D&D 5E Tried Speed Factor Initiative for the first time last night. Your thoughts?

[Syntallah]

snip

The real headache for round by round initiative isn't the players rolling, it's the monsters. In large fights, you'll be rolling a lot of initiatives every round.

Like I mentioned above, at least for now until we get a good handle on it, I am using static initiatives for the monsters (i.e. they roll a '10' every round). Sometimes the PCs go ahead, sometimes after...

 

[Smoo]

Side initiative. One roll for each side, individually modified by action speed.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

The real headache for round by round initiative isn't the players rolling, it's the monsters. In large fights, you'll be rolling a lot of initiatives every round.

You don't have to. Under a declare/act ruleset, if eight wolves all attack the PCs, and the PCs kill two of them that round, guess what? You only have to roll initiative for two wolves tops--the ones who died, to see if they got their attacks off in time. For the other six it doesn't even matter what their initiative is.

 

[redrick]

The real headache for round by round initiative isn't the players rolling, it's the monsters. In large fights, you'll be rolling a lot of initiatives every round.

I still generally roll initiative per mob, so rarely more than 3 sets of monster initiative per combat. (Depending on how agile I'm feeling, I might sub-divide mobs by their action, or just use the slowest speed factor for that group.) Once you have more initiative rolls for monsters than PCs, it seems to get a little pointless. And certainly a lot more work!

Once I roll initiative, I adjust the number and then leave the d20 up on the stat card for that mob.

I also really like the suggestion upthread of hinting at monster action declarations at the beginning of each round. Two benefits: it helps to maintain player trust in me and keep me honest, and it also builds in a time in the combat sequence where I can briefly think about my monster actions and corresponding speed factors, instead of trying to multi-task it in some side-brain while the players are talking to me about something else.

For a smarter-than-me NPC (about half of them), I might make things a little bit more opaque to increase the element of surprise and give the character an edge that my tactically fuzzy brain can't provide.

 

[redrick]

I use something very much like it, and yes I ignore the speed factor. I'm not losing anything by ignoring it because the main thing I'm going for is verisimilitude: unifying combat and non-combat, so the same rules apply to both and you can switch seamlessly between them. My major tweak is that actions are declared in order from lowest Int to highest (although Alert trumps everything) on the theory that quicker thinkers can delay decisions for longer. Also, for some battles I don't bother to roll initiative on rounds where it doesn't matter (although in large battles it's usually simplest to just roll and then count down).

My players haven't had any issues at all with initiative suppressing creativity. "I attempt to stuff the enormous silverpede in my bag of devouring so it gets eaten" works the same way no matter what initiative rules you use. It probably helps that our table uses the Rule of Yes wherein any unusual trick you try is guaranteed to work the first time it its used in the campaign; I won't bother figuring whether/how it could actually fail until the second time you use it. So yes, the monk can catch that poisoned arrow aimed at someone else, and yes, you can use Bestow Curse to render someone almost incapable of speech (Wis save each round) to prevent them from disrupting negotiations.

Speeding up combat: I've found that owning lots of dice is good (so players can roll everything in parallel instead of serially), and using average damage instead of rolling is also helpful. I have my players roll to-hit and damage early, as soon as they choose their action, so the results can be narrated without rolling required. When only one PC is the focus of all attacks I eschew initiative rolls for everyone who didn't hit (because the timing of a miss is irrelevant). And it really helps to memorize monster stats, because looking them up during the game eats up precious seconds.

Yes, we tend to use a "perpetual initiative" style system outside of combat, where players generally cycle around the table describing their actions. (Instead of the "rising up from the chaos" system that we used to use, where players debate amongst themselves and occasionally call out coherent actions to be adjudicated.) It ultimately makes transitioning into combat fairly seamless. Of course, now that we're using action declaration in combat, I might also start using action declaration out of combat in a similar fashion. (Currently, players "take their turns" in table order, with me cutting them off if their turn goes onto long. But now that we're declaring all combat actions before adjudication, I might carry that over to non-combat actions.)

We began using the speed factor rules in our PS campaign. We liked a lot, not so much because of the speed factor per se (it just adds another layer of complexity to the game, and it's boring as hell to keep track of, specially for the DM, let alone it being not much balanced, IMO), but the ramdomness of the combat, the declaring of actions at the star of the turn, THAT is what's fantastic about the system. We like it so much, we are letting go of the the speed factor rules and just sticking "declare your actions every round, then roll initiative". It just ends with all the meta-thinking that can happen in standard initiative.

Cheers!

Awesome, yeah, that is sort of what I was curious about. I'm going to run with the speed factor for a few more sessions, in the hope that some of the complexity smooths out as everybody familiarizes themselves with the system. I've given everybody a printed index card with the relevant bonuses and penalties, so they don't have to memorize all of that. I also might add and remove various bonuses over time.

This article I found while googling the topic proposed a few mods that I'm using: http://angrydm.com/2015/02/fine-i-wrote-about-speed-factor-initiative-in-dd-5e/
Namely, just use the slowest action for your penalty/bonus, and adding penalties for swapping equipment, which might help a bit with the balance when it comes to penalizing heavy weapon fighters. (Dex fighters tend to a lot of equipment swapping as they throw daggers, draw daggers, switch to short bows, etc. So the rogue with two drawn light weapons can slip in quickly, but they'll balance it out with penalties on turns where they drop the swords and switch to the short bow, or whatever. Instead of just, hey Str fighter with -1 init bonus, now you have a -5 init bonus! Have fun always going last!)

Thinking a bit more about the speed factor in particular, I see it as a bit of a concession to the strategizers. Rerolling initiative after action declarations adds a lot of uncertainty. Which is cool! But some players like a little more strategy than that allows, so the speed factor gives them a little room to exert control in where they might come up in the initiative.

Finally, this week, I'll be adding dodge, dash, disengage and aid another to the list as having +2 bonuses. (But, again, we just use the slowest action, so this doesn't let rogues get an additional bonus for using disengage with their cunning action.) So there's a little perk for folks who decide to declare a non-offensive action, and I think folks wanting to assist another character should have a decent chance of beating that character in the initiative! (The aided character could always choose to ready their action for after their helper has a chance to distract the opponent, of course.)