteFreakyFishGuy said:

Am I correct in interpreting that the "no initiative order" here specifically refers to initiative order in combat for RPGs with combat?

Assuming that the answer to my Q is "yes," it does make me wonder why the issue of initiative order comes up for combat specifically. I wonder if it's cultural baggage from DND. Or I wonder if there is something fundamentally different about combat vs non-combat situation.

Sorry if this is off-topic. Please feel free to direct me to a different thread if this is discussed elsewhere.

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Initiative: It's not just baggage from D&D; it's baggage from tabletop wargames of the 1960s onward, as well, both the chits on map and minis wargames.

Also, note that initiative isn't always for combat. Many TTWG use initiative for movement; in side by side, it's often Move in low to high initiative sequence, then attack in High to Low initiative.

We use a lot of different initiative systems.

Both tables seem to like no initiative most of the time. PCs go when they want. I have enemies go between them, or when it seems to make sense. But I think this requires trust ....

We've run a system similar to dagger heart, and the tension on if the bbeg would act next, or the party, was fun for everyone.

I find the basic DND initiative boring, so we play some a lot. When fighting demons, it's random dice, for example.

definiteFreakyFishGuy said:

I think that I am mostly in agreement.

The only thing I don't really see is the importance of the in-game timescale.

I added this update to a post I already made, which is that the need for order comes in when both conditions are met:
1. There are stakes.
2. Fixing an inconsistency from not having a strict ordering is mechanically difficult.

Click to expand...

I think of it like error-handling. When the differences in task lengths are much shorter than the task lengths themselves , it doesn't really matter.

In modern D&D combat, a round is like six seconds or so, and there is not much room for differences, so order matters.

In my cleaning example, if the tasks take around two hours, but we finish within ten minutes of each other, we can assume the difference is negligible, and move on. If we need a narrative conceit to resole the difference we can imagine my wife stopped to check her work e-mail for those ten minutes, and it all ends up just as plausible.

zakael19 said:

Most games that include the idea of "combat" but have no set initiative, also don't lock you into combat; you instead are in a scene which may evolve into direct conflict, or not.

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I cannot, for the life of me, think of a TTRPG that does "lock you into combat".

This recently revised post attempts to organize as many initiative orders as there are out, with some personal preferences listed on each. There's also an addendum, which covers some of the responses when it 1st came out.