D&D 5E Concurrent initiative variant; Everybody declares/Everybody resolves [WAS Simultaneous Initiative]

[flametitan]

One question though: Why couldn't Vlad cast Shield again before the goblins made their second flurry of attacks? It seemed like more than one "round" passed between when he used his reaction, his readied spell (which seems to alternate between EB and Chill touch), and when the goblins attacked again, unless I'm misreading. Was it because he cast his held spell?

 

[MostlyDm]

Elipsis added.

Thanks!

I felt like addressing it would be an unwelcome tangent, since the point was INT adding languages/ranks in 1e/3e, and not doing so in 5e.

But, here' goes...

While 4e didn't have Add. Lang or bonus ranks for INT, it did make INT more useful by using it to calculate AC & REF when higher than DEX, and did allow an INT-based character to make effective INT-based attacks, even with a weapon, using feats like Intelligent Blademaster or, a bit later, Melee Training. Plenty of other feats and utilities allowed INT or INT-based skills to be swapped into other rolls. INT was not only a primary stat for the usual suspects like Wizard, but a secondary stat for others, like the Warlock & Warlord in the PH1, for instance. On balance, it didn't seem like mistreatment.

Indeed, to bring it back around to your issue with 5e under-serving INT, you could also lift some of those functions from 4e, if you wanted.

Yeah, I know where you're coming from. I ran maybe three or four 4e campaigns and a few more one shots as well. There were some neat aspects to it, and some stuff that ultimately I realized I really didn't like. You've actually kind of hit upon both, simultaneously.

I'm not sure how far down this road we should go, but, briefly: My problem with the way 4e handles Int is the same as my problem with how 4e handles all stats. In trying to keep a good balance between the stats, which they achieve, what ultimately ends up happening is each stat loses a lot of uniqueness and verisimilitude. So, yeah, some people have good Int, and some have good Con, and some have good Dex, and if you have a big enough party you likely have people with every conceivable stat array...

But they largely use whatever stats they have in identical fashions, and the game makes it really easy to avoid using your dump stats for virtually anything that matters. The guy with good Con, at 20th level, doesn't necessarily have more HP than the guy with 10 Con. Their fort saves could easily be identical. One guy uses Con to attack, the other guy uses a different stat to attack, and ultimately... what's the point? It just ended up feeling very samey to me and my group.

There's very little about having a high Int or a high Cha or whatever that ever stood out to me as really defining. The high Int guy used Int for all of his attacks, even his attacks with a greataxe. The high Cha guy did the same. Etc.

I dunno. Ultimately this is a description of why the system didn't work for me so it will no doubt come off as overly hostile towards 4e. I don't want to start one of those threads, so I apologize for that in advance. For all the stuff that ultimately didn't work for me, there were plenty of good ideas, some of which I have stolen for subsequent games. No edition warrior here.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I recall coming across a system that included declaring actions in ascending INT order at some point in the distant gaming past (actions were then resolved in descending DEX order, IIRC). I don't know if it was for D&D, but it's interesting you're using something like it. Do you recall where you got the idea?

*thinks*

I might be influenced by GURPS in this. That is, I think I originally came up with this system for a GURPS game, and GURPS has only four stats (Strength, Dexterity, IQ, and Health; Speed is derived from Dexterity and Health) so when trying to make GURPS behave more like AD&D it was natural to reach for Int. And GURPS' regular initiative system is not random at all, so it makes sense for action declarations not to be random either.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

The major issue with simultaneous initiative is that circumstances on the ground are likely to change between the time you declare your action and the time it comes to resolve your action. If you ever played Final Fantasy I, before the PlayStation era re-releases, you'd remember how little fun it is to have a fighter miss their attacks because the enemy they'd selected was already dead at the hands of the black belt, while the remaining enemies continue to return fire.

I'm not exactly sure how your system deals with that, if there's anything more to it than rolling initiative to see who gets that particular enemy first

I allow my players to declare more complicated actions if they want to--they just have to declare the action in enough detail that I, or anyone else, could resolve the action without additional information. If you declare, "I attack the orc with the red hat!" and he's dead, well, you attack his corpse or abort your action. Not a big deal, and something that can happen in real life too. (Encouraging this kind of realistic chaos, especially for archers, is one of my additional motivations for wanting a different initiative system.)

One of my players has taken to saying, "I attack the masses!" as a shorthand for "I attack that guy, or if he's already dead then I attack the next guy." I generally encourage my players to develop their own nicknames for maneuvers and combinations of maneuvers.

I can imagine a theoretical point at which I'd say, "No, that action declaration is too complicated." But it's never happened so I haven't had to come up with rules for delineating the boundary.

or whether the slower actor gets a chance to change their mind based on the outcome of the faster one. (If there are three goblins and a goblin priest, then you really want to make sure the goblin priest goes down ASAP, but you don't know how many attacks it can withstand before dropping; so everyone in the party declares that they're going to attack the goblin priest, and it drops from the first hit because it's still just a goblin, and then the rest of the party... does what exactly? Stands there and gets shot by the other goblins?)

In this situation you're either looking at everyone attacking the priest simultaneously because it's vital that he die ASAP (in which case everyone declare "I Attack the priest, or if he's dead then whatever goblin is closest" or something similar) or else you're looking at waiting a beat before committing to an attack, which means you're declaring a Delay.

 

[MostlyDm]

In addition to allowing for overkill (which I agree can actually be desirable to emulate the chaos of battle), it seems like it can open up to all sorts of interesting tactics.

Like...

DM: The wolf is going to run up to Neville and bite him.

Neville: I dash away.

Party: We shoot at the wolf.

And then initiative is rolled between the wolf and Neville? And if Neville succeeds, then a round is spent with the wolf chasing Neville to no avail. Perhaps it now aborts its action, e.g. "The wolf attacks the closest one of you that doesn't flee."

In general, seems like this system encourages kinds of kiting you don't really see in regular initiative.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

One question though: Why couldn't Vlad cast Shield again before the goblins made their second flurry of attacks? It seemed like more than one "round" passed between when he used his reaction, his readied spell (which seems to alternate between EB and Chill touch), and when the goblins attacked again, unless I'm misreading. Was it because he cast his held spell?

I.

Yes, it was because of the held spell.

In this system, 1 round = my turn = your turn = everyone's turn concurrently. There's no distinction between rounds and turns. You get one reaction per round.

On round 1, Vlad's reaction goes toward Shield.

On round 2, Vlad's reaction goes toward triggering his held action (on initiative count 21, although I didn't write that) when the first goblin shoots at Vlad and misses and Vlad tries to Chill Touch him and misses. A moment later (initiative count 19, as it happens), two more goblins shoot arrows at Vlad. One misses, and one hits the wagon right below Vlad's ribs. If it had hit, Vlad would be too busy casting Chill Touch to Shield.

II.

If Vlad ever casts EB in the example, whoops! Mistake on the writer's part. In real life Vlad is a Warlock 2/Necromancer 9 who was a pure Necromancer relying on Chill Touch up until level 8, but I wanted a simple example so in my head I meant to make this a fifth level Vlad with only Chill Touch. If I at some point wrote Eldritch Blast for Vlad then that was unintentional.

 

[flametitan]

I.

Yes, it was because of the held spell.

In this system, 1 round = my turn = your turn = everyone's turn concurrently. There's no distinction between rounds and turns. You get one reaction per round.

On round 1, Vlad's reaction goes toward Shield.

On round 2, Vlad's reaction goes toward triggering his held action (on initiative count 21, although I didn't write that) when the first goblin shoots at Vlad and misses and Vlad tries to Chill Touch him and misses. A moment later (initiative count 19, as it happens), two more goblins shoot arrows at Vlad. One misses, and one hits the wagon right below Vlad's ribs. If it had hit, Vlad would be too busy casting Chill Touch to Shield.

Right. I must've missed him casting it.

That said, it does bring up something I might do if I were to use this (Strictly to help me as a DM keep it organized; I doubt the players would see much difference in play) and possibly have explicit "phases" on my side of the screen: Things that happen at the beginning of the turn, declaration, resolution, things that happen at the end of the turn. I might also have a "damage" phase, if it seems likely for somebody to get a shot off right as they're killed, or some such.

Mostly just to keep things in my head clear, and follow it better.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

In addition to allowing for overkill (which I agree can actually be desirable to emulate the chaos of battle), it seems like it can open up to all sorts of interesting tactics.

Like...

DM: The wolf is going to run up to Neville and bite him.

Neville: I dash away.

Party: We shoot at the wolf.

And then initiative is rolled between the wolf and Neville? And if Neville succeeds, then a round is spent with the wolf chasing Neville to no avail. Perhaps it now aborts its action, e.g. "The wolf attacks the closest one of you that doesn't flee."

In general, seems like this system encourages kinds of kiting you don't really see in regular initiative.

Yep, that kind of thing happens all the time. One of the most memorable moments was when the party's 9th(?) level Necromancer tried to take on a Death Slaad, solo and naked except for garments woven from tree bark because the Death Slaad (in disguise) had previously captured him and taken all of his gear including his spellbook and Robe of the Archmagi. The Death Slaad was in the form of an Enkidu (from Dominions; think of a cross between a Volo's Firbolg and a nature-oriented half-Ogre with horns) and had a couple of dozen of half-ogre-statted Enkidu guards with him when the Necromancer assaulted the city and captured the walls with his skeleton troops. I let one of the players run the Death Slaad during the battle and it ended up turning invisible and trying to get the Necromancer while Enkidu troops assaulted the boarded-up front doors of the tower the Necromancer was holding. To make a long story short, the battle came down to one crucial moment when the Death Slaad was at a handful of HP left and had declared that he was Plane Shifting away; the Necromancer's skeletons had rolled just barely enough damage to kill the Death Slaad this round; and the only thing that was needed in order for the Necromancer to kill the Slaad and get his Robe of the Archmagi back (the Slaad was wearing the robe BTW) was an initiative contest: all the skeletons had to get their shots off before the Death Slaad could complete his Plane Shift spell.

It was very tense!

There was a happy ending though. IIRC the Slaad rolled a 3 or something on its initiative, and all the skeletons beat it after all, and the Slaad died messily and the Enkidus stared in amazement at the toad-corpse of what they had thought was their Ensi and the Enkidus surrendered and everything turned out fine.

P.S. Also, my wolves aren't smart enough to declare that conditional action the first time. So Peter will be fine on the first round if he wins initiative; on the second and subsequent rounds the wolf will be more canny and Delay or declare a conditional attack. And the same learning process will occur BTW with the next wolf they meet--it's not the DM being simpleminded in his action declarations, it's the wolf. A dumber animal like a snake might not learn at all.

Edit: oh, it's Neville, not Peter. My bad, but I'm leaving it unchanged in my post because Prokofiev.

 

[MostlyDm]

Right. I must've missed him casting it.


That said, it does bring up something I might do if I were to use this (Strictly to help me as a DM keep it organized; I doubt the players would see much difference in play) and possibly have explicit "phases" on my side of the screen: Things that happen at the beginning of the turn, declaration, resolution, things that happen at the end of the turn. I might also have a "damage" phase, if it seems likely for somebody to get a shot off right as they're killed, or some such.


Mostly just to keep things in my head clear, and follow it better.

Yeah, intuitively this type of system sounds to me like it will require a bit more "work" on the part of the DM to keep things flowing correctly. Initiative can be clunky, but it's also fairly divorced from any key DM adjudications and can even be handled by a player if needed. Not the case here, I think.

I have a feeling Hemlock may have a counterargument, though.

Even if it is the case, it doesn't phase me much. I tend to prefer it when the heavy-lifting is done behind the screen and the players can focus on roleplaying and having a good time. Some of my favorite systems these days are much more free-form, and rely much more heavily on constant GM adjudication. It's not typically a big deal.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Right. I must've missed him casting it.

That said, it does bring up something I might do if I were to use this (Strictly to help me as a DM keep it organized; I doubt the players would see much difference in play) and possibly have explicit "phases" on my side of the screen: Things that happen at the beginning of the turn, declaration, resolution, things that happen at the end of the turn. I might also have a "damage" phase, if it seems likely for somebody to get a shot off right as they're killed, or some such.

Mostly just to keep things in my head clear, and follow it better.

Another thing you can do to keep things simpler is to just utilize the Delay action a lot.

DM: "All the monsters Delay."

Now it's equivalent to DMG "Side Initiative": all the PCs go, then all the monsters go.