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<blockquote data-quote="airwalkrr" data-source="post: 2915202" data-attributes="member: 12460"><p>It is a major DM headache to track separate initiatives for a group of monsters. I always roll the initiatives of like monsters together. For unique monsters I keep separate initiative, mostly because they have different init mods. For example, I would have one initiative for the 10 orcs and another for their cleric leader. To be fair to my players, I never resort to pure swarm tactics to take advantage of this fact. The monsters shouldn't metagame their initiative any more than the PCs do. However, I commonly see PCs readying to hit the bad guys with a double whammy so they can't react in time, so I see no reason why monsters couldn't think of the same thing. For instance, the necromancer orders the orcs to charge and readies an action to fireball the PCs (and his orcs) as soon as the orcs have all made their attacks. It should be up to the PCs to create a reasonable response to this kind of tactic. It is not unusual for several PCs to go early in the initiative order and given that PCs have more resources at their disposal than almost any given monster or NPC, that usually ends up being deadly for the bad guys. For this reason more than any other, the PCs should have contingency plans for how to deal with situations when they lose initiative.</p></blockquote><p></p>

[QUOTE="airwalkrr, post: 2915202, member: 12460"] It is a major DM headache to track separate initiatives for a group of monsters. I always roll the initiatives of like monsters together. For unique monsters I keep separate initiative, mostly because they have different init mods. For example, I would have one initiative for the 10 orcs and another for their cleric leader. To be fair to my players, I never resort to pure swarm tactics to take advantage of this fact. The monsters shouldn't metagame their initiative any more than the PCs do. However, I commonly see PCs readying to hit the bad guys with a double whammy so they can't react in time, so I see no reason why monsters couldn't think of the same thing. For instance, the necromancer orders the orcs to charge and readies an action to fireball the PCs (and his orcs) as soon as the orcs have all made their attacks. It should be up to the PCs to create a reasonable response to this kind of tactic. It is not unusual for several PCs to go early in the initiative order and given that PCs have more resources at their disposal than almost any given monster or NPC, that usually ends up being deadly for the bad guys. For this reason more than any other, the PCs should have contingency plans for how to deal with situations when they lose initiative. [/QUOTE]

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