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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6600427" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not sure that these two posts are really in disagreement. Anyway, for better or worse I'm going to respond to them as a unity!I can see that, in this sense, there is such a thing as seizing the initiative. (And not just in warfare but in any sort of incipient conflict situation.) The puzzle in D&D (and many similar systems) is that rather than being modelled as a bonus to success, it feeds into an essentially symmetrical turn-based structure.The way the oddity manifests itself varies a bit from system to system, and is probably more egregious in some than in others. (More on that below.)Right. The ebb and flow is the oddity here.In Rolemaster (your favourite system, AbdulAlhazred!) there is simultaneous action declaration prior to rolling initiative. This includes declaring attack vs defence. As a result it is possible to get hammered by initiative in a way that seems artificial relative to the fiction of the game: for instance, a character declares a high attack and low defence in order to attack an enemy, wins initiative, rolls a good crit and kills the enemy; then a slower opponent (who lost initiative and therefore hasn't acted yet) gets to close with the character and deliver an attack against the character's low defence. Whereas if that second enemy had won initiative, and thereby acted earlier, s/he would have (let's say) had a penalty to attack because of the blocking enemy who wouldn't have been dead and hence out of the way yet.Of course the system has rules for changing action declarations, but if you've already attack you're not allowed to re-declare actions in a way that puts that attack bonus back into defence (because that could be exploited in other contexts).It's a bit weird. I haven't played as much RQ and RM, but I think similar sorts of things can potentially happen there, where the allocation of parrying is influenced by the initiative sequence in a way that can seem arbitrary relative to the flow of ingame events.The history of Rolemaster supplements and revisions is littered with attempts to invent various forms of strictly continuous resolution that will do away with this sort of issue.(In this respect, Burning Wheel has an interesting form of continuous resolution. Action declarations are made simultaneously and secretly for the next 3 rounds, and then flipped and resolved. Relative speed factors in by allowing bonus actions in certain rounds - most characters will have one or two "floating" actions that can be assigned to their rounds. Resolution is simultaneous, and the goal is to declare attacks in those "slots" where the enemy has not declared any defences - the "floating" actions are good for this, but equally you're trying to anticipate what your opponent might do with his/hers. There is no initiative as such, but there is a speed/DEX influenced positioning roll at the top of each round that determines who gets to control positioning for that round, which can give bonuses or penalties depending on weapon length.)I agree with AbdulAlhazred here. Because in 3E/4e/5e style turn-by-turn resolution, after the first round everyone is equally good at deciding how to act and not sitting there and doing nothing. So initiative is really more like a "who gets the chance to gank" bonus. In 4e, because ganking is mechanically so difficult (given the relativities of damage to non-minion hp), it's barely even that!</blockquote>

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