Side by Side Initiative

[Crazy Jerome]

Roll init as normal and have every 2 players go at once. Any conflicts could easily be resolved by by judging who "really" went first, or by whatever is more fun, or makes more sense. For simplicity, if a monster group goes along with a PC, you could do 'em together, separate, or add the PC in with previous group of 2 players (making a group of three) and play the monster separately. Watever floats your boat.

I've done this a lot, also informally. You could say it is an intermediate jump, because we evolved into the more extreme version from something very much like what you describe above.

In our case, it rapidly became "2 or 3 players go at once" instead of a flat 2, for the simple reason that using cyclic initiative meant that we could easily manage 2 o 3 going ahead, but not 4. So if 2 or 3 players were acting between monsters, then the whole lot of them went together. But if 4 or more went, we'd still break them down into "next 2" or "next 3" to make it work out. And then if we hit a "mop up" phase of a combat, we'd often just ignore initiative entirely and let everyone go at once, to see if the last two orcs got away or not. I'm sure each table would have their own limits on this, based on how they track initiative and other factors.

There are other drawbacks involved in whatever you do, too, that don't really have anything to do with which initiative system you use, per se, but do interact with the initiative system in interesting ways. For example, we like for the players to roll attacks for many of the minor monsters, as a way to speed up play and keep the DM becoming a bottleneck to the flow. How and when you communicate the information to do this obviously is somewhat affected by how you do initiative.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Sounds very like what I was thinking. Interesting ideas.

 

[pemerton]

My group hasn't tried any funky new initiative systems, but two features of combat combine to produce something close to defacto side-by-side:

(1) As the combat progresses, more bad guys drop out of the initiative cycle'

(2) As the combat progresses, the PCs delay to take advantage of one another's set-up abilities, producing a bunching initiative order for the PCs.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

A quick update to this, for those that were interested. Last week, we used it again. The results were that we roughly halved our typical combat times.

An average fight was around 20 minutes. Part of this was because the characters are ever so slightly over-leveled for the challenge, and can thus crank out the hurt. And part of it was because we are playing Gardmore Abbey, which has more reasonable monster stats than a lot of the MM1 stuff we have mainly been using. And part was because the wizard player wasn't there, replaced by players with more straight-forward characters. If I had to guess, I'd say about half the reduction was attributable to those other factors. Still, a 20% to 25% reduction in fight time for one such change, is not shabby.

I'm also not sure how much of what I'm doing is fully reproducable in the rules as I've put them here. Everything technical is there, but there are DM judgments involved occasionally. Having run several other systems with side by side initiative, I do have prior practice.

 

[Viking Bastard]

A quick update to this, for those that were interested. Last week, we used it again. The results were that we roughly halved our typical combat times.

I missed this update at the time, but I'm now wondering if this held up.