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Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 6225548" data-attributes="member: 3400">Not that hard, but it can be quirky in ways that the cyclical initiative avoids. For example, depending on the initiatives rolled, a one-round buff or de-buff could totally miss affecting one of the targeted characters. Suppose a fighter goes early one round, followed by the cleric to buffs him with a 1 round duration (say that goes off on 5). Now suppose that the next round the fighter rolls poorly on his initiative and goes well after 5. He has been unaffected by the buff since his action one round was before and then the following round after the window created by the quirks of the initiative rolls. That won't happen with cyclical initiatives because the fighter's turn always comes before the cleric's turn comes around again - which is when the buff expires. He may elect do delay and thus miss the buff, but that's a result of his choice, not variation in the dice rolls.There may be ways around that problem, but you have to step way from round by round durations to do so and even those get tricky. You could turn the buff from duration into a set number of tokens - for instance, bless gives the affected PC 6 tokens to use to modify his attacks (no more than one to be used at any time) rather than count off 6 rounds. But then, those tokens could be abused to hang around even if the PC isn't attacking simply by the player slowing down the PC's rate of using attacks or actions. Or spell durations could be set to last the duration of the encounter - bless lasts until the encounter is done. But then what happens if the encounter snowballs as the noise of a fight keeps drawing in more combatants from elsewhere in the fortress? Then the power of that buff spell (or debuff) becomes a lot more than originally expected - too much bang for the buck.Oh, I definitely understand the lure of the cyclical initiative, the simplicity, and the benefits it brings to managing a combat even if I don't like the side effect of spell casting becoming more difficult to interrupt. I'm not at all sure rolling initiative is that much more simulative that I favor it in all ways over the fairly gamist cyclical initiative.</blockquote>

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