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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1184770" data-attributes="member: 10201">Well, my direct experience is a 2+yr game (weekly), from 1st to ~9th level.  I'll let you decide if that is limited (but given the rules have only been out a bit over 3yrs, unless you have time to play more than weekly, it'd be hard to better us by much more than 50%). I can think of exactly one combat where we gained a significant advantage by getting the initiative jump, and none where we were hurt by losing it.  I can also think of exactly one combat where we even bothered to jigger with our initiative after round one to any effect.  (We did it a whole bunch at first--until we realized it just didn't matter.)  There are probably a couple examples of each i'm forgetting, but i can think of tons of times when we couldn't see any difference between the guy with the 23init and the guy with the 7init.  In fact, just before the game changed systems, the GM was toying around with houserules to actually give the people with high initiative an advantage.  After round one, it doesn't matter what your initiative number is--everybody is before everybody else, and after everybody else.  Admittedly, our experience is probably atypical in the sense that we had nobody with the sneak attack skill at any point in the game.  Now, getting the drop on people--*that* is great.  But that's a whole round to act, plus the beginning of the first real round.  And it's something you can plan for.  The other reason Dex doesn't matter to init is the magnitude: i played a monk and had the highest init score in the group by several points, and we all were surprised when i rolled the highest initiative for an important combat, because it happened so rarely.  In general, my high init bonus was thoroughly trounced by rolling 3s and 5s while the "slow" characters rolled 18s.  The difference between an 18 Dex and a 10 Dex is 4 points.  Improved Initiative is +4.  The die roll is a d20 and there are very few other things that affect it (other than spells/magic items), so my monk only had a roughly 20% boost over the slowest characters (not a lot of stats under 10), and usually less than that.  The die simply overwhelms Dex for initiative, especially if you only roll once per combat.</blockquote>

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