Through D&D's edition progression, initiative seems to have become more complex and threatens to pull people from the immersion of the game. How important do you feel initiative is to D&D and 4E, and what changes would you make if you had it to do over again?
I’m not sure I agree with that. I think initiative hit its maximum complexity in 2nd Edition, and then settled in at a moderate level of complexity in 3E and 4E.
A few months back, we took some time to play through every edition of D&D. (Every now and then it’s good to put the R in R&D.) When I read through the 2nd Edition initiative rules again I realized that I’d generally played the most complex initiative system presented, the “count-down” initiative system. My recollection was that many (even most?) 2nd Edition tables did the same thing. The count-down system was built to make combat go slow. You had to take your turn twice per round, once by declaring what you were going to do, and once by actually doing it. And of course adding an initiative roll to every single round of combat was tedious, too. Now, what I’d completely forgotten about 2nd Edition was that the count-down system was *not* the default; the first initiative system presented in 2E was a simple side initiative much like the one in 1st Edition. And playing through side initiative again after not looking at it for a number of years was eye-opening. Rounds went fast, there was no initiative order to track, and once the players got their heads around it, there was actually quite a lot of room for narrative control. Go ahead and throw your fireball, and *then* I’ll charge into the room!
The cyclic initiative system of 3E (and 4E) definitely improved on the count-down variant that was widely used in 2E. That was the clear superiority of the 3E to 2E initiative system that I remembered. It wasn’t necessarily better than side initiative—the two systems simply value different things. Side initiative is faster, but cyclic initiative is more orderly and balanced, and gives each player a turn to act. However, I don’t think I would try to change it now. Both cyclic and side initiative work, but we have a broad player base that is pretty used to cyclic initiative. Cyclic initiative might not be great for immersion, but the fact that so many players know it and know it well means that they’re probably not paying much attention to it anymore, and that’s a good thing. Initiative does a good job of getting out of the way at most 3E and 4E game tables, which in its own way is a boost for immersion.
(Personal preference alert.) The only thing I really dislike in the 3E/4E initiative system is the Delay action. I can accept the Ready action because sometimes it makes great sense, like “I fire my crossbow when a goblin pops up to shoot at me.” When you delay, you’re manipulating something outside the story of the combat, and that bothers me. It’s very un-immersive. True story: The Delay action is in the game because initial feedback on cyclic initiative showed that some players were spooked by the idea that a low initiative roll meant they’d go last for the entire battle. Offering players the option to delay and go first the next round was just a way to sugar-coat the concept of cyclic initiative, even though we all know that it doesn’t need sugar-coating at all.