Initiative Variations

[painandgreed]

Once per encounter, call for intitiative and write on notecards (including monsters), then sort notecards from highest init down. Let top person do actions then move card to the bottom of stack. Repeat till combat is over. If somebody holds and action or is otherwise not taking one, remove card from stack. Once they decide to act, they preform their action and their card goes back in the stack at the bottom of the pile.

 

[Asmor]

Once per encounter. The DM in our last game was a stickler for rolling every round, and it was torturously slow... Not to mention it frequently screws people over, whether they guy who goes first, casts a summon monster, then gets attacked twice by everything since he goes last next round, or the guy who's second to last, holds his action, and loses it when initiative picks up again.

I've got some sheets with a table of initiatives and 6 columns... Write the PCs names on the sheet at their initiative, each combat takes up one column. When people collide, I write them above or below as appropriate with a paranthetical note of their actual init. Sometimes gets annoying when two people are next to eachother and a third gets sandwiched between them, but even running a game with 7 PCs that doesn't happen that often.

 

[Wrathamon]

Once per encounter and I use Base Reflex Save + Dexterity + feats that improve initiative.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Reflex save is a pretty cool idea.

I'm kind of proud of FFZ's initiative system because it makes managing speed pretty important. You roll 1/encounter, but then every action you take "costs" you initiative. For every 20 points of init you have, you get another turn. If you drop below 0 init, you loose a turn. And it does increase with experience (actually, at about the same rate as saves...). It kind of brings back the feel of weapon speeds and spell casting times.

 

[Nathan P. Mahney]

I like rolling once per encounter - 3e needs all the speeding up in combat that it can get. I've also taken to rolling all of the monsters initiatives pre-game - instead of writing their Init bonus in the statblock, I write their Init total. It's a big help for combats with a lot of different monster types.

One thing I've wondered about, is that the rules say to roll initiative at the beginning of encounters - and this seems to include potential non-combat encounters as well. Does anyone here do this? I like the idea of the uncertainty that PCs could face when they get to act before a creature whose intentions are unknown, but I couldn't see it working - as soon as I ask for Initiative, my players are in combat mode.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

I did a conversion of the Exalted Battleque system for d20 a while back, but its buried down in the old threads and not easy to find.

Basically you join combat with a reflex save for initiative. Highest reflex save goes first and everyone else goes after the winner a number of 'ticks' equal to the difference between their save and the winner with a cap of six. Each action or type of action has a time, and once you act you have to wait x ticks before you can act again. Each tick is roughly a second. It changes some of the times of certain actions. For one I made movement an immediate action to free up movement in combat, and I also made counterspelling an immediate action so that it becomes useful for once. You can finally see the classical spellduel with wizards frantically whipping spells back and forth while countering the enemy.

 

[The Human Target]

I used to run games with initiative every round, but eventually I realized just how much slower/more confusing it was.

I know use the once per encounter rule, with the addition that if ever the encounter drastically changes (a totally new kind of enemy appears, an avalanche occurs, a hidden wall opens) then we'll role a totally new initiative to reflect a reaction to the change.