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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6600953" data-attributes="member: 82106">In military theory the initiative isn't a quality that you have, its a quality of the situation. If you are dictating the terms of the conflict to your opponents, then you "have the initiative" the other guy is doing what you want, and you decide what will happen next. Simplistically that can translate to you getting to 'go first', but it could actually represent you forcing the opponent to do something which you want him to do (like say if you lay down a whole lot of fire in a kill zone and force the other guy to take cover instead of advancing). What TENDS to happen is that when you seize the initiative you backfoot your opponent, whatever happens next leads to giving you a chance to continue to control the situation. Often this is the result of superior C3I, Command, Control, Communication, and Intelligence, which means you are capable of acting in a tighter decision cycle than your opponent. By the time he figures out what you just did and what to do about it, you've already gone on to the next phase of your plan and he's behind the curve. This doesn't tend to get reflected in the 'initiative' system of 4e, but to a certain extent the side-based initiative system of AD&D did kind of represent it in a more concrete way, though the fact that initiative was a toss of dice and could swap each round was a bit arbitrary. It might have been more interesting, or at least faithful to the feel of real combat to have had some sort of criteria by which each side was scored to determine who had the initiative. Of course the flip side of this is that in 4e initiative in the military science sense is a function of tactics employed, and maybe some luck, which is probably equally a good way to handle it.</blockquote>

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