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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9677034" data-attributes="member: 18">Pretty good - most of the RPGs my main group has played over the last few years have used it - Mothership and Spire particularly (before that we also played Dungeon World, Star Wars World, Blades in the Dark, and others which did the same). We've also played more trad games initiative-wise like 5E and CoC (and others) in the same period of course.Yes, it definitely works for the main group, and I would personally say, and I think the players (who I am one of in Mothership) would agree that it's basically better, and certainly less annoying, because an utter inordinate amount of issues and frustrations with trad RPGs revolve around their various and sundry initiative and surprise systems.I'm actually surprised at how little we miss initiative systems, given the sheer amounts of time and effort we were putting into dealing with them in games like D&D (3E and 4E especially), Shadowrun, various superhero games, etc. Indeed, looking back, the worst rules-related gaming experiences of my entire gaming career which don't revolve around character generation revolve around initiative, including the infamous-at-my-table "3 minutes that lasted 5 hours", where the initiative/action system of Champions: The New Millennium combined with analysis paralysis despite fairly straightforward rules, to make 3 minutes of in-game-time take well over 5 hours of real time!One thing that is particularly good imho, and particularly beneficial to story and flow is that the same PC isn't limited to one strict "action", and thus the DM can like, focus the camera on something until it's appropriate to cut away, if that metaphor makes sense. With trad initiative systems, it often feels like you have just random, clumsy cuts between what's going on, like it was a sports game and they were just automatically cutting between cameras covering certain players, regardless of whether that player had the ball and was clearly potentially about to score, or if they hanging around at the back, not actually doing much at that precise time (even if they would be, say, 10 seconds later).I do think it's important that DM guides this to a significant extent - players, in my experience, aren't very good at guiding this, and just leaving them too it doesn't seem to help. They tend to have a sense of fairness, but also can get overly focused or can stop thinking about their own character because they're so entertained by what's going on with another, and they aren't always great at passing the spotlight to like, the right person. I know as a DM, I'm better at passing it when I'm a player than the other players are except for the other DM, who when he's a player, is also good at this (and third player who isn't playing right now sadly, but was also a DM, she was also much better at passing the spotlight).EDIT - Looking back at "3 minutes that lasted 5 hours" I think a major issue was the swapping back-and-forth, because it meant stuff didn't flow, and even when people tried to prepare for their turns, they often found things had changed. That was a particularly complex system which involved some characters being able to take more actions than others, but those actions being spaced out between the actions of others in a very, very, very annoying way (which wasn't even good at simulating the genre - if the Justice League are fighting a bad guy you don't get the Flash getting say, 100%+ more panels than any other member, and all those panels being like, in-between the panels of the others in a regular way - rather he gets about the same number of panels, but does different things with them, and they're probably mostly in blocks together).</blockquote>

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