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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Orichin" data-source="post: 1811663" data-attributes="member: 25226">several of your questions struck my interest knifespeaks, and while I'm not really 100% positive I can give you suggestions on how I have done (or in the case of your initiative question, will do) to iron out those questions for my own games.  1(sunder)-Hong had it pretty much right when he answered your question in the other thread, a shield (especially wooden ones) is used to deflect blows, not block them.  The difference being that if used properly, the shield never forms a perpendicular edge to any incoming attack except arrows (for those quick enough to maneuver a shield to block an arrow-quite difficult), making it more likely for the weapon to be shunted along the surface of the shield rather than biting into it.  still, stuff happens, if you wish to add something to the game to compensate, I might recommend a house rule saying something like a natural roll of 3 (arbitrary number) against a shieldbearer that does not hit his armor class requires a fortitude save for the shield, difficulty 15; success indicating that nothing happens out of the ordinary, failure indicating that the weapon has struck the shield squarely and the shield has taken 1 point of damage that bypasses it's hardness rating, but can be repaired by armorsmiths or spells like mend or make whole.  I would impliment this rule for both wood and steel shields (steel shields are still only a quarter inch thick, if that, in most places and can be dented or have holes punched through them with spears and axes)2(initiative)-This one's simple in theory, but requires a somewhat organized group, because it slows the combat down a little.  I recommend a bastardization of D20 and whitewolf initiative.  roll initiative normally, but have the lowest initiative declare their actions aloud before moving on to the next lowest initiative, continue until the highest initiative rolled calls his action, then begin resolving them in the order of highest to lowest, or all at once as DM sees fit.  Thus, the person who rolls the highest initiative gains the benefit of being able to react to what everyone else plans on doing in the round.  3(biggie)-This problem is one I've been faced with on countless occasions since 3.0 came out, and I'm 98% certain that there's no way to fix it.  I've tried breaking down various actions into various fractions of a round, or into a length of time measured in seconds, but the way the system is layed out with various types of actions being interchangeable or not is just too abstract to do something like that.  As far as..."if I am going last in a combat round (ie, I have less time out of the 6 seconds to act) then losing initiative is no big deal - I can still do 2 things, the same as the dude who won initiative."(sorry, not sure how to do that fancy quote stuff, I'll figure it out though)...You're right, losing initiative is no big deal, because you actually have exactly  the same amount of time as the guy who won initiative, if you're counting from your last action to your next action rather than using the arbitrary partition between rounds.  the simplest answer to that question is in the book, everyone acts at the same time, thus everyone finishes and starts the next round's actions at the same time.  To throw an idea out that just came to mind, maybe a progressive experience system, where everyone declares the first round's actions as initiative is rolled, but from that point switches over to..say..initiative points, which start at 0 and go up every time you declare an action. different actions would add a different number of points (say if a free action would add 3, move action would add 6, spell takes 3+spell level, etc. until you've assigned values you like to each type of action, maybe different values for different classes or weapons or whatnot, depending on how complicated you want to get in the name of accuracy).  After the first round, the DM starts counting up from 1, whenever he gets to a number that is equal to someone's initiative point pool, they can declare another action and add the appropriate points and wait their turn again (solving ties with initiative roll).  That might give a more concrete foundation to a combat system, which I think is the problem with the book's action system-it's just too abstract for most people to grasp easily.I hope I helped, and good luck with your game  <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    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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