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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 6254739" data-attributes="member: 6677017">We were talking about new ways of considering and handling initiative over <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?352102-Will-D-amp-D-Next-qualify-as-quot-Rules-Lite-quot/page6" target="_blank">here</a> and I thought it deserved it's own thread.In designing my own system, I'm replacing initiative with a different system for action pacing. DMMike has his own initiative system innovations.What have you done to change initiative in your own systems?To give the run down on how I'm currently handling it (still some fuzzy areas in development), let me tell you a tiny bit about my system.I'm creating a role-playing system (I specifically avoid calling it a "game" for theoretical reasons, because I believe only some ways of playing rpgs actually should count as games at all) that is intended as a fairly balanced narrativist/simulationist hybrid. (Savage Worlds is a hybrid slanted towards simulationism, for comparison). I want it to represent fictional scenarios as portrayed in books and movies. Everything is aimed at producing the level of abstraction you see or read, rather than pure simulationism, or pure story-based elements. For example, if you see someone using a zweihander vs. a dagger in a movie, it's going to make a consistent difference in the scene. It's worth having a clear difference between the damage caused by them. When it comes to a mace, a longsword, or a battleaxe, only rarely is any sort of difference going to impact the scene, and that comes from creative usage rather than damage values, so there is little reason from my design goals to differentiate them. Just consider them all "average-sized weapons" and you've got it taken care of.Now, when I started questioning initiative, I started wondering if I needed it at all. Is initiative, as currently used, at all representative of action scenes in books and movies? I submit that it is not. Here is a scenario with a standard initiative system:Heroes are A, B, and CEnemies are 1-4Round 1:Enemy 2 moves and attacks hero AEnemy 4 moves towards hero CHero B moves and attacks enemy 2Hero C...And so on. The point is that the entire battlefield is intended to be seen and represented from a bird's eye view, which isn't how it is portrayed in fiction.Here is how a battle between those same characters would actually play out in a movie:The camera shows enemies 1, 2, and 3 moving towards hero A; hero B moves in and cuts off enemy 3A fast and furious exchange is shown between hero A and enemies 1-2The camera switches to show hero B dueling with enemy 3Change in view, and hero C (not a warrior) is being chased around by enemy 4Change back to hero B finishing off enemy 3Back to hero A, who has defeated enemy 1, but is now on the bad side of the fight with enemy 2, when suddenly hero B jumps into the engagement and they team up and take out enemy 2Switch to hero C who is on the ground up against the wall while enemy 4 is raising his weapon to finish him off...then his gaze goes blank and he slumps over, and you see hero A standing there, having just hit him in the head with the butt of his weaponWhat's the main difference here? The difference is that instead of getting a bird's eye view of the battle, you get camera angles (or descriptive paragraphs in a book) switching from different engagements between heroes and opponents. Initiative only matters within an individual engagement.So that's what I'm going for. The main thing I still need to figure out is how the GM decides when to switch from one engagement to another. It can't be a precise number of exchanges of blows, it definitely isn't going to be one turn for each character in the exchange, but it has to allow for the fact that a hero who defeats his opponents can join another exchange in time to make a difference, without being unbelievable in the pacing.(Is there any chance we can get a sub-forum for game design and theory?)</blockquote>

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