Eyes of Nine
Everything's Fine
That does somewhat remove the tactical/turn based aspect of current D&D, which the other players in my group seem to really like.
D&D General Violence and D&D: Is "Murderhobo" Essential to D&D?
Running combat without it isn't as lopsided as it sounds, you just share the spotlight around and cut at dramatically appropriate moments. (I mostly run D&D with initiative btw). Tactics still work fine, but there's generally less gaming of the turn order, which I'm not a fan of. I don't mean gaming in bad way, but the resulting fight is very linear, and once people start talking about me then you then her then me then you... I start to find it very artificial. D&D combat doesn't have to be like that even with initiative, it just sometimes ends up that way.
MGibster
Legend
D&D has its roots in war gaming and the earliest published modules really reflect this. For the most part, the game was initially designed with the intent of kicking down doors (or sneaking around), getting the treasure, and killing what gets in your way. But D&D has evolved over the years. A module like Against the Giants (1978) is a hack and slash adventure that simply would not be fun for most modern players. I think it was a tournament module originally so maybe I'm not being fair.
This is a subject I've also thought about so you're not alone. I also like to play war games like Warhammer, Battletech, Star Fleet Battles, etc., etc. in addition to role playing games and all of these involve oodles and oodles of violence. At some point I couldn't help but take notice that I'm having fun with something that's been the source of so much misery.
On one hand, one of the biggest problems I have with violence as presented in the media is that it isn't violent enough. We don't often see a realistic depiction of the physical effects of gunshots, stab wounds, or beatings and ever rarer is it that we see the psychological impact on victims or the initiation of violence. I think one of the reasons the Iliad is still popular to this day is that the violence is exciting, it's graphic, and the narrator tells the audience of the human cost the war has. i.e. We find out one of the no-named victims' father hasn't seen his son in ten years and won't find out for another ten years that his only son has died. But I still have fun with Star Wars and D&D where I mow down fools left and right with nary a guilty thought.
In other games, Call of Cthulhu, I treat violence a little more seriously. If you're going to throw down against another human being it's going to have consequences. Not only in the form of physical or psychological damage, but damage to their reputations as their arrested for assault. But I can live with the cartoon violence of D&D.
Eyes of Nine
Everything's Fine
Sounds more like how I run Dungeon World; and yes I can run D&D like Dungeon World; but that's not the expectation that my players have. Also, do the rules really support that? Initiative is not presented as an "optional" rule.
Mercurius
Legend
One of the intrinsic aspects of D&D--and RPGs in general--that makes it such a great game, is that you can customize it pretty much however you want, and play just about any kind of game. Now of course the rules themselves--especially the reward system, but also the centrality of combat and "levelling up"--facilitate certain elements more than others, which is derived from the game's roots in heroic fantasy and mythology, as well as the cultural context of 20th century America that Gary Gygax was a product of. Wizards and warriors slaying dragons, taking their loot, and becoming more and more powerful.
Now I personally have little interest in games that are focused on socio-cultural dynamics, sexuality and relationships, and prefer light to moderate amounts of politics. Elements, sure, but I like the focus to be on heroic adventure, exploration, uncovering ancient mysteries, etc. And, yes, killing dragons. But I quite like the idea of the game rules providing for more options and styles, and would greatly welcome a more open-ended approach to the core assumptions of the game.
Certainly, the game has already moved away from the strictly murderhobo model (e.g. benchmarks vs. XP for GP), and I imagine will stretch out further. But the key is that it shouldn't be, imo, either/or, but both/and. Don't change the game from one core set of themes and assumptions to another set, but expand it to enable a variety of sets, or a "mix-and-match" approach. It already does this, at least implicitly, but could more explicitly do so.
To be honest, I find myself feeling more queasy about playing at cut-throat capitalism in Monopoly than I do a hero killing monsters, because the former has a more literal correlation with the real-world and elements of it that I find exploitive and oppressive and prefer not to emulate in my own life (that is, amassing wealth and property at the expense of other real people). I see heroic fantasy as more of a mythic, non-literal exploration. Monsters aren't stand-ins for real-world creatures, but are embodiments of certain qualities that exist within us (we all have our dragons to slay, and treasure to discover). That said, it is also interesting to blend thematic elements, to play with the idea that some monsters aren't truly (or only) monstrous, just other. D&D adventures rarely involve orc or kobold children, so it could be interesting to have the PCs slaughter an orc tribe, and then find their nursery deep within the caves. What then? How does that impact what they just did, and their characters' assumptions about what a orc or kobold is?
In my opinion, the natural and healthy evolution isn't to change or narrow the themes of the game to something different, but to broaden it to facilitate more styles of game play. I would love to see a book, a "DMG 2," that's focus was playing with the core assumptions and themes of the game, providing templates for different styles of campaigns that diverge to varying degrees from the archetype.
Now I personally have little interest in games that are focused on socio-cultural dynamics, sexuality and relationships, and prefer light to moderate amounts of politics. Elements, sure, but I like the focus to be on heroic adventure, exploration, uncovering ancient mysteries, etc. And, yes, killing dragons. But I quite like the idea of the game rules providing for more options and styles, and would greatly welcome a more open-ended approach to the core assumptions of the game.
Certainly, the game has already moved away from the strictly murderhobo model (e.g. benchmarks vs. XP for GP), and I imagine will stretch out further. But the key is that it shouldn't be, imo, either/or, but both/and. Don't change the game from one core set of themes and assumptions to another set, but expand it to enable a variety of sets, or a "mix-and-match" approach. It already does this, at least implicitly, but could more explicitly do so.
To be honest, I find myself feeling more queasy about playing at cut-throat capitalism in Monopoly than I do a hero killing monsters, because the former has a more literal correlation with the real-world and elements of it that I find exploitive and oppressive and prefer not to emulate in my own life (that is, amassing wealth and property at the expense of other real people). I see heroic fantasy as more of a mythic, non-literal exploration. Monsters aren't stand-ins for real-world creatures, but are embodiments of certain qualities that exist within us (we all have our dragons to slay, and treasure to discover). That said, it is also interesting to blend thematic elements, to play with the idea that some monsters aren't truly (or only) monstrous, just other. D&D adventures rarely involve orc or kobold children, so it could be interesting to have the PCs slaughter an orc tribe, and then find their nursery deep within the caves. What then? How does that impact what they just did, and their characters' assumptions about what a orc or kobold is?
In my opinion, the natural and healthy evolution isn't to change or narrow the themes of the game to something different, but to broaden it to facilitate more styles of game play. I would love to see a book, a "DMG 2," that's focus was playing with the core assumptions and themes of the game, providing templates for different styles of campaigns that diverge to varying degrees from the archetype.
No, the rules really don't. I experimented with in a short combat-tertiary game, and it worked ok. You can run it like DW in small quantities without running into too many issues. I don't think I'd do it for a full campaign, or for more standard D&D play.
Okay, so this doesn't actually remove initiative & turn order - it removes the randomness, and turns it into a tactical choice.
Popcorn Initiative! AKA Elective Action Order (of which there's two variants)
Variant 1: You roll initiative, highest roller goes first.
Variant 2: Whoever declared the first combat action goes first. There is no roll for initiative, ever.
From there the variants are the same.
The top roller takes their turn. Then, that person chooses who goes next. It may be a friend or foe.
That second person goes. Then, they choose who goes next - they cannot choose someone who has acted already in the round.
The chosen third person goes. They choose who goes next - they cannot choose someone who has alraedy acted...
Lather, rinse, repeat until everyone has gone. Initiative refreshes.
Whoever went last in the first round, chooses who goes first in the next round.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Note, there can be some strategy here - the party will be tempted to take all their actions first. But then the villain(s) go, and can choose themselves to go again first in the second round. If you don't polish them off before you act, they can act twice in a row without you being able to intervene, which can be nasty. PCs will often want to insert the opponents in the middle of the order to avoid this.
When using larger groups of opponents, I will tend to group them: Big Bad, Melee Minions, Ranged Minions, for example, as three groups the Players can give initiative to.
Variant 2: Whoever declared the first combat action goes first. There is no roll for initiative, ever.
From there the variants are the same.
The top roller takes their turn. Then, that person chooses who goes next. It may be a friend or foe.
That second person goes. Then, they choose who goes next - they cannot choose someone who has acted already in the round.
The chosen third person goes. They choose who goes next - they cannot choose someone who has alraedy acted...
Lather, rinse, repeat until everyone has gone. Initiative refreshes.
Whoever went last in the first round, chooses who goes first in the next round.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Note, there can be some strategy here - the party will be tempted to take all their actions first. But then the villain(s) go, and can choose themselves to go again first in the second round. If you don't polish them off before you act, they can act twice in a row without you being able to intervene, which can be nasty. PCs will often want to insert the opponents in the middle of the order to avoid this.
When using larger groups of opponents, I will tend to group them: Big Bad, Melee Minions, Ranged Minions, for example, as three groups the Players can give initiative to.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Unfortunately the bolded bit gets in the way before you start: how in the nine hells would this work? How would the DM or the players or the game determine what sequence things happened in, in a way that wouldn't lead to an endless string of arguments?
That said, I despise the locked-in cyclic initiative of 3e and newer. Most of the worries about anyone gaming the turn-order go away if you do two simple things:
--- re-roll initiative each round (recommend a smaller die than d20)
--- remove ALL modifiers other than one-off situational (i.e. Dex modifier goes away)
Oh, you'll have to do away with "till next turn" durations and actually start tracking by initiative count, but that's not hard.
EDIT to add: you'll have to allow tied initiatives too, also not hard, and they allow for outcomes you'll never see otherwise.
Yes and no. I didn't use either variant exactly as described. I pretty much ported Dungeon World straight over and I was the one moving the spotlight as dictated by the flow of the fiction. As a piece of advice for D&D, I would probably suggest one of those two variants though. I'd probably go with variant two to start and go form there. I'd agree there's some tactics there too, for sure, and actually think it feels a little more intuitive in some ways as it has some elements of the hold action built right in, and the players have some control over the pace of the turn.
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