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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5573197" data-attributes="member: 58197">I've had mixed results with side versus side in 4E, but that might be due to the complexity of the system. Players ended up spending a ridiculous amount of time deciding who was going to do what, in what order. In a system with less crunch, there might be less incentive for that. Here's a thought: The DM and the player sitting to her left roll 1d20 for initiative, and whoever wins takes the first turn. After that, initiative goes clockwise around the table. (If you don't game at a table, figure out the nearest analogue for "clockwise" and use that.) Once all players have acted but before the DM's turn, the players can switch initiative positions if they so desire--physically swapping seats is optional.I have a soft spot in my heart for the initiative/spellcasting thing, but it requires such a messy initiative system that I can't quite justify it on that basis alone. If anyone has ideas on how to keep initiative clean and quick while maintaining the danger of attacks interrupting spellcasting*, I'm all ears.[size=-2]*Without using the words "readied attack."[/size]This is a good idea. Must ponder it more.My target hit rate is 70% for a same-level monster. That means that with two attacks a round, both will connect 49% of the time. "Some attacks will miss" is far from guaranteed.I don't care about the fighter getting to choose attacks. What the N+1 thing is covering for is the lack of granularity involved in going from 1 attack to 2 attacks. If a fighter at level 11 gets one attack but a fighter at level 12 gets two, your damage output doubles in the space of one level, resulting in a massive power spike. Every edition of D&D that's involved multiple attacks has wrestled with this issue. None of the solutions (AD&D's "half attacks," 3E's iterative attacks) worked terribly well, until 4E came along and folded the whole thing into the power system. Sadly, the 4E power system does not translate well to a low-crunch design.I've played with a bunch of different ideas to address the multi-attack problem. So far, "1+1" is the best I've come up with. It improves granularity; at a 70% hit rate, it's equivalent to 1.3 attacks per round. It's simple; even the most casual player should be able to grasp the idea of "roll two, pick one." It doesn't create incentives to regress; 2 attacks are strictly better than 1+1, so you'll never see players asking to go back to the lower-level version. And it doesn't require keeping track of how often you attacked last round.The alternative would be to ditch the whole idea of multiple attacks and just hand out a flat damage bonus that scales with level. This has many advantages, and if "1+1" turns out to be too complicated, I might go with that instead. However, I like multiple attacks for a couple of reasons. One, they make high-level fighters feel more impressive. Two, they give fighters the option to split up their attacks--it's an option that will seldom be used, but it's handy against a mob of weenies. And three, they make it possible to predict how much damage any single attack will do, which makes the math easier when it comes to things like monsters with damage reduction and attacks versus objects.</blockquote>

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