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<blockquote data-quote="keterys" data-source="post: 6059765" data-attributes="member: 43019">For what it's worth, I almost always experience the opposite problem. PC Initiative far outstrips monster initiative. PCs can roll twice (or more) for initiative, get feat, item, and power bonuses to initiative. When I'm writing an adventure that has an initiative range for&nbsp; monsters of +17 to +25, say, and a party shows up where the lowest initiative the entire adventure is 43... that's fishy. (Combat Commander is a tad broken).PCs can apply Dex, Wis, and/or Cha (more rarely) to initiative. Some PCs roll Perception for Initiative, or more rarely History.Going first is _astoundingly_ useful. If a combat lasts 3 rounds, getting an extra turn over the opposition is potentially a 33% increase. In practice, it may be worth even more than that if it also has other tactical benefits (positioning, opening crowd control, being able to remove a linchpin before it goes, etc). I've seen a party where most combats took two rounds, and all but one PC went before all of team monster, and that last PC always went last. So he got only 1 turn per combat, instead of 2. That's demoralizing.Anyhow, what I'm really getting at... is that both monsters and PCs should do initiative differently <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="keterys, post: 6059765, member: 43019"] For what it's worth, I almost always experience the opposite problem. PC Initiative far outstrips monster initiative. PCs can roll twice (or more) for initiative, get feat, item, and power bonuses to initiative. When I'm writing an adventure that has an initiative range for monsters of +17 to +25, say, and a party shows up where the lowest initiative the entire adventure is 43... that's fishy. (Combat Commander is a tad broken). PCs can apply Dex, Wis, and/or Cha (more rarely) to initiative. Some PCs roll Perception for Initiative, or more rarely History. Going first is _astoundingly_ useful. If a combat lasts 3 rounds, getting an extra turn over the opposition is potentially a 33% increase. In practice, it may be worth even more than that if it also has other tactical benefits (positioning, opening crowd control, being able to remove a linchpin before it goes, etc). I've seen a party where most combats took two rounds, and all but one PC went before all of team monster, and that last PC always went last. So he got only 1 turn per combat, instead of 2. That's demoralizing. Anyhow, what I'm really getting at... is that both monsters and PCs should do initiative differently :) [/QUOTE]

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