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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 6865998" data-attributes="member: 6677017">I still haven't nailed down how I want to make it work, but I've had a couple more thoughts.The biggest thought is that I don't like how initiative generally encourages acting at the first possibility. That isn't what I see in the cinematic action I'd like to model. Not only do you have characters pausing to taunt each other, negotiate, or just catch their breaths, but you also have opponents just circling around looking for openings, or even standing there waiting for someone to make the first move, even though violence is a foregone conclusion. It seems like, often, letting (or forcing) the other person take the initiative is at least as desireable.By contrast, in most games, there is little reason not to act as fast and as often as you can.So outside of the game, what consideration is being represented in the cinematic action (loosely modeled on the real world) of waiting for your opponent to go first? (Not a rhetorical question--feel free to offer suggestions!)One that I can think of is that striking first in an engagement forces you to tip your hand as to what sort of strike you are doing, allowing your opponent to determine how best to defend, counter-attack, etc. If you are really good, you might not care. Just go first because you'll take them out before they have a chance to do anything. If you are more equally matched, you need every advantage you can get.By contrast, going first provides an obvious advantage (and not the one you might be thinking) in that it allows you to dictate the initial conditions of the combat. Are you striking your opponent directly, trying to grab a hold of them, bullrush them, etc. Any of those choices will limit what your opponent's choice of effective responses are.So it seems the main consideration is that acting first allows you to take decisive control of elements of the combat (and potentially end it before it has gotten started with a knockout or killing blow), while waiting for the opponent to make the first move allows you to respond more effectively by customizing your response to his action.It seems that a system that differentiates the interaction of various maneuvers, and makes some responses mechanically superior versus some actions, will provide a mechanical framework that would support this sort of narrative.This could be done either through a set of hard-coded actions and reactions, or just through a free-form adjudication style--either can accomplish them same thing, depending on your system.What other reasons might encourage someone to wait to react rather than aggressively act in an impending conflict?The other thought is that I really need a way to make sure I don't have to be thinking ahead and trying to predict the future. Since these engagements are happening simultaneously in the fiction, but we are seeing sequential parts of them that may be longer than a traditional "round" of initiative, it can be difficult to determine how to switch between them without having a defined round, and yet still have each character ready to potentially switch engagements when needed. And then the additional consideration is that I don't want this to be a subsystem--I want it to be part of an overall scene pacing system. I think that last part is going to be the easiest once I get the other part figured out.What I might have to do is find a way of determining "significant moments" which are when you cut away to another exchange. Then I need to figure out how these significant moments relate to each other. It's worth noting that I don't have to have each engagement take up the same amount of time. Fuzzy pacing works here.Thoughts on that? (See my initial post for examples of what I mean about switching engagements.)I looked at Dungeon World. Its "initiative" seems similar in some ways to how I do things, but feels a bit more gamey (narrativist/gamist hybrid, which I don't see many examples of outside of 4e D&D) than I'm going for. Could you provide some examples (just make something up) of the sort of completely free-form play you are describing? In some initial playtests of early elements of this system I used completely free-form initiative, but that was in contests versus only two characters. When you throw in more creatures I think the GM could benefit from some sort of more structured rules, which is what I'm going for.</blockquote>

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